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. 

Who are The Inheritors?

Guest blogger - Jamie Barnett, Planner

Working with Underwired's Planning Director Ivan Fernandes, Jamie helps develop digitally integrated strategies and CRM programmes to address its clients' challenges and goals. Jamie started her career client-side at Williams-Sonoma in San Francisco before moving to the UK in 2011, where she jumped the fence to go agency-side working for brands such as Heineken UK, Iceland Foods and LoveFilm. Jamie has an MBA in Marketing and Brand Strategy and a degree in Graphic Design, Psychology and Communications.

Although it’s not exactly as William Golding had originally written in Lord of the Flies, we are all holders of a modern day conch – using it to wield as much power as we possibly can. Every day we spring out of bed and enter into society armed with our mobiles, iPads, laptops and cameras. A metaphorical extension of ourselves, our smart devices give us a kind of power similar to that felt by Ralph, Jack and Piggy on the deserted tropical island.

Instead of just consumers, we’ve now become creators and curators of content, challenging the traditional relationship with brands that has existed one-way up until now. Instead of just one conch, brands now have multiple conches, sounding off simultaneously via multiple social platforms, as well as those from consumers. This impacts the noise to signal ratio. Naturally, this new dynamic shifts power and challenges the traditional brand relationship with consumers.

With all of these conches now in the picture, the question then becomes – who really has the power over a brand’s communications – the brand or the consumer and does it really matter?

Wag the dog

As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his book The Tipping Point, consumers can play a pivotal role in a brand’s rejuvenation and in creating viral movements. They can keep brands honest and create momentum for campaigns and competitions. But as with cases like Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches, is it the dog wagging the tail or the other way around? I think, brands should take the consumer’s power into consideration and tailor it accordingly.

In a way, it’s a bit like giving a classroom full of students a single story starter and letting each pupil generate their own narrative. A colouring book with a new box of crayons and no rules about staying within the lines – the framework is there, but the outcome is unpredictable.

A happy marriage

The basis for my opinion stems from the notion that direct interaction with a brand (and the opportunity to help shape its culture), authentically integrates that brand into a consumer’s lifestyle. In an era where marketing and advertising are ubiquitous consumers are tired of being marketed to – they want to be a part of the process, not just the end result.

They want to help create content and ‘own’ a piece of a brand that lends itself to their constant strive for self-actualisation. In a consumer becoming a creator and / or curator of content, the brand becomes integrated into a consumer’s life either as a memorable experience or as part of a re-occurring ritual – not just a product or purchase. It’s at that point that a consumer is most likely to become brand loyal increasing their value to the brand significantly. By allowing consumers to post, tweet and publically engage with a brand, they become increasingly invested in it and as a result the brand becomes a stronger part of popular culture.

However, that being said I do still believe in having a long-term strategy and vision as well as adhering to a brand’s guidelines and heritage. One way to ensure a healthy balance of the two is to create a comprehensive CRM strategy based on a brand’s consumer preferences and behaviours – facilitating interaction at each stage of a consumer journey. Not only does this allow brands to evolve organically, but in many cases it allows them to reach audiences that they didn’t know possible. As with any happy marriage, it’s a give and take and an exercise in listening and responding in kind.

Beautiful harmony

Whilst technology and social media have forever changed the dynamic between consumers and brands, it’s how a brand responds to this change that will make or break its success in the marketplace. Instead of trying to quiet the army of conches, or being the loudest conch in the room, brands should look to skillfully conduct them all to create a beautiful harmony and a solid relationship that will keep a brand current and relevant throughout the years.

So… what does your b(r)and sound like?

We’re in the Age of CRM, so what’s next?

I recently spent the day at the Institute of Direct & Digital Marketing, teaching marketers from the NHS, entertainment, travel, financial services and education sectors about eCRM. The format of the day's course deliberately – because of the variety of industries – avoids detailed best practise, as one size clearly cannot fit all. The focus is on the framework. More particularly on three frameworks: customer journey planning; capability assessment and prioritisation; and business case development. This is well-trod ground for me, I've been teaching this course for around ten years, and I lecture on this to Hult International Business School's Masters Degree Program.

One thing that I've observed over the last few years of teaching eCRM masterclasses is that the recession which started in 2008 kicked eCRM – and CRM – way up the agenda. Provable marketing has taken over. And the clients we've worked with who started out at the geeky end of things are now the marketing directors, precisely because they have been able to demonstrate the commercial results and advantages of rigorous marketing strategies.

During this revolution, creativity seems to have taken a back seat to data, segmentation, analytics, infrastructure and million pound notes. Retention programmes must resonate with a brand's consumers and customers. They have to sing in harmony, and where possible enhance and amplify, the creative direction set out for the brand.

