How To: Organic Customer Engagement

I think most managers will agree with me on some level when I say it is difficult to train employees on how to engage with customers and clients. The reason being is that customer engagement isn’t always this one tangible thing or action that can be easily written into a handbook or manual.

Genuine customer engagement hinges on two very important components:

• Putting forth the effort to connect with your customers above and beyond the business you conduct with them
• Finding ways to exemplify the sentiment of the connection you share with them

The tricky part about engaging with customers is that there is no one standard way to go about it. Each customer will feel engaged by each of your employees in different ways depending on the unique connections they have created. In fact, if your employees are using a generic tactic in an attempt to engage with all customers the same, then they have not genuinely connected with them and therefore have not actually engaged in them.

SO how do you get your employees to engage with customers if you can’t really share one specific course of action with them?  

It starts with attitude. If you simply tell employees to engage with customers you have just become the motivator behind your employees actions. WHY IS THIS BAD? You have just created an extrinsic motivator as the drive behind your employees’ actions. Extrinsic motivation is performing an activity in order to attain an outcome. In the instance of you telling employees to engage, they will act to please you or avoid being scolded by you, in either case they are no longer acting to engage with customers. WHAT YOU WANT is for your employees to be intrinsically motivated to engage with customers. Intrinsic motivation is the performance of an activity driven by an interest or enjoyment in the task itself. When intrinsically driven, customer engagement becomes a direct product of your employees’ attitudes.

So do not just tell employees to engage because doing so will only produce autopilot actions to fulfill your request, which customers will easily see through and disengage. However, when an employee looks to engage with customers because his or her attitude is the driver behind the effort, a very natural, organic connection will occur that customers will appreciate and engage in.  

Encouraging employees to take matters into their own hands will give them the freedom and empowerment to explore their own method of engaging customers and in turn enrich their attitudes. 

Click below to Learn about The 7 Pillars of Customer Service Greatness