While the importance of customer engagement to gain competitive advantage is widely acknowledged, new research has found that fewer than half of organisations (42%) have a defined customer engagement strategy in place.
It is clear that while the vast majority of companies understand that customer engagement is important, many are still unsure about how to implement a coherent and practical plan of attack. Tellingly, less than about half of respondents (41%) said that the deteriorating economic climate had resulted in a greater focus on customer engagement.
These are some of the key findings of the Third annual Online Customer Engagement Report, produced by E-consultancy in association with cScape, is based on a survey of 1,291 respondents carried out in September and October 2008.
The essence of customer engagement is seen as being about creating relationships which result in value both for customers and for organisations. Asked about their organisation’s interest in online customer engagement, 38% of respondents said that it was about "increasing long-term customer value" while 34% said that it was about "increasing value delivered to the customer".
Customer engagement is also widely seen as a way of "deepening and enriching a product or service offering" and a method for "gaining customer insight". At a time of economic crisis, organisations need to be clear about how customers are modifying their behaviour and how this could impact them. The report findings include:
- Sensitivity to price is the type of customer behaviour which responding organisations feel that they will most likely need to address over the next 12 months. Nearly half of companies surveyed (48%) said that this would be a behavioural trait which was significant for them next year.
- Email newsletters are the tactic most likely to have driven a tangible improvement in customer engagement, with 59% of respondents saying that their organisations will increase their spending in this area Whilst areas associated with Web 2.0 and social media such as user ratings & feedback (41%), user-generated content (37%), blogging (36%) and brand presence on social networks (36%) are also expected to attract significant sums of investment even though it is not always easy to track RoI in some of these areas.
- Despite the relative novelty of micro-blogging utilities such as Twitter, it is interesting to note that 7% of companies say they have improved their customer engagement through this channel.
- Despite the growing importance of customer empowerment, only 13% cite "participation in innovation and design" as an important customer attribute.
- Only 5% of companies have a customer engagement strategy which embraces the mobile channel.
Lack of resources continues to be a major barrier to successful customer engagement, although encouragingly, slightly fewer companies now find this to be a major problem compared to last year (52% compared to 60% in last year’s survey). Just under a third of companies (31%) say that problems with technology are a significant barrier to cultivating better customer engagement.