Customer Engagement
Insights and Best Practice
Learn how Key Account Managers are making positive impacts, solving real problems for their customers, and building best practices inside their organizations.
Customer Engagement
Team Building Inspiration for your Key Account Managers
We talk a lot about customer engagement here at Kapta, and there’s…
January 20, 2020/by Lesley PoladskyKey Account Management for Marketing Agencies
Key Account Management is the art of engaging with high-value…
January 13, 2020/by Alex RaymondUnderstanding Customer Engagement: What Does it Mean for You?
When we talk about Kapta, we talk about a tool and a process…
January 6, 2020/by Alex RaymondYour New Year’s Resolutions: What Makes Change Management Work?
Change is constant. But there’s no time like the New Year to…
December 30, 2019/by Lesley PoladskyIntroducing KAM To-Go
We often hear from organizations who need to establish a process…
December 23, 2019/by Alex RaymondHow Are You Communicating with Customers?
Good client relationships demand consistent, intentional communication.…
December 16, 2019/by Alex RaymondCRM and Kapta: Making the Most of Both Platforms
Many of our customers use Salesforce and/or other CRM tools for…
December 9, 2019/by Lesley PoladskyOur KAM Process: Deep Dive into MEASURE
Our KAM ProcessTM is a proven methodology for building customer…
December 2, 2019/by Alex RaymondOur KAM Process: Deep Dive into ACT
Our KAM ProcessTM is a proven methodology for building customer…
November 25, 2019/by Lesley PoladskyOur KAM Process: Deep Dive into KNOW
Last week, we wrote a high-level summary of Our KAM ProcessTM,…
November 18, 2019/by Alex RaymondOur KAM Process: Your Roadmap for Building Customer Engagement
We’ve talked to a lot of companies about Key Account Management,…
November 11, 2019/by Lesley PoladskyKAMCon 2019: Highlights and Takeaways from Attendees
It’s been about a month since KAMCon 2019, and we’re still…
November 4, 2019/by Alex RaymondCategories
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Team Building Inspiration for your Key Account Managers
/in Account Management, Key Account Management /by Lesley PoladskyWe talk a lot about customer engagement here at Kapta, and there’s good reason for that: Without customers, you don’t have a company. Period.
But internal engagement matters, too. The bigger and more demanding your book of business gets, the more you need cross-functional teams to keep your clients satisfied. And it’s not enough that they just be cross-functional; they need to be highly functional.
Employees are higher functioning and more deeply engaged when they’re able to use their strengths to be successful at an organization, and when they’re able to work more productively with their team.
So we’re taking a break from our client-facing content to look inward, and offer some inspiration around team building. At its heart, team-building is about connecting to coworkers as people. The goal isn’t for everybody to be best friends—it’s to help your teams understanding how individuals think, process, prioritize, and work, so they can communicate and collaborate more smoothly and effectively.
Often, the simple fact that coworkers are people, too, gets lost in the day-to-day stress of deliverables. Team-building is about stepping out of everyday work, however temporarily, to gain perspective and check in as a team. There are many ways to do this; we’ve grouped them into 3 main categories:
We’ll take a closer look at all three so you can evaluate what might work best for your next team-building event.
1) Routine, On-site Check-Ins
We go to meetings all the time. Status meetings. Client meetings. Meetings to review deliverables. In fact, it’s not uncommon for teams to complain about the sheer number of meetings they have to attend every day, especially if there’s no time set aside to just work.
With that in mind, it’s good to be judicious about adding more meetings to the calendar; however, it’s also important to set aside time for team check-ins. In other words, meetings that aren’t about any specific client or deliverable, but rather a general opportunity to get together and share positive feedback.
We find every 4-6 weeks is a good interval for meetings like this, and there’s no reason not to serve food and drinks. Monday morning with coffee and breakfast burritos; Wednesday lunch; or Friday afternoon with chips, dips, and beer. Food and drinks set up a pleasant space that’s unlike most of the other meetings your team will attend that week.
Within each meeting, the goal is to provide opportunities for the team to express appreciation and positive feedback for the work their colleagues do. Rather than leaving this open-ended, which may result in more superficial comments, structure the conversation around Team Norms.
Team Norms are values each team agrees to early in their work together. These values should feel like a natural expression of the company’s values or culture as a whole, but they are tailored to specific teams or work groups, so they can be a little more practical and specific. Some good examples of Team Norms include:
It’s important when establishing Team Norms to get buy-in from the team as a whole, and to keep the list to about 5. Nobody needs a Team Constitution—just a few, key, shared values to help guide the culture of a specific working group.
