How to prevent or counter the 5 most common customer engagement mistakes new business owners make – according to Maropost CEO, Ross Andrew Paquette.
Positively engaged customers buy more, promote more, are more loyal, and are just undeniably more valuable than customers that are poorly or rarely engaged. So, it is no wonder that business owners are quick to rush at any opportunity to communicate with their clientele.
The only problem with that — according to this interview with Maropost’s CEO, Ross Andrew Paquette — is that most new business owners tend to “overcomplicate things” or “focus on quantity over quality” when it comes to customer engagement. Both of which have only (and will continue to) lead to inevitable failure.
Learn more about the most common mistakes a business can make when it comes to customer engagement and how they can be avoided below:
1. Focusing on Quantity Over Quality
In the aforementioned interview with Maropost’s founder, Ross Andrew Paquette, he says that the most common mistake a business can make when it comes to their customer engagement is focusing on quantity over quality.
His statement continues as follows, “There’s this term that we like to use in the industry, called the ‘spray and pray’ strategy that focuses on having as many interactions as possible with one’s customer base. This just doesn’t work.”
According to Ross, such an “impersonalized approach to marketing” will only serve to hurt yourself and your business. So, instead, he urges new businesses to focus on getting to know their customer-base as individuals. As, according to him, this is the best way to provide quality customer service and the best possible customer experience.
2. Failure to Analyze Engagement
Customer engagement shouldn’t be taken and left at just face value. In order to execute marketing strategies that suit your customer base, it is important that you are able to efficiently and effectively analyze the data that you collect through engagement.
Otherwise, it would be incredibly difficult to implement meaningful marketing strategies that will satisfy your customers’ expectations.
In any case, it’s actually a lot easier to do than you think! And, there are many available simple solutions for it no matter your circumstances! For example, if your business is too new or small to have the resources to analyze large quantities of data, you can always outsource the data analysis aspect to marketing automation platforms like Maropost!
3. Making Human Connections Inaccessible
Although there is convenience to automated communications, you shouldn’t forget the importance of providing a ‘human connection’ when engaging with your customers.
These days, more and more companies are using advanced and automated customer service technology like chatbots — which, in itself, is not a necessarily bad thing.
However, no matter how tempting it is to nix direct human interactions for the sake of your budget or whatever else, you should not make it completely inaccessible. Most consumers, exactly 83%, in fact, according to the Entrepreneur, prefer to deal with actual people over chatbots or other automated communications over digital channels.
4. Poor Hiring or Training of Customer Service Staff
Your customer service staff may not be the literal ‘face’ of the company, but they practically are to your most beleaguered customers!
So, make sure to invest time and resources in making sure that your customer service staff is up for the task from the very beginning. And, if not, do so as soon as possible! It is your front-line staff, after all, that will be the ones in the most direct contact with your customers.
5. Failure to Establish Customer-Centric Culture
The final customer engagement mistake that must be avoided at all costs… is forgetting to establish a customer-centric culture in the workplace.
To put things in perspective, customer-centricity has been the backbone of Maropost since its founding. And, according to CEO Ross Andrew Paquette, it is through Maropost’s commitment to ensuring their customer’s satisfaction that they’ve grown so much, and so quickly, over the years. Without the proper workplace culture to encourage this kind of thinking, you might as well forsake customer engagement entirely, as nothing will get done!
