Customer engagement is nothing new. Customer engagement technology is nothing new too. Cave paintings were an early form of customer engagement and throughout history, we’ve used various forms of technology to communicate to customers, partners and employees. What is new technology to have a two-way, personalized engagement with them.
Audrey Hendley, SVP of New Customer Acquisition at American Express Open spoke at Customer Engagement World about this topic. Her focus is on “Helping Small Businesses Do More Business.” The number of small businesses is huge and the sum-total of all these small businesses add up to large businesses. 
Small businesses need digital technology just as the larger companies do. They also need to embrace the digital economy and provide the same engagement techniques as their larger counterparts.
American Express Open is interested in getting these small businesses to use American Express and they have a challenge to get the attention of all these small companies. AE Open is using many customer engagement techniques to both sell to and enable their small business customers.
As an example, AE Open created American Express Open Forum where these companies can get advice from other small businesses as well as curated content from American Express. This AE content is not just sales or marketing info. They provide lots of content to show small businesses how to take advantage of technology for their business. Here are two examples of content targeted to helping small businesses that recently appeared on the forum:
You can see that this content isn’t about American Express products. AE knows that when they help small companies to grow and expand, they will likely need additional funding, which American Express can provide.
Mrs Hendley also talked about how businesses win customers throughout a customer journey. She talked about how at each of these stages, a business can improve sales by engaging the customer in the right way: Trigger, Considider, Evaluate, Purchase, and Experience.
Depending on your product, just showing a picture and providing a description may not be engaging enough. Car companies provide the ability to “build” your car online by letting you select the options (or attributes) during the shopping experience. This level of engagement pulls the customer in closer to the brand and also provides the car company with a wealth of data about which attributes customers are interested.
Mrs. Hendley closed by talking about Innovative Listening or learning from interactions with customers. AE OPEN spent a couple of years listening to what customers and potential customers were saying through a variety of forums, social networks, focus groups and other interactions. By analyzing this information, AE OPEN was able to completely change the tone of their messaging to be more in tune with small businesses and in context with the point at which the customer was engaged. For example, American Express rejects a lot of credit requests. But often those rejections turn into re-applications later on. AE found that the tone and wording used in the rejection communication had a large impact on whether those rejected customers would want to retry the credit application in the future. With the proper language and tone, more customers were willing to return to American Express when they’d been initially rejected.
[pardot-form id=”33898″ title=”MSFT: White Paper BLOG form: 10 Content Strategy Steps to Drive an Effective Personalized Digital Experience”]
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