Total Customer engagement: growing trend of "Total Customer Engagement" and how this is affecting the future of marketing

When I was a kid, we used to shop in the same places all the time. We'd walk down the street and say hi to the butcher walking in the other direction. He'd always have a smile, and maybe make a cheeky comment about us kids. When we went into his shop he'd comment on what veg would go with the meat my mum had chosen, and tell her to say hi to Jeoff when we went into the greengrocer's next door. There was always a kind word. For decades my family shopped in the same shops. There wasn't anything called customer engagement. But that's what it was.

Nineteen years ago the web turned up, messed up customer experience by turning it on its head, reducing the shopper interaction to seven clicks, shopping carts, price comparison and basket abandonment. Almost twenty years on, we've learned a huge amount about technology, about acquisition, about usability, great design, optimisation and the always-on mentality. Having now come out the end of e-commerce's terrible teens, here are the things we now know:

Retention only comes after acquisition

Loyalty only comes after service

Advocacy only comes after loyalty

Win-back only comes after failure

Three clicks is best, though if you have a process that takes more than ten by the time you've got the customer to seven she's unlikely to turn back and go to your competitor

Responsive design means you can make the experience similar across PC, tablet and mobile

...and so on.

What we've also started to understand is that the customer is on a journey. Over a decade, we have perfected the art of defining that journey by understanding that there is a natural sequence that doesn't feel forced if you ask the customer to take the journey with you. This in turn, is based on the idea of the nudge - that one little step at a time can lead to significant change. When we look at where a customer is, what they like, where they go and where we want them to go, we can then readily develop a map of the customer's journey from first point of contact to lifetime loyalty, in little incremental steps. 

The art of customer journey planning, which came out of the in-store retail experience and the desire to drive customers past high margin discretionary items on the way to their target staples, has been translated to the online world and perfected over ten years by the specialist eCRM agencies like Underwired and others. And this customer journey, delivered using the cheapest digital channels, has been developed to allow brands to examine each little, incremental step on its own and optimise its performance. By extension, when lots of little increases in performance are added together, huge changes in revenue can be achieved. To illustrate this, by increasing revenue by 3% for a single step, when applied over 24 steps will double your revenue. We do this all the time.

By adding a dimension of customer focus to this rather technical, commercial focus, segmentation has been taken from its shopping experience roots (for instance, when our butcher would know that because ours was a three kid family, we'd be more likely to buy mince than a steak), via direct marketing thinking, properly defined in the early seventies, to the digital age. This digital age has allowed marketers to think in big numbers, to define shopping habits not through inference, but through observing behaviours from Google search to repeat purchase in an e-commerce system. Behaviour, enhanced by adding demographic data, married to motivation (back again to inference) gives us 3D segmentation. And 3D segmentation gives us the tools to develop different customer journeys for different types of customer.

All of this you're familiar with, I suspect. Marketing is now largely scientific. We can develop customer journeys for different customer types and take them from one step to another leading to maximal (or at least optimal) lifetime value.

It's been a revolution. And the kids have grown up. Almost twenty years on since the first days of the web and the painful birth of a new way of retailing, this discipline of how to engage with customers is finally about to emerge from its teens.

So where does it go from here?

The next generation of retailing takes what has gone on up until now and builds on it. In actual fact the Next Big Thing is really simply an extension to everything  you have just read: if you look at how segmented customer journey planning has been expressed in practice, the next step in its evolution is quite clear. Thus far, we have made use of digital channels to do all of this. The web to capture attention, to engage people with the brand on the website (or landing pages), to engage and retain them using email, to convert them to customers using e-commerce.

And thus far, we've been viewing the customer journey as something we as master marketers define for our customers.

In fact, customers are on their own journey. They have lives, which are multi-threaded, which involve the web, and mobile, and walking down the street with their kids. They live lives ruled by their motivations, the people they listen to, their immediate needs, and their whims. And, critically, they are influenced by all sorts of things that aren't just digital.

The customer journey plan does work. It does have a crucial role to play - as marketers we must have a framework for holding the hand of the customer while we take them one step further: without it we don't know how to brief it to agencies, we don't know how to measure success and we don't know how to optimise it. But it ignores the fact that customers (actual real people!) have their own sequence, and they are unlikely to share it with us, even if they know it themselves.

One of the facets of this which informs what will happen next is that in real life, customers aren't just on email. They don't just use digital. Sometimes the critical nudge that will take the customer from point 16 to point 17 isn't online. We may have to reach them offline.

The customer journey requires us to think in a channel-agnostic, or multi-channel, way. The future of this marketing discipline requires us to map the customer journey without assuming it will be served at every step by an online touch-point. If we do this, the customer journey plan we describe can more closely reflect the customer's own journey and the way she actually lives her life. By defining customer engagement on the basis of what nudges and steps are required first, and then adding in channel selections based on the customer's own journey, second, we can create single-minded, focused, multi-channel strategies and campaigns. 

This is the next generation of marketing. It's called Total Customer Engagement. It gives us the tools to leverage 3D segmentation and digital insight to deliver the kind of supreme engagement previously only delivered by the local family shop keeper. 

The advent of Customer Engagement Marketing

We went through a recession, and while we weren’t looking, the world of marketing changed. We discovered as an industry that making certain that marketing governance is based on sound principles is critical in a recession. Digital marketing, with its granular tracking and ability to follow a customer from first contact, means you can observe his or her behaviour while they consider their first purchase and beyond. When digital marketing is joined up correctly, you should be able to establish precisely how much value you generate for every pound that you spend. And this accountability, during the recession, meant a degree of comfort that marketing actually was working. In other words, we gave credence to – and then priority to – marketing which has built into it a chain of custody.

