Designing Your Customer Engagement Strategy by Laura Patterson * [42]

How would your customers categorize their experience with your firm? A Forrester Research study that shared the findings from interviews with more than 4,600 U.S. consumers about their interactions with 133 companies across a variety of industries revealed that ONLY 13 firms received “excellent” ratings, while 45 were rated either “poor” or “very poor.” Clearly the results suggest improving customer experience and customer engagement will drive better business results.

Defining Customer Experience

Forrester categorizes the customer experience as the sum of three elements: meeting needs, being easy to work with, and providing customer enjoyment. The more complex your internal processes and the more interconnected technologies you have, the greater the opportunity to negatively impact the experience. Companies who are too internally focused, struggle the most with improving customer experience. To affect customer experience and engage customers you need to be a customer-centric organization. Customer-centric organizations evaluate processes, technologies, personnel, and decisions in terms of the impact on their customers and recognize that customer experience and engagement can be a valuable differentiator in the market.

How do your touch points impact your customer’s experience?

Earn High Marks

Companies who achieve high marks for customer experience generally have invested in cross-channel alignment, established customer-centric metrics, and have a customer-centric culture. These organizations recognized that a positive experience is the responsibility of everyone in the organization. The organizations objectives, strategies and metrics are aligned in order to facilitate the customer experience.

Customer-centric companies have mapped all the customer touch points and are committed to improving touch point effectiveness. Studies suggest that few companies are good at mapping their customer touch points. Mapping customer experience across all touch points has a tangible impact on the ability to engage with customers. Companies who have mapped the customer touch point process feel this approach has positively affected the success of their customer engagement strategy. Mapping customer touch points is something any company can initiate.  Improve your touch point effectiveness with our Touch Point Effectiveness Workshop.

Four Key Elements to Delivering the Ideal Customer Experience

When it comes to metrics, customer-centric companies monitor customer metrics such as engagement, loyalty, retention, growth, and on-boarding for new customers.  Research suggests that the ideal experience fulfills four key elements:

1. Convenience: An enterprise needs to deliver on ease of contact, short wait times, through any channel the customer prefers
2. Competence: Humans or self-service tools need to have fingertip access to all necessary information and be consistent across all channels
3. Personalization: Companies and their web sites must recognize and remember the customer, and use existing information about them appropriately
4. Proactivity: A company must proactively reach out whether by phone, text message, or other channels. The topics range from a simple follow-up to informing the consumer about relevant products and services (while still respecting the need for permission and being mindful of customer preferences).

While improving customer experience and engagement won’t cure all the problems your company is facing, it is a pivotal opportunity. Customers are becoming increasingly intolerant of poor customer service. Customer engagement is seen as being about creating relationships which result in value both for customers and for organizations. Research by E-Consulting and Cscape found that a customer engagement strategy increases long-term customer value and the value delivered to customers.

Develop Your Strategy

After you take a look at your current capabilities and map your customer touch points, you can begin to develop a strategy that will enable you to create the ideal experience and improve engagement with customers. To deliver an ideal customer experience, it is important to have a well thought out customer experience and engagement strategy. To be successful the strategy will need to address customer interaction in all its forms (web, phone, etc.), personnel skills, infrastructure to support customer-centric processes and data collection, business process, and customer-service and engagement data.

* Laura Patterson is a marketing practitioner, consultant, writer, and speaker. Contact her at  laurap@visionedgemarketing.com. Also, check out Laura's other articles [22 & 38] on the Customer Value in the Now Economy blog.

The Value of Analytics in Customer Value by Maria Petrescu * [17]

Source: digitalerra.com

Did you ever wonder what is the value that consumers are getting from your company’s products and services? Your customers are surely analyzing, consciously or not, the value they are receiving when interacting with a business. Organizations who do not try to find answers to these questions are not going to be able to differentiate themselves and offer superior value to customers. But if you are already working on constantly monitoring the value received and perceived by consumers then marketing analytics are a great source of help. 

Customer value analytics assumes the use of data science, technology, statistics and business processes to analyze customer response and perceptions and to understand the buying and consumption context. From this information, managers are able to draw conclusions about the customer experience and formulate strategies for improvement. 

For example, businesses can use marketing analytics to evaluate and monitor customer acquisition, customer needs, and customer profitability, to gain customer insights, and to build relationships. Analytics also help manage and improve customer lifetime value, as well as personalize the value offering for consumers in order to increase loyalty. Marketing analytics can be used in different stages of the customer value management process.

• Customer acquisition - prospective customer behavior, customer needs, lead management
• Customer profitability - sales, registrations, sales discounts use 
• Customer loyalty - loyalty offer use, loyalty card data, online account use 
• Customer engagement - complaint behavior, online interaction, word-of-mouth
  

In the customer acquisition phase, there are various software and analytics platforms that are being employed for lead management (such as Salesforce), to analyze prospective customer behavior offline and online (including Google Analytics), and to assess customer needs through market research. 

In the next stage, after the customer acquisition, analytics can be used to evaluate existing traditional data, including scanner data and the sales database, as well as more modern marketing promotions and analytics insights coming from the interaction with consumers online and through sales promotions. This can also contribute to an increase in customer loyalty and to further consumer insights from loyalty management analytics and digital behavior, including email management, web traffic, and pull marketing (e.g. various platforms such as Hubspot, Hootsuite, ConstantContact).  

Nevertheless, an important part often ignored by marketers in the evaluation and monitoring of customer value is related to customer engagement and especially the feedback offered by buyers on the digital platform. Because of the difficulty and the skills required in the analysis of qualitative data such as consumer complaints, reviews, recommendations, and shares, methods such as sentiment analysis, social network analysis, and quantitative analysis of qualitative data are often overlooked. In this case, simple software options such as Tableau, MAXQDA, MonkeyLearn, and Adobe Analytics can help. No matter which analytical tool is employed, the insights about consumers’ perception of value are essential. 

* Maria Petrescu, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Marketing at ICN Business School Artem, Nancy, France and Colorado State University, Global Campus. Her main research areas include marketing analytics and digital marketing. Dr. Petrescu has published articles in journals such as Psychology & Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Management, Public Management Review, Journal of Product and Brand Management, the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, and the Journal of Internet Commerce.  She may be reached at Maria.petrescu@csuglobal.edu     

Further Reading

Iacobucci, D., Petrescu, M., Krishen, A., and Bendixen, M. (2019). The state of marketing analytics in research and practice. Journal of Marketing Analytics, 7: 152. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41270-019-00059-2 

Petrescu, M. & Krishen, A.S. (2018). Novel retail technologies and marketing analytics. Journal of Marketing Analytics, 6: 69. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41270-018-0040-z