The document provides an overview of internal customer engagement, outlining key definitions, methodologies, and phases. It describes internal customer engagement as a cyclical process with three main regions: initial engagement to raise awareness of new solutions, engagement during migration and implementation, and engagement after adoption to maintain loyalty. Effective engagement requires communication, migration, support, and escalation plans along with targeting stakeholders at different organizational levels appropriately over time. The engagement approach evolves as solutions mature from individual-focused early on to more collaborative later on. Maintaining engagement throughout the product lifecycle is emphasized.

1. Internal Customer Engagement – Overview &
Process
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2. Table of Contents
1 Overview & Key Definitions
2 Internal Customer Engagement Cycle
3 Key Methodologies
4 Engagement Phases
5 Summary
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3. Overview & Key Definitions
What is Customer Engagement?
– Customer Engagement is the process of fostering and optimizing the relationship between
consumer needs and a company or group’s objectives to produce the most viable
deliverable.
Why is Customer Engagement important?
– Allows the team to ensure that they are providing the best possible overall solution most
suited to the customer’s expectations
– Increases satisfaction scores and gives the customer the impression of a more professional
and user-centric mindset
– Ensures a much higher likelihood of brand loyalty and advocacy
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4. Overview & Key Definitions
Type of Customers
– External Customer – Individual or individuals that are not employees or affiliates of the
existing company who purchase products or services from the company
– Internal Customer – Individual or teams that are paid employees of the company but are
still consumers of your product or service
***Note: It is important to draw a distinction between external and internal customer types;
the methods of engagement and policies of interaction will differ
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5. Overview & Key Definitions
How are Internal and External Customers Different?
– External Customer
• Is a purchaser of a product or service, but has no vested interest in the company itself
• Has their own agenda outside of the company’s strategy or goals
• Is solely focused on their needs and is not interested in the needs or wants of other customers
– Internal Customer
• Is a consumer of internal components or solutions, but also a producer of products or services that are purchased by
the external customer
• May have a particular product level agenda, but is in line with company strategy and goals
• Has focus on their needs but is mindful of need for collaboration with other company colleagues
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6. Overview & Key Definitions
What are some of the difficulties in engaging with Internal Customers?
– Internal customers have their own external customers to please; their actions in adopting
your solutions directly affect their customer outcomes
– Internal customers have release schedules and timetables to consider; disruptions to those
schedules can directly affect company profit and end-user satisfaction
– Internal customers may be comfortable with existing technologies or solutions and will
likely be hesitant in adopting a new component or change to their software products as this
may have adverse and unexpected consequences for their deliverables
**Note: Recognize that internal customers are ultimately responsible
for THEIR solutions, even when adopting another group’s technology
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7. Internal Customer Engagement Cycle
What is the best strategy for engaging with Internal Customers?
– The graphic on the following slide provides the high level process of customer engagement,
broken down into three regions and six sections
– The main premise behind Customer Engagement is that when it is performed effectively, it
becomes cyclical; i.e. self-driving when word of mouth and strong advocacy by previous
adopters begins to spread to other potential customers
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8. Internal Customer Engagement Cycle
LEGEND
Customer
Engagement
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9. Internal Customer Engagement Cycle
Sectional Breakdowns
INITIAL ENGAGEMENT
Knowledge of New Solution
1.Internal Customer becomes aware of new
component or solution, through direct
communication or through advocacy
Awareness 2.Team provides information and insight into new
solution, explaining the merits of adopting it
3.Team provides demo and/or documentation of
new solution to target internal customer(s)
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10. Internal Customer Engagement Cycle
Sectional Breakdowns
INITIAL ENGAGEMENT
Scrutiny of New Solution
1.Internal Customer begins evaluation process of
new solution
2.Team provides best practices and samples as
Consideration
needed to Internal Customer during evaluation
process
3.Team ropes in previous Internal Customers to
discussion as needed to provide frames of
reference and additional guidance
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11. Internal Customer Engagement Cycle
Sectional Breakdowns
DURING ENGAGEMENT
Migration Process to New Solution
1.Internal Customer begins migration of existing
products to begin leveraging new
component/solution provided by Team
2.Team monitors engagement and facilitates
active response as needed for any issues
encountered during implementation process
3.Active fixes or updates provided to Internal
Customer are also immediately available to
previously migrated implementations
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12. Internal Customer Engagement Cycle
Sectional Breakdowns
DURING ENGAGEMENT
Active Support Phase
1.Internal Customer has completed
integration/migration to new solution
2.Team provides continued support and facilitates
effective escalation process for new
implementation
3.Issues raised or discovered in this phase are
immediately addressed and any fixes or work-
arounds are communicated both to the current
Internal Customer going through initial adoption
as well as existing customers who are already
adopted to the new solution/component
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13. Internal Customer Engagement Cycle
Sectional Breakdowns
AFTER ENGAGEMENT
Adherence to New Solution
1.Internal Customer has completed migration to
new solution and is satisfied with the outcome
2.Internal Customer begins to ask for new
Loyalty features or functionality as needed
3.Team provides ease of updates and quick
response to inquiries and requirement requests
from customer(s)
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14. Internal Customer Engagement Cycle
Sectional Breakdowns
AFTER ENGAGEMENT
Devotion and Ardor to New Solution
1.Internal Customer becomes reliant on new
solution or component
2.Internal Customer becomes advocate of new
Advocacy solution or component, communicating with
other teams about the merits of migrating
3.Customer advocacy fuels additional inquiries
into solution from other potential customers and
the cycle repeats
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15. Internal Customer Engagement Cycle
Summary of Engagement Cycle
– Active engagement is a continuous cycle
– Effective engagement is cyclical: good customer interaction leads to more customers and
positive feedback
– Engagement never stops; customers are always kept informed and up to date on new
versions of your solutions and are actively encouraged to provide feedback
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16. Key Methodologies
How Should Engagement be Achieved?
