‘Customer engagement’ is rolling off the tongues of many executives these days—nearly 90% of CEOs cite it as their primary initiative in the next five years. Companies are recognizing the need to innovate and make organization-wide changes to get them closer to their customers. This seems easy enough, but how do you work out where to start, and what initiatives will have the most impact?
 
It’s often difficult assessing which area to tackle first: should you implement cloud CRM or roll out mobile enterprise applications so your teams can serve your customers better? Is data analytics the best way to help your employees understand customer interactions across your departments, or should you invest in social listening platforms?
 
At Bluewolf, we’re loving this shift because there are so many right answers to these questions. Depending on your industry, customer base, and unique business challenges, your strategic initiatives adjust to make the biggest impact on your business. However, before you dive headfirst into an intensive customer engagement initiative, we suggest you take a step back and get an inside-out and outside-in understanding of how your company measures up on the emerging metric of customer engagement. 
 
Here’s Why.
We’ve found that many thought leaders think they know the ins and outs of their business, but are puzzled when their their rollout falls flat on its face. The relatively low success rates of enterprise CRM exemplifies the importance of meticulous planning and execution for any new technology or process. In order to solve your company's biggest problems, you need the kind of understanding that only comes to those who have “lived it.” Insight drawn from your customers and, more importantly, employees at every level of your organization, is critical to any successful deployment or implementation.
 
Bluewolf’s Maturity Assessment & Plan (MAP) helps companies do just that. The MAP is a targeted, short engagement that gives a 360-degree view of your business, incorporating feedback from your employees and customers. Short of setting up a covert ‘undercover boss’ situation, this is the best way to determine the current state of your company's inner workings and pain points. The MAP service helps identify the biggest challenges and turn them into opportunities for profitable growth in three steps:

1. Rep Rides
   When is the last time you spent a day “riding along” with your reps or agents? We spend time with your employees as they interact with your customers to know what they experience working on a day-to-day basis to get the ins and outs of how they do their jobs. This process creates priceless insight, enabling your salespeople to better serve your customers, and increase productivity. 
2. Stakeholder Interviews
   We identify the degree of employee engagement across all levels and departments, not just your rockstars. Through a series of field-tested questions relevant to customer engagement, you can benchmark your organization against industry standards. Uncovering disparities between what your employees experience and what your executives believe, is a great opportunity to pinpoint initiatives that will close the gap.
3. Customer insight
   To increase engagement, companies must put the customer at the center of their business. After you have an intimate understanding of your company’s challenges and opportunities from the inside-out, the Bluewolf MAP takes it one step further—we draw insight from your customers through a powerful combination of interviews, sentiment surveys, and collaborative customer journey mapping. This is often an eye-opening experience, forcing companies to drop their own agenda and develop an outside-in perspective of how successful they are at capturing customer moments.  

Your organization’s ability to engage customers and drive growth starts with knowing where you are and where you need to go. The first step to knowing where you are and addressing these issues involves a deeper look at your company’s current challenges, goals, and operations—and the processes, employees, systems, and technology that support them.
 
From our experience working on thousands of transformation projects with our customers, we’ve learned that all major changes must involve members at every level of your organization and have a clear business outcome in mind. Truly successful initiatives engage both customers and employees—get the Bluewolf MAP and start your journey to customer engagement today.