Customer Engagement Unit

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It’s perhaps hard to imagine now, but even just four years ago talk of customer engagement was a bit of a rarity. Back in 2006 a Google Alert on the phrase ‘customer engagement’ would receive an average of just two alerts a week. Today, when combined with a Twitter search, the numbers are more like 30 mentions each hour.

There are many excellent reasons why businesses now focus on engagement. This year’s Annual Customer Engagement Report reveals some of the most important, for example ‘increasing customer value’, ‘gaining customer insights’, ‘increasing value delivered to the customer’ etc. (View survey data).

However while any or all of these are excellent outcomes from engagement they are rarely the best place to start when developing a robust customer engagement strategy. For that we need to understand the four main challenges to engagement that have come to define customer relationships this millennium.

1. Our customers are increasingly distracted

We are currently living in the most information rich, attention demanding, message laden, multi-channel time that has ever existed. One recent study even indicated that the average length of uninterrupted time for a desk-based worker was just 2.7 minutes.

So the first major challenge any customer engagement strategy must take is cutting through this distraction to convey the value of our business – not just once but again and again, because engagement is built on repeated interactions. [The definition of Customer Engagement we use is: ‘Repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological and physical investment a customer has in a brand (product or company)’.]

Solution: The primary tactics to embrace to meet the challenge of customer distraction are simplicity and persuasion.

Simplicity is achieved by focusing our efforts on our customers’ scarcest resource. For one customer segment that might be time, for another it might be mental effort. People tend to find things simple that they do over and over again, if you can piggyback an already existing customer routine the chances are you more likely to engage them.

Based on an understanding of customer psychology, persuasion recognises that our customers navigate all the distractions they face by looking for short cuts to establish if something is valuable – for example: If other customers are using using/buying a product it must be useful. Highlighting things that help our customers take these short cuts means a customer is less likely to pass over us and our product.

2. Our customers have increased expectations

If we can’t provide quality right now the likelihood is that our customers will find someone else, and fast. Switching products and suppliers has never been so easy for our customers. While the importance of post-sales support has also increased dramatically as the ability to amplify discontent is now just one click and a Facebook group away. So how are we to meet, and even exceed our customers’ expectations?

Solution: Expectations can be met by increasing the relevance of our product, service and communications. While time spent on gaining a deeper understanding of you audience doesn’t always pay dividends, using that understanding to develop a framework for personalisation does. Focus on establishing what the right-channel is, the right-timing and right-messaging for each customer segment as a first step.

3. Our customers are listening to new models of authority

Trust in old forms of authority: politicians, businesses, academics, scientists etc have continued to decline and in their place new models of authority have arisen. Encyclopaedias are replaced by Wikipedia, Bank Managers are replaced by MoneySavingExperts and Travel Agents are replaced by Trip Advisors. The common element in many of these new authorities is people supporting and trusting each other.

Any Customer Engagement strategy needs to understand and address this shift in trust relations if it is to have long-term value.

Solution: Become a new model of authority for your area of business. Provide free expert advice, this is often best done via someone else’s website rather than your own. Recognise that the only way you are able to establish authority today is through offering something valuable to your customers, while any interaction with them that doesn’t offer value undermines your authority.

4. Our customers are establishing new communities

With the new sources of authority come new ways of connecting. The challenge for those interested in Customer Engagement is how do we join the discussions within these communities without coming across as outsiders wishing to disrupt the conversation. The language of customer-to-customer exchange is often difficult to learn and even harder to articulate business needs through.

Solution: Again the key to participating in the new communities is to add value. While supporting or hosting a customer community can be an excellent way of establishing a community the best way to engage community participants is usually to open channels back into your business. Providing access to the product developers or the company decision-makers that can offer insights into how and why things work the way they do and is often deeply engaging for customers.

While the tactics used for engagement will vary over time and audience these four challenges are universal and any customer engagement strategy that starts from the perspective of addressing them will have an excellent chance of long-term success.

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.

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In each of the four years of the cScape-Econsultancy customer engagement surveys, I have been struck by the diversity of aims of organisations in managing customer engagement. But with the latest set of results we can see the clear, common benefits that engagement can offer. The survey also shows that these benefits are greatest where active audience or customer participation occurs.

The three main types of participation are:

Recommendations participation.
42% of companies and 53% of agencies reported that recommendations of product, service or brand had been a benefit of engagement initiatives. It seems that many customers love to participate! This is shown by the success of UK retailer Argos who received over two million customer reviews in a post-Christmas email campaign run earlier this year to prompt participation.

>CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE<

Community participation.
34% of companies and 32% of agencies reported benefits from audience participation in online communities or support. Only certain types of brand lend themselves well to communities on their own sites, but participation beyond your own site, for example through self-help support services like www.getsatisfaction.com should also be reviewed.