– In order to facilitate proper engagement with customers and ensure re-usability and
uniformity to your engagement model, the following should be part of your overall
engagement strategy
• A Communication Plan
• A Migration Plan
• A Support Plan
• Standards and Practices documentation
• Well defined points of contact
• An in-place Escalation Plan
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17. Key Methodologies
Breakdowns
 Communication Plan  Support Plan
 How primary lines of  How to deal with issues during
communication are handled and post
(email, wikis, SharePoint, etc) Main Team migration/implementation
 Primary points of reference  Well defined turn-around and
within product teams is defined *Primary Contacts* response for issues
*Uniform Standards*
*Documentation*
 Migration Plan *Best Practices*  Escalation Plan
 Standard checklist of primary  Available mechanism to deal
migration milestones with issues that arise from
external sources
 Available references to previous
migrations  Coordination with product team
escalation mechanism
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18. Key Methodologies
Who Should be Targeted for Engagement?
– Depending on maturity of the project and the current position in the engagement cycle,
different individuals will likely be targeted at different times
– How and when should certain people at various levels in the corporate hierarchy be
targeted depends on various factors, including the internal dynamics of the product team
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19. Key Methodologies
Engagement Breakdowns
– The organizational breakdown of a company, business unit or team will usually function as
the main contact reference for engagement
– Generally speaking, as engagement moves forward in the cycle, the movement through the
organizational hierarchy will go from senior level individuals to mid-level and finally to
individual contributors
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20. Key Methodologies
Engagement Grid
Awareness & High Level
Loyalty & Advocacy
VP
Consideration
Mid Level Mid Level
Director Director
Mid Level Mid Level
Implementation & Manager Product Manager
Support
Individual Individual Individual
Development QA Project Manager
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21. Key Methodologies
Engagement Grid Summary
– Ultimately, those at the top will make the decision of whether or not to adopt your solution
and/or process
– Those in the middle and lower tiers will be tasked with implementing your solution and/or
process
– Conclusions:
• Engagement at higher levels is more of a marketing or sales pitch, explaining the benefits of your
solution and what problems it will solve for the business
• Engagement at mid and lower levels is more technically focused, concentrating on
the granular particulars of how to implement your solution into the broader
product offering(s)
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22. Engagement Phases
How Does Engagement Change as Product Matures?
– As indicated earlier, customer engagement is an on-going process
– Initial engagement will be more sparse, with a small number of customers to deal with and
more technical challenges to solve
– As the number of customer adopters of your solution grow, customer engagement will
become more complex, with more emphasis on new features and functionality and a
smaller emphasis on problems to solve
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23. Engagement Phases
Engagement Timeline
– Customer interaction and engagement as component/solution matures and is adopted by
more and more people
 Customers engaged on an individual  Migration plan is now mature
basis
 Collaborative entity of customers
 Engagement logs created for formed to meet regularly regarding
reference and future engagements new features/enhancements
(to become part of migration plan)
 Migration plan leveraged for
engagements
 Customer focus groups formed and
surveys leveraged on need basis to
determine fixes/enhancements
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24. Engagement Phases
Key Takeaways
– An early engagement process will be more individually based, with less emphasis on cross
product team communication (to ensure any early issues are dealt with quickly and
response time on a per customer basis is high)
– As component/process adoption moves forward, customers can be brought together on a
need basis for focus groups and surveys to get a broader sentiment and begin early stages
of collaborative engagement
– At the mature phase, customers should be engaged regularly on a group basis, so that any
new ideas or enhancement requests are brought to a forum for review
**Note that collaborative engagement becomes important as more customers
come on board since enhancement requests by individuals may now impact
customers as a whole
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25. Summary
Engagement Cycle
– A properly implemented customer engagement mechanism becomes self-driving; loyalty
and advocacy will fuel a push towards your solution
– Engagement with customers needs to be maintained at all times in the cycle; customers
should not be left out in the cold once they have adopted your solution
Engagement Phases
– Initial engagement will be more individual, bringing customers on board in stages
– Mature engagement will require more collaboration between customers as they push for
new features and functionality; forum-based engagement will occur at this stage
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26. Summary
Conclusion
– Customers make or break your solution (including internal customers)
– Be mindful of the types of jobs customers are attempting to solve and how one customer’s
request may impact others
– Stay engaged in all three areas of the engagement cycle (Initial, During, After)
– Ensure your engagement plans are in place so that customers have plenty of reference
material and a unified strategy in place when they are considering your solution
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