How to Drive Engagement with Coordinate

Coordinate provides a shared view of your customer’s high-value goals, their plan to achieve those goals, and their progress on their customer journey. When all key stakeholders are included, Coordinate becomes a powerful tool for promoting customer engagement at all levels.

What is Engagement?

Engagement can be different for different customers, stakeholders, or even products. Before you can effectively drive engagement, you have to define the engagement you hope to achieve with your customers. Below are different scenarios representing increasingly rigorous customer engagement, but each can be critical to the success of your customers.

Maintaining high-level alignment with key stakeholders

If your primary purpose for utilizing Coordinate with your customers is to keep the decision makers and exec sponsors engaged, it may not require frequent direct interaction with the plan on their part. Instead, you will want to share a strategic plan with all stakeholders and use that as a guide for strategic decisions throughout the relationship. In this case engagement comes from the strategic alignment provided by Coordinate’s plans by keeping stakeholders informed and ensuring their biggest challenges are being addressed. 

How to drive engagement: 

• Create a plan that includes your stakeholders’ high-value goals and lays out a path to achieve them and review it with them
• Maintain the plan on an ongoing basis and use it to keep stakeholders informed. Indicate progress on the plan as it’s made, record notes on Tasks and Goals when additional context or updates are available, and ensure stakeholders are getting regular updates.
• Utilize the plan to drive strategic discussions - ensure goals are up to date and that the plan aligns with customer expectations during QBRs and other strategic sessions.

Accountability while working toward customer goals

When it comes to customers, accountability starts with awareness. In this case having a plan that you’ve mutually agreed to that is kept up to date may be the best tool to keep things moving. Delays occur when customers don’t know what they should be doing, don’t have a target, or are dealing with competing priorities. Keeping a shared plan that defines the path, the required resources, and the timeline can make a huge difference in driving accountability when things go off-track. 

How to drive engagement:

• Get buy-in on the plan. By making sure all stakeholders agree to the plan, you generate added pressure to follow through with the plan.
• Ensure the right stakeholders are informed when due dates are approaching. Use Coordinate’s automated reporting or directly message stakeholders on Tasks and Goals to let them know their action is needed.
• If something does fall behind, loop in additional stakeholders and make sure everyone remembers which goals are at stake.

Day-to-day collaboration

Using Coordinate as the primary communication and collaboration tool with your customers has huge benefits: clear context and history on all communication, an organized history of information and progress, automated alerts and reminders, and it enables asynchronous workflows. A key to using Coordinate for day-to-day collaboration is making your plans as informative and useful as possible for your stakeholders.

How to drive engagement:

• Initiate conversations on Tasks and Goals to keep communication in context and focused
• Keep the plan informative: Make sure task descriptions provide or point to the resources your customers need to continue executing on their plan
• Record notes on Tasks and Goals whenever there are updates or out-of-band conversations 
  

Setting Expectations

No matter which type of engagement you are trying to promote, the most important step is setting expectations with your customer. When you first introduce your plan to stakeholders, you have to define its purpose and clearly explain your expectations of them. If you expect all communication to happen in Coordinate, you have to specify that when sharing the plan with stakeholders and make sure they know how to initiate and respond to communications. Similarly if you expect your customers to update the plan, indicate progress, and subscribe to automated alerts you need to clearly explain those expectations to your stakeholders.

Expectation setting isn’t a one-time event, you’ll need to remind your customers often and revisit expectations if they change. You’ll also want to remind your customers about the value the plan provides to them which we outline in more detail here. One of the best ways to reinforce your expectations is to follow through on your side to show customers how you want Coordinate to be used.

Following Through

If you want Coordinate to help you drive accountability, alignment, and ultimately customer success, then you need to ensure it’s up-to-date and utilized properly and consistently. If you aren’t following through on your side of the work, then you can’t expect your customers to do so. 

• Initiate new conversions related to Tasks and Goals from within Coordinate
• If/when customers communicate out-of-band, record it in Coordinate to ensure information is complete
• Keep plans up-to-date
• Escalate appropriately if things are falling behind
• Refer back to the history if problems or discrepancies arise 
  

To fully unlock the value of Coordinate you need to be deliberate on how you utilize its features and workflows with your customers. Define the role you want it to play in the relationship and the level of activity and engagement you expect from your customers before sharing so you can clearly set expectations. Accountability and alignment are two-way streets so you must follow through and meet your customers half-way when utilizing a shared plan in Coordinate.