Customers now have unprecedented perspective and expectations about the companies they do business with. The customer buys, continues to buy, tells others, and pays more because of their complete experience with a product or service provider. For marketing's investment to pay off, it can no longer hand off a new customer and hope for the best.
The boundaries for marketing are expanding. Marketers are venturing further into directing or influencing the complete customer engagement, typically with customer data–driven intelligence. Some are being pulled there by forward thinking executives, while others are arguing for expanded marketing budget, recognizing a stronger financial benefit. Simply put, customer engagement is critical for marketers today.
Customer engagement leverages technology, strategy, interactivity, customer information, and analytics to improve every customer interaction consistently and in real-time. Customer engagement means real command and control over the myriad customer interactions channels both on and offline. Customer engagement requires marketers to captivate customers, draw them in, and truly engage them--because customers expect it and have told marketers how they want to be engaged.
For marketers to thrive in this emerging customer engagement frontier, the majority of big company marketing organizations have to change. Below are three overarching principals for how marketing can help to improve customer engagement:
1) The Best Real-time Analytics Wins. Companies making the best offer at the right time with real-time analytics and the use of real-time data will succeed. As the world becomes increasingly interactive across channels, opportunities for real-time decision optimization will be countless, each a moment of truth to maximize customer value. Simultaneously, we will see a reduction in the reliance on campaign-oriented outbound direct marketing. Thus, the analytics that drove outbound test-and-learn cell segments must be updated and transformed for real-time interactions and moments of truth. For example, companies can use real-time analytics to drive offers made to customers at risk of attrition. By doing so it's possible to optimize decisions at the moments of truth, e.g., when customers are on the phone, based on their specific situation and what offers have been working well.
2) Synchronize and Use All of Your Data Across All Touch Points. It's simple: Your customers want to be recognized every time they show up, and certainly every time they are contacted in any channel. As a marketer, when you learn something about a customer, treat this information like gold, keep it and use it wisely. This includes all interaction and behavior data, Web data, POS information, social media insights, customer service information, and certainly all of the company's billing information—the best source of verifiable behavior available. Marketers should never drive critical customer decisions at moments of truth with half the story, and the story should be consistent. That is what today's customer expects. The technology is readily available to capture, integrate, store, and analyze every interaction with your customers. Successful companies will differentiate themselves by using the right information to create engagement. Seamless real-time integration between a customer database and e-commerce platform enables a company to present a single, consistent, personalized, and profit-maximizing face to their customers across channels.
3) Proactive Beats Reactive Every Time. Retention and attrition programs receive too many marketing resources. When a customer decides to leave, most marketing efforts are too little, too late. In a way, this is marketing's version of CPR. Any type of reactive marketing to improve flagging engagement is a losing strategy. A best practice is a proactive customer lifecycle communications and offer plan that is analytically optimized to acquire the right customers (even if there are fewer at first) and engage with them through various phases. Using the information in a customer database it's possible to reduce attrition from the moment of acquisition and throughout the customer's lifecycle.
As marketers look toward 2010, they should seize their expanded responsibility for customer engagement. To do this, marketers can influence all customer touchpoints using real-time analytics, a single view of the customer, and proactive communications—and maximize every moment of truth in the new marketing frontier.
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About the Author: Patrick Dineen is vice president of Quaero, a CSG solution