The customer service industry has been around since the beginning of time and is the cornerstone of every business. It doesn’t matter whether you serve the B2B or the B2C community, you need to pay close attention to your customers’ needs and demands. Failure to do so probably means that your business might not be around for long, if it hasn’t gone under already.

In today’s sales and marketing environments, engaging customers requires a higher level of commitment from all in the entire company. Gone are the days where marketers only cared (and were only responsible for) about branding and brand management and sales owned customer relationships separately. Today’s marketing environment demands that companies stop viewing customer engagement as a slew of discrete interactions and think about it from the customer’s point of view – as related and at times, cohesive interactions.

In order to truly engage customers, companies must step outside conventional channels and outside their comfort zone in order to maximize that engagement. Customers no longer distinguish marketing from the product itself or differentiate between the in-store experience and the overall experience. Stepping outside your comfort zone is a surefire way to learn new ways of doing things that will align with your customers’ changing demands. If your customers demand it, I highly recommend you listen to them!

How can companies big and small engage their customers more effectively? Here are three ways to achieve this:

Everyone is Accountable

Like I mentioned before, long gone are the days were marketers were strictly responsible for marketing and sales people for sales. The first step to engagement is everyone is accountable. There’s no “I” in team. Everyone needs to work cohesively as the ultimate goal is the same: customer satisfaction. More satisfied customers mean more business – which is something that benefits everyone.

Companies themselves need to become the engine of the customer-engagement vehicle. They will be responsible for establishing priorities and stimulating dialogue throughout the enterprise seeking to design, build, operate and renew cutting-edge customer-engagement approaches. Marketing is constantly being redefined, and while there’s no “magic bullet” to succeed in the era of engagement, this is the first step in the right direction.

Design a Strategy

Now that you’ve determined that everyone in the company is accountable, you must design a strategy to effectively engage your customers. The strategy will depend on your understanding of how people interact with a company throughout their decision-making process. That interaction could be with any aspect of the company: marketing, sales, PR, customer service, etc.

The customer experience will vary depending on the brand – no two brands are alike, nor should they treat their customers in the same way. For example, the hospitality industry aimed to enhance the customer experience for each part of the brand portfolio by demographics and affordability. Each part of the brand delivers a different customer experience, ranging from how guests are greeted by the staff to the type of toiletries offered in rooms. As a frequent business traveler myself, I know that my needs will be completely different from the leisure traveler staying with the family. I don’t care to know where the gaming room is, but I care about where the meeting room is. This type of mentality might seem obvious to many of you, but you’d be surprised how long it has taken certain industries to abandon the ‘one-size-fits-all’ mentality.

How is your industry adapting to engage their customers?

Build A Strategy

‘Build it and they will come’ became a memorable (yet often misquoted) phrase from “Field of Dreams,” but does it work the same in sales and marketing? It depends. If the design of your customer engagement strategy is solid, the implementation of that strategy should be just as solid, if not more.

Once your strategy is in place, you need to make sure that the organizational capabilities to deliver are in place – whether it’s adding staff, building a social media infrastructure, shifting and/or creating currently existing structures. Embarking in this journey means that everyone in your company’s ecosystem needs to be a part of the strategy if it is to be successfully implemented.

An example I’d like to highlight are how luxury brands use a number of different methods to engage with their customers. They have built a number of channels in order to reach their customers where they live – on social media. Luxury brands have built blogs, digital magazines and other relevant content in order to ‘socialize’ the brand. As customers demand more timely, relevant and compelling content, brands are taking their cues from them and implementing content-oriented strategies that are the brainchild of more than one team or department within the company.

Another big industry that has shifted gears to online has been the automotive industry. It has had to do so in order to better serve its customers, particularly millennials. The auto industry has been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century by this highly influential (and powerful) demographic, as they prefer to do everything online, so why not purchase a car? That demographic accounts for about 10 percent of the 15 million new passenger vehicles sold each year, according to research firm, R.L. Polk. As a result, dealerships have had to re-train their staff, advertise competitive pricing online and provide content capable of answering potential customers’ questions ready to make a purchase.

Once your customers are engaged with your brand, they will come…as long as you give them what they want. Give them what they want! It’s good business to keep your customers happy.

Jeffrey Hayzlett is a primetime television and radio host of C-Suite with Jeffrey Hayzlett and Executive Perspectives on C-Suite TV and All Business with Jeffrey Hayzlett on CBS on-demand radio network Play.It. Hayzlett is a global business celebrity, speaker, best-selling author, and Chairman of C-Suite Network, home of the world’s most powerful network of C-Suite leaders. Connect with Hayzlett on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ or www.hayzlett.com.