Every week I get at least two invitations for webinars exploring various customer engagement technologies.\u00a0 Apparently brands are really interested to engage consumers. At least technology vendors think so, and provide them with powerful tools to do just that. The problem is – nobody seems to know whether the consumers want to be engaged with the brands. Neither the technology vendors nor the brands ever bothered to ask the consumers this question. They just charge ahead and expose consumers to practices that often create negative customer experiences.<\/p>\n
A recent online purchase from a well known retailer triggered an immediate avalanche of emails begging me to rate their performance well before the item I purchased was delivered. It was mildly irritating at first. It became outright annoying when the merchandise was not delivered on the promised date. When it finally arrived, I had a chance to experience it sufficiently and respond to the rating request. While the rest of my customer journey was quite smooth, the untimely attempts to “engage”\u00a0 me, resulted in less than a favorable rating.<\/p>\n
While shopping for a kitchen appliance in a well established brick and mortar store, my wife and I met a major brand’s ambassador who gave us very informative product demonstration. Upon completion, she asked for our emails to “continue the engagement”. Unfortunately, the brand did not supply her with any meaningful information about why and how this engagement will be conducted. We chose not to provide our email to the brand. I asked the ambassador about her rate of success in getting email addresses, and her answer was 0%.<\/p>\n
I am not suggesting that consumers want no engagement with brands, or that a use of technology for engagement is a bad idea. I do suggest that marketers should ponder on the following questions before they attempt to deploy any technology for customer engagement:<\/p>\n
The most important thing to remember before you start planning a customer engagement campaign: we no longer sell products, services or expertise – we sell experiences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every week I get at least two invitations for webinars exploring various customer engagement technologies.\u00a0 Apparently brands are really interested to engage consumers. At least technology vendors think so, and provide them with powerful tools to do just that. The problem is – nobody seems to know whether the consumers want to be engaged with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7404,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[128,84],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103986"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7404"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103986\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}