Customer Engagement Unit

How we measure engagement has been an ongoing discussion amongst marketers, analysts, communication professionals and human resource departments for at least the last five years. Ideally we’d have a simple single metric that we could use but nothing ever seems simple in this area.

This video interview with Eric Bradlow and Peter Fader from Wharton’s Interactive Media Initiative (WIMI) discusses the difficulty and dangers of creating a single engagement metric.

Personally I find the desire for a single engagement metric understandable but not massively useful. Ultimately the usefulness of any metric is determined by three primary things:

1. it’s ability to be repeated in order to gain insights over time (this often trumps accuracy)
2. it’s ability to provide the basis for insights (ideally insights that are predictive of customer or employee behaviour)
3. it needs to be understood by, and the insights actionable by, the business. (This is the hardest part in my experience)

The interview starts on the question “Is there a single engagement metric?” but quickly shifts to the real question ‘how useful is a single engagement metric (compared to the metrics we already have)?’. Judged against the three criteria above my feeling is that we already have enough metrics to develop customer and employee engagement strategies.

[I picked up on this video via the ever excellent Jim Novo's Twitter feed]

About the author

Richard Sedley is the Director of the cScape Customer Engagement Unit (CEU) and Course Director in Social Media for the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

Follow Richard on Twitter

We’ve been investing heavily in work looking at ‘Storytelling in a Corporate Context’ here at the CEU, so I thought I’d share my favourite storytelling video.

Stick with it until the end :-).

About the author

Richard Sedley is the Director of the cScape Customer Engagement Unit (CEU) and Course Director in Social Media for the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

Follow Richard on Twitter

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all of us in the cScape Customer Engagement Unit

The other month I listened to Adam Greenfield (Nokia’s Head of Design Direction for user Interface and services) prophesise a future of Ubiquitous Computing. He defined this as a post-desktop world where computers are totally integrated into everyday life and where the physical world is a searchable place like the internet is now - an ‘internet of things’.

I realised that most of the innovative and interesting things that happened in 2009 in the interactive arena were an exploration away from the desktop – a move toward a more physical type of engagement. In the same way APIs and widgets find inventive ways to use and engage with the data already flowing through the web, a new generation of physical tools and interfaces are bringing the virtual back into the material world. Could this exploration be the first tentative steps towards Ubiquitous Computing - the dawning of the Age of Ubiquity perhaps?

The catalyst for this transformation has been the iPhone 3GS and how it has completely altered people’s perception of what a phone can do.

The growing number of augmented reality apps for the iPhone have started to become ubiquitous, utilising the compass, camera and GPS system within the phone to lay virtual data on top of the physical world. Wikitude AR Travel Guide enables you to hold up your phone and see Wikipedia information on the site you’re looking at, similarly ‘Nearest Tube’ from Acrossair allows you to be directed to the nearest tube station.

Debenhams’ experiment of giving staff smart phones to answer customer enquiries in stores through Twitter had the ring of something approaching ubiquity. Digital agency Poke went one step further by creating a physical device that Tweets - “Baker Tweet” sits in the baker’s kitchen and informs the bakery’s customers when something is fresh out of the oven.

2009 also saw a movement away from the slickness of the touch screen to a more tactile and crafted place. Inspired by (former Nike Global Consumer Planning Director) Russell Davies’ great call to action “We’ve broken your business, now we want your machines”, The Newspaper Club is using under-utilized printing presses to create bespoke and beautiful newspapers from customers’ digital content. Then there is the GPS puzzle box, a wedding present crafted out of wood by Mikal Hart, which is set to open in one particular geographical location, the puzzle of it is to find out where that might be.

Most of these excursions away from the desktop are largely niche and experimental at present – apart from mobile. Although our survey suggests that corporate brands are still tentative in their use of mobile, the mobile phone now has the combined utility of the fixed telephone, internet, computer, credit card and TV. Brace yourself. It’s going to completely revolutionise the way customers engage with brands over the next few years.

About the author

Marc Sibley is a designer at cScape. He has over 12 years experience working within all aspects of interactive design, including information architecture, usability and accessibility for clients such as Barclays, CIPD, Carbon Trust and CILIP.

