What Might a Client Engagement Questionnaire Look Like? Part III

15/12

#Engagement #Clientengagement #Employeeengagement #Success

Links to the other two Parts are provided at the end of this portion.

To continue, we now need to ask ourselves questions such as:

  1. “What might a more engaged clientele do for our business?” (do we really want to do this? Will it be worth it? How much engagement would be helpful?)
  2. “What would we need to change in order to more fully engage our clientele?”
  3. And of course, “what will we need to give up in order to support a more engaged clientele?”

Great questions and, initially, I don’t think I really know the answers. There is engaged and there is engaged. Just how engaged are we talking here? Are our clients helping to decide who gets the promotion or even if there are such things as promotions? Are these people who buy from us contributing to decisions like which colour to paint the walls in our facilities? Do they get to come into our organization and ask questions, make suggestions, list their grievances? Are we going to have to clean our finger nails for inspection? Yeah, how engaged is engaged?

For the moment let us choose a baseline of customer engagement, work through the dominoes that fall and decide next steps from there. Reviewing the Client Q12 above, my reaction, overall, is to invest way more time with our clients. Most of what we need to do needs to be co-designed with our customer base. I’m not feeling good about asking or polling (like Gallup) all of our clients. First of all, a huge job. Second is that even if we managed to somehow collect the data from the majority how long would it remain valid, current? How would we meet every customers response? What about the cost of this adventure? Pause please.

A wise bit of advice is ringing in my ears as I feel tempted to toss the whole idea. What I am being reminded of is, “start, is not a four letter word”. I like that, lets me relax a bit and get things back into perspective. So the better question becomes more along the lines of, “what is one small thing (define small to suit present reality) might we do to ‘start’ on this path of increasing client engagement?”

That feels better.

Here are some suggestions.

  1. Per the above idea, share the Client Q12, as imperfect as it might be, with all of our own employees, who are customers for many other organizations. They have buying experiences all the time. Let us invite their help.
  2. Set an objective, such as find, say, ten candidate suggestions for getting closer to achieving increased Client engagement through improvements to #1 in the list above. Just for #1. Maybe have a contest to attract ideas or any of many other options.
  1. Invite our employees to rate us on the Client Q12, find out our own opinion of how well we do when it comes to engaging our clients.
  1. Invite a few of our biggest buyers to join us for a discussion on this whole concept. This could be a coffee, or a luncheon or a half day workshop, or…
  1. Place a copy of the Client Q12 near the coffee station so that as employees congregate the concept might be a source of conversation
  1. Etc

As the phrase reminds us, “start is not a four letter word”. The other huge observation one can make here is that taking this approach, via our own employees, will increase their engagement level. Check out the Gallup Q12 employee engagement questionnaire, which I refer to as the Employee Q12.

What will you do with all of this?

End of Part III

Part I can be found here http://yournaturaledge.com/2017/12/15/might-client-engagement-questionnaire-look-like-part-i/

Part II can be found here http://yournaturaledge.com/2017/12/15/might-client-engagement-questionnaire-look-like-part-ii/

 

Thanks

Joseph Seiler MCC