Feedback participation.
30% of companies and 29% of agencies said they received benefits from regular customer feedback, for example through satisfaction surveys, Net Promoter Score or product feedback (there is some overlap with the first category).

More intriguingly, 20% of companies had seen benefits from customer participation in innovation and design. For me, this is one of the most exciting forms of online engagement – gaining direct feedback in a structured way through customer panels is tremendously powerful. I have compiled a list of some of the free and paid services that can be used for gaining direct feedback on website experiences at 
http://bit.ly/feedback-tools

Benchmarking methods of achieving active participation within and beyond your sector can help you develop a participation strategy. Another aspect of participation strategy is to put in place measures which show the degree of participation.

Dave Chaffey is a member of the cScape Customer Engagement Unit specialising in digital channel strategy and analytics. For his work as an author and commentator, Dave has been recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have shaped the future of marketing.

About the author

Dave Chaffey is a member of the cScape Customer Engagement Unit and Director of Marketing Insights Limited. He has been recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 ‘gurus’ worldwide who ‘have shaped the future of marketing’. davechaffey.com

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As this and previous year’s Customer Engagement Reports have consistently shown, developing a rounded view of customer and visitor engagement is not about any one discipline or source of insight; it requires a more inclusive and holistic approach.

Whilst customer engagement is seen by more than half of all businesses as being essential, among other issues the report this year identifies two interesting points:

• That barriers to cultivating better customer engagement are widespread and range from technology to management buy-in.
• Businesses are using a very wide variety of methods in gathering customer intelligence of which web analytics is the most popular.

However, web analysts cannot and should not operate in isolation. Quality web analytics data may be available literally for free but that doesn’t mean it should be the only source of insight.

Web analytics data provides one of the main platforms from which web analysts play their part in contributing to a bigger picture. but the depth of insight around customer engagement is greater when the considerable gaps are filled out by other areas like customer interviews, focus groups, buzz monitoring, usability, feedback from customer facing staff etc.

If senior management can be helped to understand the benefit of web analytics then buy in will follow shortly after

Additionally, while the leading edge of web analytics is taking on a new profile as it partners up with business intelligence and adopts a greater degree of technical and analytical sophistication, the one very basic area which governs all this is internal buy-in. If senior management can be helped to understand the benefit of web analytics then buy in will follow shortly after. From there the door to a greater understanding of customer engagement and the rewards therein, will be unlocked and left wide open.

It is the web analyst’s job to step up to senior management and deliver not just the data and the insight but more importantly to make sure that nobody walks away without having a clear understanding of where to go next.

About the author

Hugh Gage

Hugh Gage is a member of the cScape Customer Engagement Unit and works as an independent web analytics and usability consultant. He is also author of the Web Pro Analytics column in the UK’s .NET magazine. His clients include Sky, Virgin, Yahoo!, Eurostar, Renault and Hilton. Hugh’s blog can be found at www.engage-digital.com

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The last 12 months saw the continued rise of a ferocious breed of beasts, unfairly caged by their owners. Or, to put it less sensationally, it’s about time we stopped treating rich content as some sort of rare and rabid animal.

Video has the highest potential to engage. The 2010 Annual Customer Engagement Survey results this year bear this out. For example, companies saw a 31% rise from last year in tangible improvements seen where in-site video is used. Video captivates and compels the user but it should not be fenced off in a dark corner marked ‘here be dragons’.

Why would anyone hide their most exciting content?

Of course, this sounds like an amateur mistake. Why would anyone hide their most exciting content? Yet the natural step when adding new types of content is to create new spaces to match. Under this logic, users must first make a commitment to find and watch the video, then try and remember why it is relevant to them. That’s asking too much.

Even when rich content is well placed within the architecture of a site, it is often still treated with the same kid gloves. How many times have you seen video which only serves to repeat the message that already appears in text or images on the page? At the other end of the scale, we shouldn’t assume that video content always has to tell an elaborate story with a sweeping narrative arc. The ability of video to explain and illustrate difficult points, whilst still keeping users engaged, is unparalleled.

The dark era of caged beasts will be over and a brighter, leaner animal will emerge

In the coming year, I hope that corporates and agencies act on this year’s survey results and that well-placed video that enriches the user experience and assists the customer journey will be used more frequently online. With this free-range attitude to rich content, the dark era of caged beasts will be over and a brighter, leaner animal will emerge.

About the author

David Dodd develops video, audio and motion solutions across multiple sectors and a vast array of digital platforms. He is a member of the cScape Customer Engagement Unit and Director at Lightweight Media with a varied client base which includes Design Council, Barbican Centre, Carbon Trust, Vodafone and British Library.