View Marc’s blog

Our good pals Agency Foreplay over in Sao Paulo, Brazil have translated the 4th Annual Online Customer Engagement Survey 2010 into Portuguese (see below). If you don’t speak the lingo then you can view the report highlights in English here or access the full report via our report partners Econsultancy.

Thanks to Bruno and the gang for such a stirling effort.

Back in January 2006 when we set up the Customer Engagement Unit I wrote a discussion paper called ‘The death of digital’. It was based on the recognition that digital was becoming increasingly central to effective business activity, so much so in fact that pretty soon all business would become digital thus rendering the distinction between digital and non-digital irrelevant. So no need to even mention digital – hence its death.

I was both so right and so wrong in equal measure.

What I had failed to grasp was the extent to which the social tools being developed would expedite the desire for face-to-face interaction. The new forms of online social connectedness that we can see facilitated through tools like Twitter have spilled out into the ‘real world’ in the form of conferences, Tweetups and other networking soirées. As the old forms of community in western societies were fragmenting and becoming redundant, there were new social networks connecting individuals in physical ways not just virtual. Not surprisingly businesses want, and indeed need, a piece of this action.

Click to enlarge

A key part of the digital business strategies we develop for our clients, now rests on the integration of face-to-face networking, whether internal (employees/suppliers) or external (brand/customers). The 61% of companies surveyed in the 2010 Online Customer Engagement Report who intend to increase investment in social networks and 27% & 44% who intend to increase investment in on-site branded communities and micro-blogging respectively, would do well to consider integrating activities beyond online if these investments are to reap maximum reward.

What I had grasped more successfully four years ago was a shift from digital being a desktop PC paradigm. In just the next couple of years we’ll be seeing the proliferation of many different types of digital screen. We already have digital readers making an impact into the book market. Touch-screen phones are proliferating and before long digital screens will be large enough, flat enough and flexible enough to transform any surface into a read/write interface. Framed in this context the fact that only 6% of companies say that they have integrated mobile seamlessly into their customer engagement strategies seems pitiful.

With potentially every surface an opportunity to connect, interact and engage, ‘the death of digital’ poses some incredible business opportunities for next decade.

About the author

Richard Sedley is the Director of the cScape Customer Engagement Unit (CEU) and Course Director in Social Media for the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

Follow Richard on Twitter

Behavioural economics is the next big thing. The idea that we can be manipulated into spending and/or saving through the human equivalent of what Barbara Woodhouse used to do to dogs is now very much in fashion. Books like Nudge by Richard Thaler encourage the view that we are there to be manipulated into doing things rather than making our own rational decisions.

What does this mean and why is it important for the way we think about engagement? Advertising has long worked on the principle that there are ways of appealing to an audience which hit our psychological sweet spots. Ever since Vance Packard’s Hidden Persuaders in the 1950s, debate has raged about how ethical such manipulation is.

Businesses looking for competitive advantage will always try to present their products in the best light and make them as appealing as possible. There is no doubt that many of us can be flattered into thinking that we can look like the supermodel if we wear the same clothes as her, or be a babe magnet if we drive a fast car.

Fortunately in the end most of us can only be manipulated up to a point. Experience tells us when something is not right. Good customer engagement has to go beyond trickery. It should encourage people to connect with and fully appreciate the product, but no amount of behavioural manipulation will make up for the weaknesses of something which is substandard.

About the author

Rob Killick is CEO of cScape and author of the blog UK After The Recession which deals with how the UK can develop a dynamic economy once again.

Follow Rob on Twitter

Back in November 2006, when we launched the first Online Customer Engagement Survey, not many people had heard of ‘customer engagement’ as a concept. Over the last four years, as the latest survey results show, there has been a huge rise in the number of companies who feel that the engagement of customers is a key part of their digital strategy.

But how do you work out if an engagement strategy is right for your organisation? And if it is right, when should you implement it and what should you engage your customers around?

