Strategies for Effective Engagement Management

Explore essential strategies for engagement managers to ensure sustained product success. 

Engagement managers play a pivotal role in creating a lasting impact on teaching and learning. The success of any new product roll-out in a school district depends on regular support and guidance provided by engagement managers. 

Unfortunately, engagement managers are often tasked with having to do more with less. Not only are they tasked with onboarding new customers, but they must also be responsive to existing customers’ needs or to follow up to ensure broader adoption. The latter often falls to the wayside as the demand from sales and marketing to onboard new clients overshadows the need to support existing customers. It’s often only the larger or more strategic customer accounts receive the dedicated attention needed to ensure sustained success. 

The solution is to be systematic and organized at providing comprehensive experiences that facilitate teaching and learning. 

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Consider these strategies in your approach: 

• Support leaders in roll-out and check-ins. One of the fundamental responsibilities of engagement managers is to establish strong partnerships with school leaders and decision makers. Assist leaders in not only effectively rolling out your product, but also in cheerleading continued use by observing and following up with educators. Consider organizing a system of regular check-ins and ongoing support to solicit feedback and celebrate achievements to help solidify the product's position as an indispensable educational solution. A solution like this mobile app for classroom observations we developed may help your engagement managers and school leaders gain valuable feedback. 
• Understand the instructional context. Be ready to talk about the instructional strategies best suited for your product or service. Have examples ready to showcase where and how it aids educators’ classroom instruction. At least once a month, observe educators using your product to understand where it fits in their pedagogy, so you can help other customers improve their practice. 
• Adapt to evolving customer needs. Listen to how educators are (or want to be) using your product and be prepared to provide the resources necessary to facilitate that use case, even if the product wasn’t designed for it. Customers will always find new ways of using a product, and these may turn out to be the only reason they renew.
• Provide extended opportunities for professional learning. Going beyond a one-time onboarding training is essential. Engagement managers have higher customer retention when they can refer to ongoing workshops, webinars, self-guided tutorials, and resources that specifically focus on instructional capacity, like the self-guided professional development workshop we created for Adobe Systems. 
• Recognize savvy educators using your product. Providing a certification program gives you an opportunity to showcase educators that excel at using your product well, and fosters a culture of excellence and continuous learning. 
• Participate in collaborative communities. Whether your company hosts one, or educators create their own online community for your product, engagement managers should actively participate in these collaborative spaces, where educators share best practices, exchange ideas, and support each other, similar to this resource rich collaborative learning platform we designed, built, and moderated for one of our clients. Or, go a step further and build a Community of Practice. 
• Highlight success stories. Concrete, real world examples are powerful motivators. Engagement managers that collect and share exemplary implementations will inspire others to use your product and create a positive, supportive network that acknowledges and celebrates effective teaching and learning experiences. 

Employing all of these strategies for engagement management can have a positive effect on subscription renewals. Establishing the right systems is critical to ensuring your customers understand the rationale and benefit of learning how to make your product part of their essential practice. Our team is ready to help you develop the systems and resources your engagement managers need to set your customers up for success.