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Although this may sound like an oxymoron, you can plan to surprise and delight your customers. People’s memories can be fickle and we tend to polarize what we remember of the past – the best of times and the worst. I would recommend increasing the number of positive memories for your customers through email.

As this year’s Annual Customer Engagement Survey results continue to show, email newsletters can be the most powerful tool in driving qualified traffic to your website. With the rise in the volume of email traffic, standing out can be difficult. However, if you have a dedicated newsletter with the same subject line each month, gaining stand out may be easier than you think.

A surprise may take the form of wishing someone happy birthday, prompting for their opinion, reminding them that Valentine’s day is around the corner or a teasing line such as ‘We never thought it would happen…’. Subject lines that have stopped me in my tracks before have been:

• ‘Feed the Birds Day is here’ (RSPB)

• ‘Why…………………’ (my cousin Marie Markey)

• ‘What is your song of the decade?’ (Absolute Radio)

• ‘An exclusive invitation’ (the Roundhouse)

• ‘Enjoy a £9 adventure’ (National Express)

• ‘Cracking discount on nut trees’ (Dobies of Devon)

• ‘Get them while they’re still hot’ (First Direct)

The key to surprise is to keep the suspense as long as possible. I recently received an email from Dell with the subject line ‘Win VIP tickets for the 2009 MTV European Music Awards!’ I was intrigued enough to open the email which was clear and punchy, but the real surprise came when I clicked through on the link ‘Join the World’s Largest Online Choir’. To enter the competition, you had to record your own version of ‘Lollipop’ and your rendition would be entered into a video wall. The sound was synchronised so that you were singing along at the same time as everyone else the combined impact of the individual and the group was immediately apparent. The competition is now closed but you can still enter your recording – Dell are really capitalising on their surprising content.

In essence, shake things up a bit; permeate your standard email/online output in a way that makes your customer stop and think about you in a positive way and enjoy the ‘feel good’ factor.

About the author

Lucy Conlan

Lucy Conlan is a digital marketing consultant and member of cScape’s Customer Engagement Unit. Lucy’s direct marketing background was gained in the charity and cultural sector, having worked at the Barbican, English Heritage, British Red Cross and the Natural History Museum.

So much energy in online marketing and customer engagement is focused on building customer relationships for acquisition that the place where the real relationships are fixed or broken – customer services/customer support/account management/member services – is often sidelined at the planning and resourcing stage. Whatever it’s called, it’s the point at which the often expensively acquired customer is handed over to another part of the organisation.

Marketers know that this is a vulnerable situation. So why not – right from the initial concept when in an ideal world a content strategy is created – collaborate to ensure that the engagement established at the beginning of a relationship with a new customer is extended to maintaining and developing that relationship into long-term value?

>Click graphic to enlarge<

The finding that leapt out at me from this year’s Customer Engagement Survey was the one that shouted: 61% of client and 57% of agency respondents believe that intolerance for poor customer service would increase over the next 12 months. The company figure has almost doubled since last year while the agency statistic is 15% higher. Combine this with the finding that almost 40% of clients are looking to use customer engagement strategies to achieve long-term customer value and it begins to look obvious that customer engagement is a business-wide concern.

In this new ‘me-centric’ rather than ‘brand-centric’ world people are bound to be less tolerant of unplanned, under-resourced, badly trained, disconnected, deaf-eared customer service. It’s even more unforgivable if good customer service isn’t made available right up front, online.

Broadly speaking, websites are geared towards selling; they’re not set up to answer questions from existing customers

Ten years after Godin pointed out that valuable ‘personal permission’ to market to someone could be cancelled as a result of a single incident of bad service or interaction we’re still making people hunt for contact information or returns processes, (tried that with Amazon lately?) Broadly speaking, websites are geared towards selling; they’re not set up to answer questions from existing customers.

People are realistic. They don’t expect perfection. It seems that one of the lowest cost and fastest routes to satisfying existing customers is to make it really obvious where to go for help; engaging them by positioning a visible and obvious ‘complaints’ button, for instance. Use customer engagement techniques to turn complaining into a positive experience rather than intensifying their negative feelings towards a brand by hiding it away.

More than ever we need content strategies that meet the needs of all constituents, and the organisation as a whole

We need to get away from the idea that websites are all about promoting and selling. This means bringing together an organisation’s selling and the servicing objectives, skills and experience into a single web presence that’s meaningful for all visitors. More than ever we need content strategies that meet the needs of all constituents, and the organisation as a whole.

About the author

Clare O’Brien is a member of the cScape Customer Engagement Unit and co-founder of CDA, the content strategy and digital communications consultancy. She’s also helped found the UK Content Strategy Group and is developing CUT, a methodology for measuring and evaluating content value.

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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.

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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