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Customer relations creating engagement

Motivating your customers without compensating them is not easy. Yet their engagement brings a multitude of benefits: they can become brand ambassadors and encourage competition for sales, or become involved in a brand community and carry out peer to peer customer support, free of charge. Moreover, the most engaged customers are able to participate in the design of tomorrow’s products, through participative innovation.

On the same basis, the e-reputation of customers who are brand ambassadors, fans or super fans plays a part in the development of Brand Equity in enhancing the brand image. They have a massive impact on direct sales by the increase of the average basket and on indirect sales as a result of peer recommendation.

All these factors make the strategies and tools of customer commitment essential. But how do we value and develop the motivation of customers, along with their brand loyalty and engagement?

Making customers feel valued

Brands have to ensure that customers or fans are motivated to make a lasting commitment, to take part in the brand’s development, improve its processes, and help it to innovate.In order to achieve this, companies have to rely on a system of values, an organisation and teams that focus on the customers, thus reinforcing a feeling of belonging.

That is why brands must increase the involvement of customers and value their contributions, especially on digital community platforms, but also across all social media where they have a presence.

If this is done in a systematic way, for the long-term and cross channel, customers will become true ambassadors of the brand, without receiving a salary, yet retaining their freedom of expression.

What are the key success factors for engagement?

Academic research, as carried out by eminent researchers such as Brodie (2011), has shone a light on the factors for customer engagement, in particular online with social media and brand communities.

The first factor according to Brodie (2011) is to help fans to share their experiences online, thus to express themselves, publish, post, demonstrate and share their expertise. Then the second factor is to let the fans of the brand or customers teach others or learn from others. Experts are then able to give their opinions on online product sheets, like Darty, or through a community (Sosh).

After that, super fans like to find out information, for their own benefit but also for others. Experts share their tips and tricks, while newbies benefit from peer advice like, for instance, the Sosh community. Engaged customers are also aware they can co-develop products or services, such as members of CVous, the virtual community of Casino, which brings consumers together.

Moreover the social nature of online media encourages the creation or development of relationships between peers, consumers, customers or potential customers. Links form on social media and sometimes carry over to the real world.

Furthermore, the most engaged customers enjoy the role of ambassador, if given the opportunity by the brand, either within a dedicated community, or on consumer advice websites, or social networks.

Customer service centres play a central role in customer commitment

From now on, providers of outsourcing services and customer service centres have a duty to give precedence to those same factors which boost engagement by giving increased voice to the customer, by valuing customer-experts, by supporting novices and by developing participative innovation.

If not, customers may disengage and custom will increasingly be lost. In consequence, customer service centres are at the forefront in shifting brands towards Customer Centricity, towards cross channel communication and they must show an example to advertisers on the subject of Customer Engagement.

At first sight, brand communities appear to be seriously damaging the health of customer service centres. Why? They lead to call deflection. Call deflection is one of the most significant trends observed in online brand communities: they start off with an expanded customer service and resort to using call centres in particular. This has been true for some mobile phone brands for example. Deflection is when some of the calls previously handled by call centres are redirected to the online community, which takes over a significant part of customer service provision.

Brand communities deflect significant call flows

Why is this happening? It’s because the fans, who are members of the community, are united in their love of the brand and happily take on a large part of customer support.As such, the impact of brand communities on deflection is undeniable and the brands that have set up an online community have benefitted enormously from it, like Sosh, Orange, Kiloutou, or Casino with Cvous.

At Kiloutou the brand’s economic interest is served by deflecting call centre traffic and forwarding it to the community. It lends itself to the sharing of similar experiences. So there is a peer to peer transfer of knowledge, and that effectively drives down the cost of handling customer requests and actually brings about the deflection mechanism. In addition, customers respond to customers at all times, 24/7.

Online communities cannot take on all the call flows

However, in the telecommunications sector deflection can be of an astonishing scale because it has a significant customer support infrastructure. The community can take charge of a large percentage of generic customer queries. Brand communities respond to recurring questions and provide a high resolution rate. Those customers who want specific and personal responses need a brand advisor. Their questions can therefore not be handled by an individual, a simple member of the community, especially if it concerns issues such as payment, invoicing, guarantee or a complaint.

Customer service centres should supplement community support

This is where customer service centres have an essential role to play in the framework of customer relations. Instead of managing massive flows, they have to deal with a smaller volume but offering high quality, those which lend themselves to it are better dealt with onshore. Dealing with high quality flow requires considerable expertise, such as that provided by the HP community. A key account customer will demand customised treatment from HP and the online HP community is only able to provide some of the services requested by the brand. In this sense, it is essential that the members of the community are able to access a personalised and high quality service, provided by brand representatives.

Brand communities: an opportunity to develop Customer Centricity

The customer relations hub represented by brand communities is a positive incentive for organisations to move from multi to cross channel. Indeed, fans of the brand grouped together in the communities expect 24/7 availability from the brand representatives on all possible interfaces, including devices, social media and mobile phones. This is why cross channel integration is a logical consequence of the communities, because it makes it possible to focus again on customer needs and thus to adopt Customer Centricity.

From now on, customer service centres have to manage flows coming from community platforms, both to organise the brand community, make it live and develop, supporting the work done by the members, but also and above all to supplement P2P support which, by definition, can only limit itself to generic issues.