The traditional view of brand marketing was centred around the way the business wanted to engage customers. To some extent, in the early days of internet-based marketing, this notion of brands built around customers’ needs was lost, at least temporarily. It became ‘build it and they will come’ – a conceit founded on the novelty of the medium: indeed, when I set up my first digital agency there were around 250 servers on the World Wide Web. Attendance and engagement could be reliably assumed.

The idea of a brand built around what the customer wants has of course changed as a result of the mediation of the internet. The customer is still at the centre of the business’s universe, but this position has evolved. Marketing, once predicated on understanding demographics, motivation and behaviour, can now be said to pivot about which channel the consumer is (or may be) consuming at that precise given point in the customer lifecycle when they are considering a step in their dialogue with the brand.

In simple terms, where once we considered marketing to be about mapping the progression from one medium to the next (TV followed press and PR, followed by Direct Marketing) this new age means we map the customer as she travels from mobile to Facebook, email to website and via SMS to shop.

In turn, this must be mapped against the decision-making cycle: first contact to second, peer review then press review, comparison sites, reminder banner, examination of features, emailed offer then shopping basket. We end up with a two-track series of events, joined at critical touchpoints which define the medium in which we pass on a specific, perfectly-timed message.

This form of marketing planning is necessarily going to be slightly different from segment to segment (a young mum’s media consumption is going to be radically different to that of a Baby Boomer), and from product to product. But the framework is sound, and applies as much to a high-value B2B proposition as to an FMCG brand – in fact we’ve used it for products as diverse as McCain oven chips, ASICS sportswear, Travelodge and the FT. What it delivers is a rational, measurable chain of custody from first contact to value. From this continuous sequence comes your brief for the messaging at each touchpoint, a detailed resource requirements list, indeed a foundation for micro and macro KPIs.

This new post-recession type of marketing is called Customer Engagement Marketing. It takes the power of the brand, dethroned by a combination of recession and digital renaissance, and refocuses it on the customer. In essence, it recognises that the customer is now the centre of everything, and that our job as businesses is not just to design our products around them but to design our marketing around them too.

2013 will be the year of Total Customer Engagement

The year ahead will be marked by a number of really interesting developments in how we engage with our customers. One that has caught up with us – and which marks a sea change – is the advent of the Generation Y customer base. Gen-Y uses mobile as its main medium of interaction; if you’re not using mobile to engage with younger customers then you’re probably missing the biggest trick available, though it has been a very slow start since the trend first became apparent five, or so, years ago. Just in passing, to give you an idea of how trends break, let me illustrate this briefly…

Imagine your customer base is, potentially at least, a million strong. And say on day one a single person uses mobile as their main device for browsing the web, and every day that number doubles. By the end of the first week, 64 people use mobile. By the end of the second week that’s 8,192. That’s the point at which as a business you might start thinking there’s a trend. In actual fact it only takes another seven days and that’s your entire customer base. If you didn’t engage in a mobile strategy after two weeks, you missed it. Trends accelerate in an exponential curve – and in the internet age a trend can look slow for a few years, when in fact the numbers are doubling every month. Mobile is one of these, and if you target people born after 1982, that means you’ve got to jump, now!

There’s another trend that’s been a few years in the making, but in 2013 it will have gathered a critical mass, and it’s going to affect you – like it or not. The trend is for Total Customer Engagement. In plain English this means joined-up marketing, the opposite in fact of the “silo” thinking that has driven marketing during the first couple of decades of digital.

Most companies today have a web strategy, which may include e-commerce. They will also have a nascent social media strategy, a Google Adwords programme, and maybe an eCRM programme serving segmented comms to different sets of customers, split by value, behaviour, demographics and motivations. All of which have given businesses learning and insights into how they engage with customers using ‘new’(ish) channels. What’s lacking is integration. The sea change in 2013 requires a fresh way of thinking about customer engagement, which puts the customer at the centre. The trends feeding this are the shift in the balance of power from brand to customer, driven by the shift towards peer decision facilitated by social media, and the power of collective reviews.

So how does a business tap into this before it’s too late to do anything about it? A shift of focus is required, meaning the marketer needs to understand where the consumer is going to be, on- and off-line, when they are at a moment when they are likely to change their view of a brand, ideally positively. If you can identify that, Customer Type A is likely to be on a mobile, using Twitter, when considering whether to shortlist your brand, then you can target them with the right message at the right time and in the correct format. By mapping where the customer is at each critical point in their relationship with you, and mapping a rational sequence of nudges to take them from pre-custom to loyal customer, and then creating a matrix of comms against medium for this map, then you have a plan for engaging them. This Total Customer Engagement plan gives you as a business several things: a plan that can be tested, benchmarked and improved; a brief for your team and their suppliers so they have specific tasks to achieve against your business’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs); and a framework that can be adapted when new trends become apparent.

This kind of approach is essentially multi-channel and channel-neutral. It’s also measurable and of course by its very nature future proof. By investing in developing this kind of (actually very simple) framework and marketing architecture, it will protect you against the overwhelming trends that are often nearly impossible to spot early, but which end up rather too quickly having strategic impact. Do it now, before it’s too late!