online customer engagement

As a followup to yesterday’s post on online customer engagement, reader Sarah Woodbridge suggested taking a look at cScape’s report on Customer Engagement. The report is well worth a look (and it’s free!). They’ve been producing a report for 3 years so they have a bit of historical data as well.

Customer engagement is widely seen as a way of deepening and enriching a product or service offering and a method for gaining customer insight. – The cScape Online Customer Engagement Survey Report 2009

Here are some of the key findings:

Only 42% of organizations surveyed have a defined customer engagement strategy in place
41% of respondents said that deteriorating economic climate has resulted in a greater focus on customer engagement
There’s interest in creating relationships with customers to increase the long-term customer value and also to increase the value delivered to the customer.
Most organizations feel that sensitivity to price is a key customer behavior that will have to be addressed in the next 12 months (48%).
Email newsletters are the most likely tactic to improve customer engagement (59%).
Web 2.0 and social media such as user ratings & feedback (41%), user-generated content (37%), blogging (36%) and social networks (36%) will also be used to engage customers.
Very few companies (5%) have a strategy that uses mobile channels.
Lack of resources continues to be a barrier to successful customer engagement.
About a third of companies site problems with technology as a significant barrier to cultivating better customer engagement.

Technorati Tags: online customer engagement, customer-centric,brand, branding, internet marketing, brand management, brand strategy, internet business strategy

Customer engagement is the interaction of customers with each other, a company or a brand. Online customer engagement often combines all three of those at once, enabled the ability of customers to connect with each other and share opinions much more easily and to more people than before the Internet. You’ll often hear marketers speak of the importance of online customer engagement, but why is it important and what does it mean exactly?

Due to the development of blogging software, forums, boards, chat, Twitter, etc. customers can very easily post opinions about your company and products in places where others can see and respond to them. This means that is much easier for customers to connect and share information about you than ever before. People are also much more likely to listen to feedback from their peers over marketing information from a company.

These same technologies make it much easier for companies to see what their customers are saying and to respond to it. Think of the feedback as free market research and the Internet gives you the opportunity to interact directly with the market research panel.

Online customer engagement is happening whether companies participate or not and without participation customers are shaping company’s brand reputations.

(photo by daisybush @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: online customer engagement, brand, branding, internet marketing, brand management, brand strategy, internet business strategy