When it comes to your business, your customers are the most important when it comes to your bottom line. But they are also important for contributing to a business that they want to keep coming back to.
Customer engagement is a whole lot more than doing market research to develop products or services and drive sales.
It’s about gathering customer insights on a service, process and/or product to improve the way you do things.
This insight is what gives you the edge in a competitive market.
Our clients often ask us to design and deliver customer engagement activities to:
- identify a customer need based on their experiences, unmet demand or aspirations
- improve a service, process and/or product to meet (and where possible exceed) customer expectations
- have customers develop or codesign new or innovate ways to operate or deliver products and services
- gain a better understanding of customers and their customer journey to inform future business communications, products, services, products and processes and/or
- strengthen the relationship between the organisation and the customer.
There are a number of different ways we approach customer engagement:
- Design thinking which is a process that enables organisations to engage with customers in creative problem solving. This may include prototyping new ideas.
- Codesigning customer problems and solutions, including prototyping or piloting of new products and solutions, often done in design and delivery sprint workshops.
- Derive thinking where organisations prompt customers to develop new products or services derived from practices used by other organisations in the same or unrelated fields.
On the IAP2 (public participation) spectrum, customer engagement is ideally at the consult, involve, collaborate or empower levels rather than inform.
People can confuse customer engagement and market research. Market research has a different purpose to customer engagement – it focuses on the marketing of products and services to drive sales.
If you’d like to discuss your organisation’s customer engagement needs with us please contact kim.stone@articulous.com.au.