Our experience of working with a range of clients on their digital strategies, from large corporations like Sony, Barclays and Aviva to professional bodies like the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), leads us to believe that you really need to ask three key questions before launching into an engagement strategy:

• Do you really want to engage with your customers?
  Is an engagement strategy the right approach for your target audience? We have worked with some clients who just needed to impart certain facts to their stakeholders and leave it at that. For these organisations, customer engagement was neither appropriate nor relevant.
• Are your customers actually suitable for engagement?
  You may find that, while your customers are very eager to be engaged with, this will not create much increased value for your business. Customer engagement should ultimately be about helping you to achieve a return on your objectives. If there are no long term benefits, do not adopt an engagement strategy.
• Does your product or service lend itself to an engagement strategy?
  If a purchase is a one off, it might not lend itself to further dialogue. Similarly, if the optimum timing for a client conversation is once every 10 years, striking up a conversations on a weekly or monthly basis won’t have the desired effect.

Developing an effective online engagement strategy is not a short-term, tactical exercise. Nor is it easy. You need to commit to it long term to gain real business value and you must really put the effort in to planning, executing and measuring if you want it to pay real dividends.

Taking time to question the relevance of your customer engagement approach before you commit to it will hopefully save you a lot of time, effort and money in the long run!

About the author

Theresa Clifford is Sales and Marketing Director at cScape. She has worked in the digital industry since 1997 and has written for a variety of publications and presented at many events around the globe.

Although this year’s Customer Engagement Report is internationally focused, it’s interesting to count the number of references to ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’ from contributors.

The key to engagement lies in relevance to the consumer. In many places, including geographies with GDPs that are growing as quickly as social network usage such as China, the major US and UK social networks barely capture market share. Believe it or not, Facebook and Twitter do not rule the world. And if you are doing business with an international audience, you won’t either unless you think about cultural and linguistic specifics when planning your engagement campaigns. One size most certainly does not fit all.

I cut my marketing teeth arguing with colleagues in North America about the relevance of content to other markets (or lack of it). This lack of awareness still exists in this online age, a fact that is highly ironic given that over one third of the North American audience belongs to an ethnic group. However, while many international marketing gaffs do emanate from the world’s leading economy, some of the most heinous cultural errors slip from countries such as France where marketers can actually be fined for not behaving like good international citizens. For example, Citroen recently ran an online advert in Spain showing Mao, which was extensively (often negatively) blogged about and was pulled down due to Chinese disapproval (China being a big potential market for Citroen).

Japan, a nation where relationships are key to business, has also committed expensive cross-cultural marketing faux pas, ironically in North America. Panasonic’s US “Touch Woody – The Internet Pecker” campaign for a new PC received the wrong kind of publicity and had to be withdrawn when the ‘Touch Woody’s Pecker’ slogan spread virally.

Engaging customers around the world is key and it is not just
about translating copy

The message is clear; engaging customers around the world is key and it is not just about translating copy. Campaigns must embrace the social nuance of separate markets. This means including the use of appropriate channels – for example, vkontakte.ru, smortri.ru, moikrug.ru and livejournal.ru instead of Facebook in Russia (currently the world’s largest user of social networks) and mobile for geographies like Africa where PC usage is comparatively low. Culturally tailored, sensitive imagery and rich media, appropriate inter-personal communications and the right jargon or slang all help as well.

You may argue that it all takes extra resource (something the survey highlights as an issue) but just ask yourself if you can really afford not to engage the tremendous buying power of the non-English speakers who will drive nearly 70% of the world’s economy in 2010?

[If you're interested in international customer behaviour check out Global Web Index's Social Web Involvement Map]

CLICK TO VIEW FULL SIZE

About the author

Monica Hart is an Account Director at cScape, She has over 20 years of marketing experience working with companies such as Sony, Aviva, BAA, Adobe, Logica, William Grant & Sons and Getty Images.

Last night I gave a short speech to launch to publication of the cScape and Econsultancy Customer Engagement Report. Now in its fourth year, this annual report has become a regular benchmark for organisations wanting to assess their customer engagement strategies. With over 1,000 participants the survey continues to be the largest of its type anywhere in the world. Indeed this year the survey gained the largest number of non-UK participants in its history. Below I’ve highlighted a few insights from the report and introduce a few recommendations from Thursdays speech.

Register to receive a copy of the full report

Over the next month I’ll be drawing blogging more about the Report and it’s insights, but first the introduction.