Once those are established, your monthly team check-ins can include a chance for everyone on the team to share an example of how a teammate exemplified Team Norms. These kinds of check-ins reinforce shared values and give the team regular, quick chances to show their appreciation, which can help keep lines of communication open and smooth as work continues. And, since they happen onsite in the course of the normal work week, they are often relatively inexpensive and easy to schedule.
2) Offsite Retreats and Workshops
Occasionally, you need to step even farther out of context to get your team thinking differently about their coworkers. This is where it can be useful to go offsite, or bring in 3rd party groups to facilitate workshops.
Unlike regular team check-ins, which are structured around Team Norms and include appreciative remarks about work, offsite or 3rd-party facilitated workshops should take your team to a completely different environment. These exercises help people step outside their normal day to better understand themselves and their own strengths, as well as the strengths of their teammates; a good facilitator will then help your team apply what they’ve learned to their workplace environment.
Some good examples of activities like these include Tangrams, Liberating Structures, and DISC. In Tangrams, the team creates images out of geometrical shapes, learning along the way how many unique ways there are to tackle a problem, and how a high-functioning team needs different kinds of thinkers to thrive. Liberating Structures are designed to boost engagement and inclusion, with a focus on creating a culture of innovation within an organization. And DISC is a personality assessment, designed to build nuanced profiles for each team member, illustrating how they work as individuals, and how they can better relate to each other. In all cases, a skilled, 3rd-party facilitator is key to making the experience engaging, meaningful, and valuable for everyone.
In all the examples above, teammates learn more about what makes each other tick: How they function, how they think, and how to create a smoother, more satisfying work environment. It’s not just about making people happy at work; it’s about making teams more effective.
There are also options that get your team out of the office and moving around, without the same level of in-depth reflection. A good, old-fashioned ropes course can build leadership skills and strategies, as well as trust and communication. If it’s winter or if your team is decidedly uninterested in dangling from moderate heights, Escape Rooms are fun and social, and require teamwork, creativity, and communication. Neither ropes courses nor escape rooms are necessarily designed to crystallize clear learnings about your coworkers’ strengths or your team’s dynamics, but they are more than just a social outing in that they demand cooperation among the team.
Offsite or 3rd-party moderated team building workshops necessarily require more investment than in-line meetings. However, they are a worthy use of time and money, especially if the team is coming out of (or looking towards) a particularly stressful set of deliverables.
3) Go Social
Sometimes you just need a break. No workshops. No puzzles. No meetings. Just time outside the office to reconnect as people, and remember that even if so-and-so sent an annoying email about such-and-such, or handled a situation poorly, you still mostly like them as a person.
The options here are endless: Top Golf, arcades, bowling, or just a nice happy hour at a nearby bar. Social outings can’t tackle the deeper level of who we are, how we work, and how we can work together better, but they’re a nice release valve when things are stressful, and an important reminder that relationships matter.
Conclusion
Ideally, your team-building strategy involves a mix of all these elements. Periodic deep-dives, offsites, or 3rd-party workshops to learn more about each other and how to work together better. Regular check-ins to make sure the way you’re working day to day is reflective of the values you share and the people you are. And the occasional social event to lighten the mood.
It can be easy to dismiss the time or money it takes to stop working and, as Socrates advises, “live an examined life.” But it’s not just about internal satisfaction, though that has its own merit. When a team is high-functioning internally, they can be high-functioning externally, too. Teams with strong internal relationships are better poised to build strong client relationships, and clients recognize when a team has good chemistry, just as they recognize when a team is falling apart.
So make a plan for team building in the coming year, and let us know what you do, and what kind of results you see.
Key Account Management for Marketing Agencies
/in Customer Engagement, Key Account Management /by Alex RaymondKey Account Management is the art of engaging with high-value customers to promote a long-term, strategic partnership that results in organic growth. Because high-value customers appear across multiple industries, KAM is be useful for many different types of organizations.
For some of our customers, high-value customers are a segment within a broader customer base. However, for some companies using Kapta, every account is high value. And we don’t mean that as a platitude—we mean these companies have a small roster of clients, all of whom are worth half a million dollars in revenue or more, annually.
For these organizations, all Account Management is Key Account Management, and KAM is not an afterthought or an offshoot of sales. Rather, it’s an established pillar of the organization.
One good example is a marketing agency. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the challenges that define KAM at marketing agencies, and how our customers in that industry use Kapta to manage client relationships. Even if you don’t work for a marketing agency, read on: It can be helpful to see KAM in action at an organization where Key Account Management is a thriving, important function at the organization.
