Your engagement through all touch points with your audience or audiences is mission critical. Or you will be spending a lot more time and money on trying to arrest increasing customer attrition and negative experience.
Guess what? That negative sentiment will be all over social networks and other conversations and you probably won’t even be addressing a great deal of it to prevent it from occurring over and over again – regardless of how “big” your brand is.
Let me tell you a real story (after all we know that some of the strongest and most powerful content is stories and real life experiences – it’s never been more true).
Recently I moved home and wanted to purchase a multi-product service for my new home two important things happened, as a result of this trigger;
1) I reviewed the products and packages in the market to see what was most suitable, competitive and what had changed since I last looked probably 2 years ago (sound familiar?)
2) I spoke to a major brand who happily took my order, confirmed the cost and advised that I would have it in 6-10 days.
3) 2 days later I then got a phone call saying we can’t do that? so agreed to change a part of the package. We will contact you and advise progress.
4) 11 days, past and no contact so I contacted via the customer service centre – “apologies not sure why nothing has happened but I’m not sure if you can have that”. I explained that I had already spoken to someone and changed it. “Oh, ok you will receive a date confirmation SMS in the next 24hours”.
5) 3 days later, nothing- no SMS, I contacted Customer Service Centre again, oh there are other problems with us supplying that package to you – so I said well why was I told it was OK and would get an SMS date confirmation in 24hrs 3 days ago? “I don't know that’s not the service we like to deliver”.
6) Ok let’s just get rid of everything else out of the package and just do what you can deliver. “I will have to start your order all over again and cancel this one”. So are you telling me that you can’t modify the order and the time frame starts all over again? “Yes”.
7) You know what just cancel the whole order.
8) Order cancelled completely and email received confirming the cancellation.
9) For 3 weeks following I had calls and messages from different individuals in the organisation wanting to contact me about the progress of my order and the time it would be completed?
Over 4 weeks since the original promised 6-10 days, multiple different people none of which had any view of my previous engagement, emails or conversations with the various company representatives and even after cancelling the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing?????? I complained and no one has ever bothered to contact me and ask why I cancelled or why I complained or what was the substance of that complaint (I have told at least 20 colleagues and everyone in my social media circle) – how’s that for a negative multiplier effect.
Within 30 minutes of contacting another competitor the product package was confirmed at a better deal than previously quoted, delivered in 5 days and I received daily SMS and email advising progress until delivered. Plus follow ups since then to check everything is good.
Morale of the tale - No one or shared view of any audience engagement, different experiences and inconsistent communications to the audience so no one knows how the audience is being treated and why they lost the sale or probably ever will.
How many people will rethink using that brand in the future from what they have heard and the power of social media, and other conversations.
A lack of even attempting to see how anyone and everyone that is associated with your brand is treating the customer is the definition of insanity.
You don’t have to be the world’s biggest brand to afford or even start with a sensible, scalable, flexible foundation to build on this and guess what your audience expect and demand it. Despite what some tell you it’s not that complex or difficult to start to evolve correctly and practically. If you don’t start now and review and evolve, you may as well just give your competitors your business or customers now.
You might be surprised have an obligation free chat about the reality of AEDM.