The number of survey participants who consider customer engagement ‘essential’ to their organisation continues to grow slightly, but what I feel this year’s survey reveals best is the extent to which the last 12 months have changed how we will do business in the future. In many ways this was to be expected. The world has just experienced the toughest economic environment since the 1930s and any company not looking to change the way they operate is likely to be suffering the consequences already.

The definition of customer engagement:
Repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment a customer has in a brand (product or company).

But how to change and into what, have been the hardest questions for most organisations.
Predictably the big ‘winners’ in this report are social media and micro-blogging tools like Twitter. These are the technologies that companies see as worthy of increased attention and financial investment. If 2009 was the year that saw the main-streaming of many of these social technologies, then 2010 will be the year that social technologies get serious. This will manifest itself not only in terms of marketing investment, but also in the way they begin to impact the internal structure and culture of organisations both large and small.

The reorganisation required to take advantage of these social technologies should not be underestimated. It is worth recognising that the introduction of these tools is unprecedented. Technologies like fax, email and the telephone had all first established themselves (and their associated behaviours) within business before making their way into society as a whole. Today we are seeing the reverse as enterprises struggle to adjust and embrace the pre-established attitudes and behaviours of customers and employees while trying to bring these social tools ‘in-house’.

This year we’ve added a new section to the report entitled Enterprise 2.0. This touches on issues of product development and innovation, customer service and employee engagement, all areas of increasing importance to customer engagement.

Organisations need to focus on quality, simplicity and customer service in the next 12 months.

If I were to make any recommendations based on the results in this year’s report it would be that organisations need to focus on quality, simplicity and customer service in the next 12 months. These are three key areas that can foster an understanding of value and emotional connection within the customer.

Since the conception of this survey we have stressed the importance of an emotional connection as part of engagement – our definition has it at it’s heart (see above) – and this has never been more important than today. Indeed ‘strengthening emotional investment in your brand’ showed the biggest year on year increase of all the reasons why organisations are interested in customer engagement.

Underlying much of this year’s results is an expressed desire to get closer to our customers, to understand them better and to become a more integral part of their lives. So it is slightly surprising that the number of companies planning to step into mobile customer engagement is not larger.

More than any other channel, mobile has the ability to connect emotionally with us. The mobile phone is omnipresent and highly personal – I spend more time with mine than I do my family. This poses both challenges and opportunities in equal measure. While 2010 appears to be the year when many more organisations are preparing to get their toes wet with mobile, it appears most are waiting for someone else to start swimming. If that’s you, you’ll probably have a healthy lead by the time the others dive in.

We find ourselves firmly placed in an interregnum – a period between the close of one era of business and the opening of another.

What the 4th Annual Online Customer Engagement Report reveals to me is that we find ourselves firmly placed in an interregnum – a period between the close of one era of business and the opening of another. This isn’t something created by the current troubled economy but what our economic woes have done is focus our attention on the changes happening.

While customer engagement is no panacea for a troubled economy, or changes within the business environment, what it does offer is grounding – an opportunity to stabilise and reap the benefits of increased predictability in our customer relationships. As I wrote back in 2006 in the introduction to the first of these surveys; ‘customer engagement is the best measure of current and future performance; an engaged relationship is probably the only guarantee for a return on your organisation’s or your clients’ objectives’.

There are many interesting observations and insight within this report, probably more than any previous report we have produced. I really do hope you find it useful and stimulating, and look forward to any feedback you care to share.

Register to receive a copy of the full report

It just remains for me to thank all those who’ve continued to help make this a successful report.
To all those who took the time to complete this, the longest survey to date, we salute you. Thanks to Linus and Aliya at Econsultancy – great job guys. To our partners who promoted the survey around the globe, particularly Bruno. To our report contributors – over 30 experts this year – thanks for sharing your time and intellect. And finally to my colleagues at cScape: Monica, Theresa, Sal, Sarah A and Rob.

Richard Sedley
cScape Customer Engagement Director

About the author

Richard Sedley is the Director of the cScape Customer Engagement Unit (CEU) and Course Director in Social Media for the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

Follow Richard on Twitter