Marketing agencies need Kapta because they are:
KAM at Service Firms
Marketing agencies don’t sell a tangible product, but rather, a collection of services. Whether they bill by the hour or in flat fees, they need to be actively working on client deliverables in order to be profitable. It’s the account manager’s job to keep work coming in the door—and that requires deep customer engagement. Account managers at marketing agencies need to:
In other words, they need to follow some version of Our KAM Process in their everyday work. Kapta is built to support this process. With Kapta, marketing agencies stay connected to their clients’ goals and challenges, so they can proactively suggest solutions. (These solutions become client deliverables, which become revenue.) Kapta helps marketing agencies develop complex Action Plans designed to drive big picture growth for clients—and everything in the action plan promotes revenue. Finally, Kapta helps measure the success of individual deliverables as well as the overall partnership, which helps demonstrate value to clients—and keep the work coming. (More on that later.)
Cross-Functional Teams
Another defining feature of marketing agencies is that they need cross-functional teams to work on each piece of business. There’s the account manager or client services lead, who’s in charge of managing the client relationship. Often, there’s a brand strategist who might review competitive threats, industry trends, and client goals, constantly cross-referencing to make sure the marketing strategy is sound. (This could also fall under the account manager’s job description if the agency isn’t big enough to support a brand strategist role.) There are creative teams—art, copy, UX designers, web developers—who translate the marketing strategy into branding, messaging, and other creative assets. There are quality control and production specialists. And there are project managers keeping everyone organized, on time, and on budget.
In a team like that, the Account Manager (and the strategist if that role is filled) is responsible for ensuring that every client deliverable is strategically sound, helping that client achieve their interim or long-term goals. As they’re reviewing deliverables, they are also meeting with clients regularly to capture feedback on existing deliverables while also keeping the pipeline of new work flowing.
We find that while project managers have several purpose-built tools to help cross-functional teams stay organized, account managers do not have the same luxury. Kapta is designed to support the client service function, helping account managers stay deeply engaged with clients so they can act as effective “quarterbacks” of a cross-functional team, ensuring every deliverable is what the client needs, and that clients stay satisfied throughout the process. Kapta also supports project managers and the rest of the team by integrating with the tools agencies use to get work done (such as Slack) and helping track contracts and timing as projects progress.
One thing many Account Managers at marketing agencies will run into is the team losing sight of big picture goals as they get caught up in the daily ins and outs of client deliverables. Maybe there’s a big leadership summit at the beginning of the year, where the team conducts a SWOT analysis, identifies key strategic objectives for the year, and starts to brainstorm an action plan to accomplish those goals. The output of that meeting is presented to the team and stored in a beautiful PowerPoint deck on the server…then promptly forgotten. Kapta helps keep strategy visible, so anyone who picks up a client project can easily see the broader picture for what they’re doing.
Desk-Based vs Field-Based
Managing client relationships is different when you do it from a desk, rather than from the field. Companies that sell a product, such as a large piece of equipment, have built-in opportunities for client face time: Installation, operation, regular maintenance, auxiliary equipment sales, etc.
However, marketing agencies do not have the same excuse to regularly show up at their customer’s door. That means they need to be intentional about keeping in touch—checking in regularly, providing consistent opportunities for feedback, and ensuring they get the face time they need with day-to-day clients as well as executive leadership.
The more remote work becomes the norm, the more difficult it can be to maintain a strong relationship. Kapta helps marketing agencies by tracking client touchpoints, and raising a flag when it’s been too long since the team reached out. Kapta also provides multiple opportunities to demonstrate value, which makes it enticing for account managers to set up periodic reviews. That leads us to the last reason marketing agencies love Kapta: They constantly need to show value to clients.
Constant Need to Show Value
There’s an old saying: “You start losing a client the minute you win the business.” There are a few reasons for this:
Marketing agencies need to demonstrate value to their clients at every turn—and they need to ensure deep client engagement so they become extremely difficult to replace. Kapta helps marketing agencies demonstrate value by tracking metrics that matter, including:
Conclusion
Diving into the specific challenges that shape key account management at marketing agencies, it’s easy to see how service-based firms in competitive industries would benefit from diligent, consistent KAM practices. For these firms, we at Kapta don’t worry about coaching teams from a purely sales mindset to an account management mindset—they’re already there. Instead, our focus is providing a purpose-built tool to support a well-established account management team. Because again, project management teams have their tools. Web developers and other creatives have their tools. But we often find account managers—the people responsible for keeping work coming through the door—are still relying on a collection of emails, Powerpoint decks, Excel spreadsheets, Slack, and their own notes to run the account.
To see how Kapta supports client service leads at marketing agencies and other service-based firms, schedule a personal demo today.
Understanding Customer Engagement: What Does it Mean for You?
/in Customer Engagement /by Alex RaymondWhen we talk about Kapta, we talk about a tool and a process designed to build customer engagement.
