A reflection on the Customer Engagement ’15 event and technology discussions in 2015.
At Customer Engagement ’15 in Bussum, Microsoft and its partners brought business leaders together to discuss a central question: how do you keep the customer at the heart of an organisation as more processes become automated?
The speakers argued for knowing customers better and giving them sincere, personal attention. Long telephone menus and irrelevant mailings showed how automation could make the experience feel impersonal. Yet systems such as CRM and cloud platforms could also help organisations understand and serve their customers more effectively.
The technology needed to be accompanied by a convincing view of the experience the company wanted to create.
Personal attention at a different scale
For a local shopkeeper who knows regular customers by name, personal service is easy to picture. For a multinational with millions of customers, the challenge looks different.
Connecting IT and marketing systems can help, but the organisation also needs the commitment to use that information thoughtfully. In the Netherlands, Coolblue was one of the examples discussed at the time of a business placing strong emphasis on the customer experience.
As technology became more closely woven into everyday life, companies increasingly needed user input to shape their products and services. Customers were not only the audience for an innovation; their experience could help improve it.
Machine learning as an example
Skype Translator was a striking example in 2015. The service demonstrated how spoken words in one language could be translated for somebody listening in another. It made an abstract technical development easier to imagine in an everyday conversation.
The broader principle was that systems could improve through examples and feedback. For communications professionals, it created a useful question: how do we explain the technology through the benefit people experience, rather than through technical features alone?
The original discussion also highlighted the importance of the user’s contribution. An innovation needs to offer a meaningful benefit to the people whose participation helps shape it.
Start with the reason behind the product
As a technology PR agency, we depend on our clients’ input to develop strong communications. We keep looking for ways to explain why their work matters.
A clear, inspiring vision and a sense of direction help give individual announcements a place in a larger story. Products and services become easier to understand when the audience can see the problem being addressed and the outcome the company wants to achieve.
That approach also gives journalists material that is relevant to their readers. A story about what a technology enables can be more useful than a list of specifications without context.
Make engagement a two-way process
Customer engagement is therefore not just a marketing phrase. It asks a company to listen, learn and communicate in a way that reflects the customer’s experience.
For PR, that means asking better questions, drawing on practical examples and connecting the organisation’s vision with the needs of its audience. Read more about listening to what clients really need or explore our content marketing services.
Ruud Berendsen
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