Mobilizing to Be More Engaged

By Scott K. Wilder (@skwilder) Jan 12, 2012

While the goal of marketing is to improve customer's overall interactions with a brand, few organizations engage directly with their customer tribes or communities and therefore miss out on leveraging what is one of its most valuable assets.

Companies also have a hard time keeping up with the latest technology or vehicle for sharing information, rarely considering the types of networks and technologies people use to access the company's information. Probably the best example is the slow adoption by companies to optimize websites for the increasing number of mobile users. As Jacob Nielsen’s research shows, most don’t have much information or capabilities to support users (or even bother supporting users) who access sites via a smart phone. The current success rate of completing a task for mobile web use is about 64%, the same as Nielsen research measured for desktop web use in 1999. Note: the current desktop success rate is 84%.

Increasingly, customer engagement starts with the mobile device. Most people begin their online journey to learn about a company through Facebook, a company website or Google search. Companies need to rethink how to develop and manage their digital experiences. Even the most successful communities will need to be better designed for mobile and smart phones.

Talk to Your Customers

To truly create a better customer experience, not only do you have to talk directly to a customer in person, but you also need to understand the tasks they want to accomplish with your products and services. In the case of mobile devices, there’s only a small amount of real estate on a mobile device that a company can use to show off their functionality, so mobile engagement will have to focus on highlighting the critical few items people might want to know in order to take the next step to learn about your product or service.

Fortunately, it is easier to learn about people’s interests and needs and to understand their perspective than ever before. Even if you are hesitant to talk to a customer directly, you can always email them, send them a direct message on Twitter or LinkedIn, or participate in their niche communities or personal interest groups, such as Fiskateers.com, which is designed for people interested in scrap booking and other handcrafts.

Learning to Engage

It is the responsibility however, of every employee, from senior management to the front-line worker, to interact directly with customers. And today the job of most marketers is to shepherd this process along by:

Providing guidelines and guardrails to employees via opt-in training programs.
Setting up a feedback mechanism where employees can ask questions.
Understanding their customers tribes — who they spend time with, where they spend time, how they like to learn and how they use technology.
Understanding the group dynamics of these tribes — who are the leaders, the relevant influencers.
Partnering with tribal leaders and the not so powerful to learn about how they use your products, services, etc.
Developing customer engagement maps to highlight all the customer (and business partner) touch points involved when interacting with your product or your various channels.

Customer engagement needs to be part of every company’s DNA and culture! Customer interaction must be supported by and rewarded by senior management. They need to ensure that the proper mechanisms and processes needed to successfully interact with users are in place and can be modified if necessary to integrate those lessons back into the organization.