So what do we mean by “customer engagement?” It’s a term that pops up all over the place these days, and it means different things to different people. So let’s take a closer look at how we define, demonstrate, and achieve customer engagement, and how doing so compares to other roles, such as Customer Success or sales.
Defining Customer Engagement
A brief internet search will show you that people define customer engagement all sorts of ways. This is understandable. Customer engagement is hard to define in absolutes, since it deals with the emotional connection between your customer and your company or brand, and looks slightly different in different industries. (For example, a retail brand is not going to define or measure customer engagement the same way a creative services consulting firm might.)
However, if you sift through many definitions out there, you’ll find 3 common, crucial elements:
At Kapta, when we distill and simplify those key elements, we say: Customer engagement is an ongoing, strategic relationship in which both parties succeed.
Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of that statement—it actually contains quite a bit of information. You can’t have an ongoing relationship without consistent, 2-way communication, in which your customers talk to you as much or more than you talk at them. Your relationship can’t be strategic if you’re more focused on selling what you offer than listening to what they need. And you can’t share success if you’re not dedicated to helping your customers achieve their business goals, and growing alongside them.
At the end of the day, something as nuanced and important as customer engagement is better demonstrated than defined. So let’s step away from theory for a minute, and give you a sense of what customer engagement looks like in practice.
Demonstrating Customer Engagement
One way we help our own customers understand the strength of their customer engagement is by asking a short list of questions, each designed as an indicator of customer engagement.
In summary, the questions we ask are designed to give you a sense of the strength of your customer engagement. If your client is reaching out to you regularly; if they call you when they’re facing an issue or opportunity; if they share with you the bigger context for what they’re doing; if you are confident in their satisfaction and your future with them, and if you’ve built your own sales goals accordingly, then you are doing customer engagement right.
Achieving Customer Engagement
So how do you get there? At Kapta, we believe customer engagement is the end product of a customer-first culture and process, executed by a dedicated team of account or client service professionals.
Let’s pick that apart for just a second. First, you need a company-wide culture and a set of internal processes that puts customers first. This has to happen at the company level, because it has to be reflected in every function at your organization. It affects who you hire, how you train, how you measure performance, what products and services you offer, how you plan for growth, and more. The companies with the highest level of customer engagement are those that prioritize their customers, full stop.
Second, you need a team of professionals dedicated to building and strengthening client relationships. Traditionally, this has been called account management, key account management, or client services. There are different titles here, and different potential department names, one thing is key: This is distinct from the sales team, or at least a distinct group within the sales team. Because yes, client services professionals drive revenue, but their focus isn’t generating new leads or chasing quotas—it’s partnering with high-value customers to foster lasting, loyal relationships that can’t help but drive revenue over the long term.
And finally, you need a purpose-driven process and tools to support customer engagement. CRM and sales tools cannot do this for you. Neither can customer success tools. And neither can an ad-hoc collection of various communication, presentation, project management, and billing tools. To understand which tools you need, let’s look at some key differences between customer engagement, customer success, and sales.
Customer Engagement vs Customer Success
Let’s start with some areas of overlap between customer engagement, as we define and use the term, and customer success. In both instances, customers need to feel successful with your products/services/company. They need to use your products and services to their full (or close to full) capacity, and they need to see real value from the time they invest in you.
Now, let’s talk about some of the differences:
Customer Engagement vs Sales
Again, let’s start with similarities. Customer Engagement and Sales are both about driving revenue through the products and services your company offers. The main difference here is how, and where the team’s focus lies.
In sales, the goal is to generate new leads, driving revenue by increasing the customer base. The goal may also be to upsell or cross-sell a large number of existing customers. In contrast, Customer Engagement drives revenue through organic growth, gradually increasing the scope and longevity of existing, strategic, high-value clients. We’ve written in detail before about how sales differs from Key Account Management, and why you need purpose-built tools for each. We’ll simply recap here that CRM tools are excellent for generating new leads or managing a high volume of low-touch customers, but they don’t provide the framework and visibility you need to build an ongoing, highly strategic relationship with any given, high-value client.
Conclusion: Benefits of Customer Engagement
Hopefully by now the benefits of Customer Engagement are pretty clear. Customer Engagement creates lasting, loyal, strategic partnerships that not only help secure your existing revenue from a key account, but also provide a platform for growth. Engaged, satisfied customers are more likely to invest in premium products and services, and more likely to continue to work with you when things go wrong (as they sometimes will).
Customer Engagement also helps reduce the risk and cost of customer churn. Customers today are easier to lose than ever before, and companies who win will be the ones who make customer engagement a priority.
To learn more about how Kapta can help you build real customer engagement, schedule a demo today. And if you have thoughts on what customer engagement means to you, get in touch and let us know.