Bloghound

How engaged is your company with its customers? Walter Carl, assistant professor at Northeastern University’s Communications Studies Department, has created a six-step model to help companies determine how engaged they are with their customers, particularly as it relates to word-of-mouth. Check out Walter’s post. The six step model, which Walter co-created with his students:

1. Oblivious: don’t realize that people are talking about them.
2. Indifference or neglect: aware that people are talking about company, but don’t care.
3. Monitoring: aware and paying attention to what people are saying; usually only paying attention to what’s being said online, which is short sighted.
4. Listening: listening for insight and understanding.
5. Responding: acting on feedback from customers; reaching out via blogs. Still somewhat reactive.
6. Joining in: actively participating in conversations with customers; proactively creating ways to have thoughtful and helpful dialogues; seeks out feedback, even the negative; earns high Net Promoter scores.

While there’s a lot of talk about “customer engagement,” most companies are still stuck in the first three passive steps. To really engage with people, companies need to be at the last two steps. You can’t develop genuine relationships or trust without talking with customers about what’s of interest to them.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.