Customer engagement is a critical part of marketing.

Customer engagement is a critical part of building a highly effective marketing campaign and brand strategy.   Because of the diverse nature of how customers relate to the goods, services, and products that they buy it is important to first understand how they plan to interact with your brand, or similar brands, and to focus on how to deliver a brand experience that is relevant to them.   That is a critical path to success in todays markets.     As Jamie says in the following article: ” Advocacy is being built and traded in a matter of seconds” so the decisions that they make are based very quickly on the values that you bring to them in the experiences they have with your brand.   This is true throughout the organization from the way you answer your phone, to how the customer service dept handles problems, to sales, to marketing, to A/R, and everywhere that the company interacts with customer influencers on a daily basis.  So become involved in improving your customer engagement tools.  Build marketing as a customer engagement hub, and define what is most important for your audience.  Today’s marketing allows us the opportunity to be far more affective than we ever have been in the past so take advantage and learn, or hire someone like The Page Group, to help you target and focus on your customers, even to the micro level. 

 

The New Face Of Customer Engagement: Generation ‘Me’

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Today’s modern consumer connects with brands how they want, when they want, and via the channel that is most relevant and convenient for them. Recent McKinsey data indicates as much as 70 percent of a customer’s buying experience is based on how the customer feels they are treated. Simply stated, advocacy is being built and traded in a matter of seconds.

ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

  • To win hearts and minds, companies must create personalized and consistent brand experiences across the entire customer life cycle.
  • Very few marketers feel their organizations are positioned to support the personalized needs of today’s empowered customer.
  • The “Internet of me” trend shows no signs of slowing down–and will likely extend to the “omnichannel experience of me.”

In a fragmented landscape, where no single journey is identical, it’s up to marketers to develop engagement strategies that keep up. To win hearts and minds, companies must create personalized and consistent brand experiences across the entire customer life cycle—from initial engagement to ongoing service and support.

New research from SAP and the CMO Council shows many organizations are struggling to deliver that. They recognize the importance of providing a world-class customer experience, but face a number of challenges in delivering.

Through interviews with more than 300 senior marketing executives at B2B and B2C organizations across North America, the research found that 73 percent of marketers view customer-centricity as critical to the success of their businesses. That said, very few marketers feel their organizations are positioned to support the personalized needs of today’s empowered customer, pointing to a “customer-centricity” gap in the following areas:

• Only 14 percent of marketers said customer centricity is ranked high within their organizations; only 11 percent said their customers would say customer centricity is ranked high within their organizations.

• 66 percent of marketers said they believe quick response time to customer requests or complaints is the most important attribute demonstrating customer centricity through the eyes of their customers.

While it might seem easy to blame shortcomings in mastering more adaptive customer engagements on a lack of technology, that’s simply not the case. In fact, when asked to identify the greatest challenges with executing a customer experience strategy, executives pointed to separate internal matters:

• 22 percent of marketers pointed to challenges with people–having the right talent and the right culture to reach success.

• 52 percent said it is a combination of people, processes, and platforms needed to properly develop, manage, measure, and continue delivery of the customer experience.

Overall, the “Internet of me” trend shows no signs of slowing down–and will likely extend to the “omnichannel experience of me” as customers will continue to expect personalized engagement. It’s the responsibility of modern marketing leaders to help their organizations adapt to this new wave of customer engagement by implementing the core foundational principles of customer experience success, and transforming culture and internal use of technology in order to truly become customer-intuitive organizations.

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