An engagement manager is a professional who specializes in business relationships. They may help companies build and improve relationships with their clients or customers, usually in a customer service or client representative capacity.
Engagement managers can also apply their interpersonal skills to improve the relationship between a company and its personnel. These managers may work for employee engagement service companies or offer special programs and consulting services to deploy employee engagement activities and strategies.
An engagement manager job description will likely vary based on whether they’re fostering relationships between buyer and seller or worker and employer, but the base skills have a lot of overlap.
First and foremost, an engagement manager needs to understand and enjoy working with people. This is essential to identifying what motivates someone to engage, as well as what causes someone to disconnect or withdraw.
They must also be great communicators who are eager listen to needs and concerns, and also capable of explaining their strategies for implementing a customer or employee engagement plan.
Professionals who have these skills and experience in building better business relationships are in demand. More and more companies are prioritizing employee and customer experiences as an important element of their brand and growth.
Every year, there are tens of thousands of new engagement manager jobs. Considering that an engagement manager salary ranges from $39,000 to over $140,000 annually, this career can be a great opportunity for anyone with an interest in people and business.
How To Become An Engagement Manger
Although not always a requirement for the job, the majority of engagement managers have at least an associate’s degree or bachelor’s degree.
Studying business administration and management is a good start for developing the organizational and professional communication skills required for the job.
Although there is some crossover between customer engagement and employee engagement manager, the career path is different.
Those who are seeking customer engagement manager opportunities will want to gain experience in customer service. Those who are interested in employee engagement management will want to start in human resource roles.
Either path will address methods for improving relationships, communicating effectively, assessing needs, identifying opportunities for improvements, and developing and implementing strategies.
However, engagement managers will need to have a solid understanding of issues and trends pertaining to the client-seller relationship or the employee-employer relationship.
The dynamics between these two relationships are going to vary, as will the tools and strategies for improving engagement.
How Engagement Managers Can Succeed
Customer engagement strategies are going to be different from employee engagement strategies, but engagement managers with the right skills know that the common factors are understanding people and meeting their expectations.
Engagement managers are going to be constantly looking for opportunities to do both.
This is why communication matters so much and also why many customer and employee engagement ideas start with collecting information.
The goal is to gain consistent insight into employee and customer sentiments and what can cause them to change. A successful engagement manager will identify different methods of gathering this information.
This can mean deploying surveys, polls, and other direct contact methods, but this may not work in every case. Instead, engagement managers can look at wider trends and cultural shifts to see where their employee or customer sensibilities align.
This will enable the engagement manager to identify opportunities for positive engagement. This might require solving pressing problems and addressing disconnects or it may mean building on past successes.
Successful engagement managers will use their organizational and analytical skills to identify where their engagement strategies have been effective, where mistakes have been made, and what actual engagement looks like. From there, they can develop short and long-term strategies for more positive business relationships.
Article Sources:
https://www.betterteam.com
https://www.glassdoor.com
https://hbr.org
https://www.zippia.com
