An inquiry into ‘customer engagement’ – making the abstract concrete



There is no such thing as ‘Customer Engagement’



  • Occupy, attract, or involve (someone’s interest or attention
  • Pledge or enter into a contract to do something
  • Participate or become involved in
  • Enter into conflict or combat with (an adversary)”

What engaged customers do



What does it take to engage customers?


My take on ‘customer engagement’






Author: Maz Iqbal


4 thoughts on “An inquiry into ‘customer engagement’ – making the abstract concrete”

  1. Hi Maz, Thanks a lot for that comprehensive feedback, very interesting with the company specific initiatives you mention to get some everyday life examples of this!

    What puzzles me at the moment is mainly how to quantify this abstract term. You can usually measure the outcome of a “good” customer engagement afterwards, by saying that it resulted in additional sales, increased share of customer wallet or better margins on sold products/services. But usually the aim of a successful quality management function, would be to detect this already before-hand. “Are we pouring new or old wine into these bottle?” instead of waiting for the customer to taste it.

    Another thought in the area of measuring the quality of a customer relationship, or even partnership would be that such measurements should be “global” so that any found best practices can be shared and implemented in large scale, as well as relevant for different kind of businesses and markets. Tricky one…

    To really find the optimal engagement models I am sure they need to be tailored and customized to the specific client, offerings and relationships as well as markets and maturity. However what I’m looking for are indicators and attributes of successful customer engagements that can be spotted in advance, possibly adopted, and maybe even systematically followed up on.

    If I come across more input, I’ll for sure get back to you to enrich this thread further (which I hope more ppl will do as well), for now the brainstorming continues!

    Thanks again! / Peter


  2. Hello Peter
    I thank you for your feedback. I just want to examine ‘quantification’ with you.

    To that end lets just say that you decide that the kind of engagement that you are looking for is customers sharing their ideas and suggestions with you. HOw do you quantify this? I suggest that you can put forward a mix of the following measures:
    a) The number of customers putting forward their ideas and suggestions;
    b) The number of ideas and suggestions put forward to date, in the last month etc;
    c) The quality of the ideas and suggestions;
    d) The trend – whether the more customers are participating or less; whether more ideas are being put forward or less;
    e) How many customers are commenting/voting on ideas/suggestions put forward by other customers;
    f) How many ideas/suggestions are commented on by the enterprise;
    g) How many ideas/suggestions are evaluated and then implemented by the enterprise;
    h) The revenues generated and costs saved through the implementation of these ideas/suggestions.

    Turning to the subject of ‘best practices’ from experience I can see the value of people being ambassadors for the best practices that they have come up with and even a platform for sharing best practices.

    However, I am totally against imposing best practices on others. Why? First, there really is no such thing as a best practice. A behaviour can only be appropriate or inappropriate to a given situation. The people who are best placed to determine thsi fit is the people who live/work in that situation on a daily basis at the coal face.

    Second, when you have been involved in all kinds of organisational change for 20+ years you learn something marvellous. Anything imposed is like having your foot on the accelerator – it only works as long as you keep your foot on the accelerator. Sooner or later you get tired, you foot comes off and all you have is pretense and game playing.

    Instead of imposing ‘best practice’I suggest something counter-intuitive: forbid other units for stealing ‘best practices’ from units who have invented them. You are likely to find something interesting: people are likely to pester you for the right to take and implement that ‘best practice’. I am not just making this up. I have used that ploy successfully to unstick a CRM programme that had become badly stuck.

    Towards the end of your comment you mention the need to tailor and customise to client, market etc. My experience suggests that you have hit the nail on the head.

    What are the attributes of successful customer engagements? Fundamentally, you engage customers in activities that create value for these customers. For example, in my digital marketing days we found that young men love competing and showing off their wizardry. So when we set up an online customer engagement and loyalty ‘club’ we designed it around competitions, games, status level etc. On the other hand when you take a look at the young females competitions and games don’t do it for them. Rather it is about conversations, relationships, huddling together, sharing tips etc.

    Last word: there is absolutely no substitute for the hard work of getting to know your customers and what matters to them before you start working on creating engagement.

    I thank you for your contribution to this conversation and allowing me to be a part of it.


  3. Hi Maz,

    Can you clarify your thoughts/exeperience a little on “forbid other units from stealing best practice”.

    Is this about creating independent innovation “necessity is the mother of invention”


    about stopping people “stealing” but allow them to “ask” so the creator hence putting emphasis on the value of the best practice.

    good thread developing.


  4. Hello Mike
    If I turn up and offer you what I consider a gift (something that you can/will benefit from) it may not occur to you as a gift. It may occuring to you as me selling you stuff. It could occur to you that I am criticising you. It might occur to you that if you accept my gift you have to accept that there is something wrong with you and so forth. Let me make that concrete.

    Yesterday, I was working with a colleague who respects me and who I respect. The challenge was to put a compelling proposal together and get it out of the door by the end of the day. To help us do that I asked my colleague to photocopy a couple of pages. What did those pages contain? An effective communication method that we would use to develop/write out the proposal. His remark and the tone that he used was telling “Your asking me to ………” When I returned from the toilet I found that he had not copied the pages! He did not perceive the need to change and in fact was offended that I even thought that he needed to learn something new. He is an expert in his field!

    The reason that I mention this incident is that over the last 20+ years I have seen this pattern played out again and again. When I push something on to you then your natural – habitual and emotional -reaction is to resist. You will either do this overtly if you do not fear me or you will do this covertly if I can punish you.

    So how do you get people to adopt best practice? One way that has been shown to work is to demonstrate that it works. Lionise and promote the people that use that way or working and are delivering the results. And then ‘prevent’ the other folks from ‘stealing this intellectual property’. That is to say you give this ‘best practice’ value by restricting access to it. And if people want access to it then they have to pay for it – in some way or another. When you do this you make use of the ‘scarcity principle’: “As a principle if an item is rare or becoming rare, it is more valuable.”

    Lets bring this to life. I was brought in a change consultant by a big European company that was struggling to get its CRM programme off the ground. HQ had been pushing this CRM programme – best practice processes and technology – onto the local business units and they were dragging their feet. Upon diving into the situation I learned that the value of this programme was unproven and the only people who believed in it where the people who conceived it in HQ.

    So first we ‘bribed’ one of the influential units to do a pilot and we invested everything into it to make it a success: involve all the people, joint design, joint implementation and 100% funding of all resources to make the project a success. The pilot was a success and the marketing and sales people were singing about it along with head of the BU.

    Now instead of pushing this project on to the next BU (the practiced that had not worked) we marketed the success of this pilot programme in the rest of the company through a number of communications channels. Once we had awareness we moved on to create desire and interest. How? By clearly stating that the centre would only fund and support a limited no of further CRM implementations. Then we invited the BU head to put forth bids to win this investment. And it worked. We picked the BU’s where the BU head was enthusiastic and willing to put a lot of skin into the game.

    Another version you will come across is simply that the act of forbidding something makes that something attractive to most human beings. That is just what is so. This has been found in all kinds of pscyhological research and you will know that from personal experience. How do you get a song to top of the charts? Ban it from the radio!

    I hope that clarifies the situation. I thank you for asking the question and giving me an opportunity to share my views and experience.



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