Customer engagement is the key to delighting customers and keeping them coming back for more. But what does it mean to engage with your team? How do you create an environment where team members feel valued and know their contributions matter? 

Customer engagement doesn’t happen on its own. It’s a process that takes thoughtful planning, collaboration, and effort—and luckily four practices can help guide your team through this process:

The importance of team engagement

Customer success is a key element in the overall success of many companies. It’s responsible for helping your customers achieve their goals and providing them with value while ensuring that you’re maximizing ROI from your product or service.

While this may sound like it should be an area where you can focus all your attention, two other functions also need to be considered: employee engagement and team engagement.

The first thing you need to understand is how each one relates to the others. Customer success teams function best when they have strong employee engagement — as well as high levels of customer and team engagement.

Regular check-ins

We recommend regular check-ins for your team to ensure everyone is on the same page. The frequency of these check-ins is up to you, but weekly or monthly should be sufficient for most teams. A good cadence leads to better communication and more effective problem-solving.

Focus your check-ins on what you accomplished since your last meeting, as well as any big challenges you’re facing that week or month. You can also use this time to review each of your goals from the previous quarter (or year), which helps you stay aligned with one another and ensures that you’re moving in the right direction as a team, which will help you better engage with your customers.

Collaborative goal setting

Collaborative goal setting is the second of your customer success engagement practices. Your team needs to be involved with goal-setting and prioritizing, as it increases their sense of ownership and helps them feel more empowered to make decisions.When you allow your team to provide input on goals, priorities, metrics, and actions related to customer success improvements or new initiatives:

• They will feel more invested in their work because they were a part of making the decisions
• They will be better equipped to communicate these objectives effectively throughout the organization

Reflect on your work

Reflecting means taking time to consider what went well, what could be improved, and how you can make sure that next time you’re even more successful in achieving your goals with this particular customer.

It’s important to ask for feedback from all of your stakeholders: customers, team members, managers, and peers—and if you can get it from the customer again (this would be super awesome), then do.

Learn from one another

The final step of the customer success engagement loop is to work as a team. You can learn from the past by reflecting on the experiences of previous customers and their use cases. This will help you avoid making the same mistakes again in the future, which can save time and money for your company.

Conclusion

Engaging your customer success team takes more than just a few workshops. It’s an ongoing process of learning, reflection, and growth that requires a deeper level of commitment from everyone involved. By implementing these four engagement practices—regular check-ins, collaborative goal setting, reflecting on your work, and learning from one another—you can help ensure that each member of your team is working toward the same goals. And when each person feels like they have ownership over their success, it becomes easier for them to build strong relationships with their customers.