Engaging With Customers

Customer Engagement is the engagement of customers with one another, with a company or a brand. The initiative for engagement can be either consumer-led or company-led and the medium of engagement can be on or offline. It can be defined as the emotional connection between a company and its customers. It is extremely important for the successful working of a business. EXIN Media brings for you the importance of customer engagement for your business.

Nothing predicts organic growth like customer engagement. Aggressive advertising campaigns, mega sales promotions, promises of low prices, and reward programs may get customers through the door, but they don't create the types of emotional connections that drive long-term profits and loyalty. If the customers aren't "true believers," then the company risks surviving based on a price relationship alone and will never be able to prosper.

Customer engagement is a worthy goal for any brand, and the surest path to loyalty. The best way to build it is with working on customer-centric method. That means every aspect of the brand is geared towards what a customer wants from it.  Every interaction should affirm the customer's decision to make a brand part of their life.

Though some may believe customer’s purchasing decisions are guided primarily by rational thinking, it can also be quite the contrary sometime. Customers form strong emotions about a company based on their experiences with its people, and those emotions strongly influence their buying decisions.

Customers who love a particular company often say that they “can't live without it”. They shop more often, buy more, tell others about it, and most importantly, are less price-sensitive.

Exceptional customer engagement doesn’t happen by accident, and there’s certainly no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to keeping the customers happy. But by engaging customers in the right way and at the right time, one can deliver an experience they won’t forget in a long time.

By keeping the customers informed throughout their journey, one can not only reduce customer effort, but also avoid complaints, improve their experiences and prevent them from having to chase the company for information.

Managing Crisis In A Business

Every business, no matter how stable it remains, is bound to get hit by crisis at a point of time. It is almost inevitable. Before a crisis strikes, business owners should think about a how a disaster would impact employees, customers, suppliers, the public and their company’s value. Crisis can strike anytime, anywhere and to anyone in the business. Therefore, having a crisis management plan is an utmost necessity. Well defined and smart companies around the globe are now coming up with a crisis management team of their own.

The objectives during any crisis are to protect any individual (employee or public) who may be endangered by the crisis, ensuring the key audiences are kept informed, and making sure that the organization survives. There should be a written plan which should include specific actions that will be taken in the event of a crisis.

Every organization should ensure, via an appropriate policy and training, that only authorized spokespersons speak for them, and this is particularly important during a crisis. Each crisis communications team should have people who have been pre-screened and trained to be the lead and/or backup spokespersons for different channels of communications.

Today, we have to have — immediately at hand — the means to reach our internal and external stakeholders using multiple modalities. Many of us have several phone numbers, more than one email address, and can receive SMS (text) messages or faxes. We can even send audio and video messages via email. And then, of course, there is social media. This may be the best and fastest way to reach some of our stakeholders, but setting up social media accounts for this purpose and developing a number of followers/friends/contacts on the various social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+) is not something you can do after a crisis breaks, because nowhere does news of a crisis spread faster and more out of your control than on social media. Therefore, social media should be handled tactfully at such a time

Nothing generates more negative media coverage than a lack of honesty and transparency. Therefore, being as open and transparent as possible can help stop rumors and defuse a potential media frenzy. This transparency must be projected through all communications channels — news interviews, social media, internal announcements, etc.

A crisis that is not managed well can wipe out decades of hard work and company value in a matter of hours. A well-managed crisis confirms that your company has the processes and procedures in place to address almost any issue that may develop.

The most important aspect is that the crisis management plan should be created when everything is running smoothly and everyone involved can think clearly. By planning in advance, all parties will have time to seriously think about the ideal ways to manage different types of crisis.