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Don’t be a faceless business

If your customers aren’t engaged with your business, then you’re just another name to them. They won’t notice you’re gone if they switch to another company instead of yours because they’re not invested in you. If they don’t know you, then you’re just a tool in their arsenal, and if that tool makes a mistake or has a hiccup, they’re going to buy another one.

Customer engagement is just as important to them as it is to your business. If they’re getting to know you, then you’re getting to know them and that opens all kinds of doors to help you serve them better and create passion among your team for their products and services.

Don’t be afraid to get personal with your customers

We’re human, and as humans, we’re social creatures even if some of us aren’t necessarily “people” people. Community and tribe are what drives us and keeps us sane. Think of the last cashier you had at the grocery store. Can you remember them at all?

If you remember them, it’s likely because they were relaxed and joked with you or talked to you about things that weren’t necessarily business. They maybe saw something you were buying and told you how their family likes to cook them, leaving you with a great new recipe for the Brussels sprouts you picked up.

Personal interactions like that bind people together because we’ve seen inside that person’s life, and they offered ways to enrich our own lives. It’s an exchange of thoughts, ideas, and energy. Depending on how amazing your experience was with the cashier, they then become the face of the grocery store to you. It’s no longer a convenient stop on your way home, but the place where that awesome cashier works.

The same can be true for your business. Every employee in your company has the chance to be the face of your business, the person your customers know that brightened their day, offered insights, and pulled them deeper into the inner sanctum of your company.

Are they your teammates?

This means celebrating when they celebrate. Your customers get excited about milestones, and you should too. Sing their praise on social media, share product launches, publicly congratulate them if they’re nominated for an award. This doesn’t take much time, but it means the world to them. It means you value them enough to pay attention to them and celebrate alongside them.

Another way to make them feel like part of the team is by offering them exclusive deals they could benefit from. This could even mean discounts and special offers. If you’re attending conventions, invite your customers to join you or come out and meet you. Even if you’re not attending an event, if you hear of one that may be of special interest to a specific client, pass the word along to see if they knew about it.

Interaction

Interaction is essential. Nothing builds tighter bonds than chatting with people, so why are you only talking to customers once and a while when they call with a problem? A fun way to get your employees and your customers working together and your customers engaged is to create a forum or a chat room.

This could be a place for customers and employees to hang out through the work day and chat now and then about life, work, and frustrations they’re going through. This heralds back to getting personal, but this is focused less on solving a problem for your customers and more about creating a bond of friendship. Work chat can happen in this room, but it’s not required. You could even make your chatroom a roundtable event each Monday where customers and employees chat about what their goals are for the week and what they have going on in the coming days.

At CrewHu, we’re helping you get feedback to your surveys with Custom Faces. Custom Faces allows you to switch out images for your surveys to keep them fresh and to catch the attention of your customers, so they’re less likely to ignore it and more likely to engage, and that’s what we all want!