CRM 2012 Forecast – The Era of Customer Engagement – Part I

Posted by Iryna Dubenyuk on Dec 27, 2011 in Enterprise 2.0, Featured Articles | View Comments

…The Era of Customer Engagement Begins

The social customer is no longer a customer to gawk out, just a customer to deal with – like any other customer, with one explicit difference. He/she scales. Meaning they know how to impact other customers on a large scale who are “like them” in interests, and use the social channels that are not controlled by the company to do so.

But this is no longer what businesses take as a special case. What defines the Era of Customer Engagement more than anything is that so-called social channel strategy is now a normal part of multichannel strategy for the company. To be clear, customer engagement means that customers are part of the company’s collaborative value chain. The customer selects how they want to interact with you, and hopefully uses your products, services, tools and consumable experiences to make that decision.  Most companies recognize the value in being closer to the customer. In fact, IBM’s Institute for Business Value, in its 2010 CEO study found that the most important imperative for the next five years for CEOs – 88% of them to be exact – is to be closer to their customers.

But the era of customer engagement implies a lot more than that. Here are some of its characteristics and implications for your business:

1. It starts from the assumption that you are going to incorporate social channels into your customer communications.
2. It identifies how you can enable collaboration at your business for better productivity and effective employees.
3. It says that you might even go as far as converting your overall culture and business focus to a social business which means empowering (and incentivizing) employees to be able to deal with customers wherever and whenever (among other things).
4. It means that your business understands how internal collaboration and customer interaction/involvement are not only converging but can be an important influence in your strategic direction.
5. It means that you understand that the customers social information is as important as and complementary to their transactional information.
6. It suggests that you realize that we have enough case studies, surveys, practical examples, business models, strategic parameters, frameworks, metrics, success and failure stories, programs, best practices and systems to actual engage the customer. What is needed beyond that is cultural recognition and acceptance so that adoption of these new approaches is strong.
7. It requires that you see the channels that are already there (much less the future ones) are communications media for you and your customer working together as subjects of an experience and partners, rather than objects of a sale and clients.
8. It also means that you recognize that there is clear evidence that the use of traditional channels is not only not ending but will continue to be vibrant and that social channels are newer, more highly scalable, will have more potential impact because of that, but will never replace traditional channels. Social channels may not be traditional, but they are now as mainstream as traditional channels.
9. It means that you’ll stop treating the social customer as an object of wonder that you bow down to because of their remarkable powers to change your business – and start treating them like a customer who is operating in a set of channels that have unique protocols that you have to learn.
10. It means that we’ve reached the point that we can be proactive in dealing with all the “conversation out there” on the social web, rather than waiting to react to every little bad word that a customer says on Twitter when we see it.
11. It means that we need to recognize that there are tools that actually can do some good in a number of ways but they, like always, have to be chosen well, implemented properly, and adopted by those that are needed to use them so that you get the results that you are looking for.
12. It is a recognition that while many customers are thinking differently and have much greater expectations of companies, they are still looking for, what the Edelman Trust Barometer in 2011 defined as “high quality products and services”, and a company that they can trust – something which hasn’t changed one iota – ever.
13. It means understanding that now practitioners have their own perception of what Social CRM is (see above) and it isn’t entirely the analyst/pundit/influencer definition, but it is going to have to do.
14. It is an understanding that while the strategies, programs et. al are now maturing and have a sufficient body of knowledge to back them up, the technologies capabilities tend to lag the strategies and programs requirements. It is time to set some standards as to what can be called “Social CRM” software.
15. It is based on an idea that advocacy is a centralized focus for customer strategy – not the advocacy proposed by NPS but one closer to what Dr. V. Kumar proposed with Customer Referral value – a person who can indirectly impact revenue performance through his/her influence in any channels where he can communicate with a potential customer who is “someone like (him/her)” That means a focus on creating the environment that encourages the advocates but allows all customers to effectively self-select – decide how much and which way(s) they want to engage with you from passionate advocate to occasional buyer.

Source: ZDNet

Related Posts:

• 3 Slick Analytics Dashboards to Monitor Your Business Website
• The Social Impact of Cloud
• Can Social Media Work for Midsized B2Bs?
• Social Network Analysis 101
• Can’t get on Facebook from work? You’re not alone.