I appreciate the Grammarly plugin. I’m a decent writer, but everybody can use a tip now and again. But there’s one thing about Grammarly I don’t like. Their little green doohickey keeps putting itself right where I want to put my cursor. It gets in the way – especially when I’m filling out a form, or something like that. It got so annoying that I just logged out. The grammar and spelling tips weren’t worth the annoyance.
Grammarly noticed this after a week and sent me an email. Now you might think the email would ask “what the heck?” or “is anything wrong?” or something along those lines. Nope. It just assumed (1) I was taking a break from writing, or (2) I had accidentally logged out.
There’s a self-awareness problem going on here.
That got me thinking about the differences between customer engagement and customer success, so I asked ChatGPT to explain. Here’s my slightly edited version of the list I got.
Customer Engagement includes …
- Dialogue and building a rapport with customers,
- Feedback, reviews, and suggestions,
- Personalization, and
- Brand loyalty.
Customer Success includes …
- Onboarding,
- Training and support,
- Regularly assessing customer satisfaction, and
- Aligning the product’s capabilities and how it’s used with the customer’s objectives.
According to ChatGPT, “customer engagement” focuses on creating a strong connection between the customer and the brand, while “customer success” is more directed towards ensuring customers are meeting their goals.
The labels don’t matter. I would say there are three important things here.
- Help your customer do what he needs to do. It’s not about you, or your brand, or checking off all the boxes on a list of tasks.
- To do that, you have to think outside the constraints of your discipline, or whatever model your company is using to measure and manage engagement,
- Customer Success people should learn from Customer Engagement people, and vice versa.
Let’s apply this to the email I got from Grammarly. I’m going to read you the opening paragraph.
We’re not seeing any writing activity for you last week, so unless you were taking a writing break, you might have accidentally logged out. Please log back in so we can keep you up to date on your personal records and general greatness.
That sounds like an email from somebody who’s bought into gamification. What’s important – from that point of view – is that I keep up my streak. My “personal records” and such.
In fact, right after that paragraph is my “Grammarly writing streak,” with my “next achievement.” Whatever the heck that is.
Then there are some charts showing a bunch of metrics I don’t care about at all.
All I want out of Grammarly is some spelling advice from time to time and to know when I need a comma.
Somebody at Grammarly has narrowed the concept of customer engagement down to this gamification thing. Don’t blame them. They probably learned that at a marketing conference. But gamification has absolutely nothing to do with why I use the service.
I realize gamification is a powerful tool in some settings. But it’s a tool that helps the company get the user addicted to a certain behavior. It’s not of any benefit to the customer.
If you’re in the business of customer engagement, or success, or … just making sure your customers are getting value from your product, then here’s the question you need to ask. Is the behavior you’re manipulating a person into in their interest, consistent with their goals, or is it only in the company’s interest?