This creative direction, the tone of voice, look and feel and integrity of vision and values, is the context and instruction for how all communications must work. By focusing on the practical, technical, commercial and process aspects of marketing it's a shameful reality that occasionally these things get lost in the drive for results and ROI. Creative thinking provides the glue for all of marketing. Over the last few years, as CRM has blossomed, the most successful programmes have been produced by clients and agencies that have deep creative capability - not as lead, that's for the brand agency, but as interpreters. Why? Because interpreting brand values for the kinds of channel eCRM now makes use of – social media, email, mobile, direct – takes clever interpretive abilities that are execution-oriented. The great creatives take the grand work of the advertising partner and deliver it to individuals on the ground, during the customer journey, matching it to the consumer's transient need states as they travel along the relationship with the brand.

CRM is established as an equal partner to advertising, where it has effectively become the engine room of marketing thinking. It took eleven years. It's time marketers looked up and worked out what the Next Big Thing is.

I don't think it will be any surprise that it's already shaping up to be about partnering, collaborating with and accompanying customers for their entire lifetime, in every channel, in ways that are relevant and – critically – appropriate. CRM implies retention, data, direct, pushing customers along the journey we have defined for them. The new approach requires creative engagement enacted by the brand following the customer, not the other way round.

It requires multichannel or omnichannel thinking, holistic relationship building. It's called Total Customer Engagement and it's been here already for a few years. It is the next big wave. When you've got eCRM or CRM sorted (and you will need to have it nailed down before you can start) you can take a few short steps to transform it into the next big driver of your business as the economy dusts itself off.

Underwired redesigns Travelodge website

Travelodge has re-launched its website, designed by Underwired the specialist eCRM and customer engagement agency and delivered by the brand’s in-house IT team. The new website provides customers with significantly improved functionality and ease of use. The project is part of Travelodge’s £223 million brand investment programme which is being rolled out this year. 

The new look complements Travelodge’s new room design which launched earlier this year.  

The website delivers improved functionality to ensure customers are able to find and book what they need quickly, whether directly or via the company’s mobile site. Travelodge’s website receives 1.2 million customer visits every week and sees up to 1,500 bookings made every hour at peak times. By simplifying and clarifying the home page, the new website ensures that customers get a quick and straightforward experience – all designed to make the Travelodge journey easier, increase sales and reduce drop-outs.

Jason Holland, Creative Director, Underwired, said “Travelodge is one of the most iconic hotel brands in the UK and we are thrilled to have been able to work together on this exciting website redesign. The website makeover is part of a significant, nationwide brand investment programme for Travelodge and so it was vital that we really got under the skin of what the new website needed to offer customers.

“The journey involved in taking the brand through its website redesign, which is integral to Travelodge's business, has been fantastic and is a major step towards making the customer journey much simpler, clearer and leaves the user with a positive and memorable brand experience.”

Catriona Kempston, Travelodge Sales & Marketing Director, said: “The Underwired teams’ eCRM expertise and track record made them an obvious partner for us as we continue to roll-out our £223 million brand investment programme. The refreshed website offers customers a whole host of new functionality at their fingertips, as well as a fast and easy booking journey with lots of great visual content.”

The new website communicates some of the latest changes to the Travelodge proposition, including the company’s food and beverage offering, as well as the new bed - the Travelodge Dreamer - which is being rolled out across the company’s hotels.

The new site also features an enhanced corporate section for business customers, following the company’s three-fold growth in corporate business custom. The new features include a dashboard, which allows business customers to rebook frequently used hotels and add a corporate rate to their search results.

Travelodge pioneered the art of selling budget hotel rooms online when it became the first UK hotel chain to do so in 2001.

Navigating Big Data

Tesco famously has ‘segments of one’. Which is lovely of course - but they had to buy a data company just to make sense of the data so they could get there. Most of us don't have that luxury. But it doesn't mean we can or should ignore data, even if it looks like it might become unwieldy.

Some brands haven't yet realised that the power in a brand/customer relationship has shifted from the marketer to the marketee. Clearly however social media and the ability to share every thought, spoken or unspoken, with friends and peers and even the whole wide world means that the brand perception is out in the wild. It's been let loose. No longer is the way your brand is represented in your control. It's in the expressions of passion, ire, indifference and ephemerality of the digital ecosystem: Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, Twitter, Vine, even email. It's transmitted by mobile, stored on the web, and available to the world.

Your job as a marketer is to understand that this revolution has already happened. And to take advantage of it. If you can do it successfully you can catch up with the wild thing your brand has become, and even gain competitive advantage while your peers wrestle with boards who just don't get that they're no longer in control.

Scary thought?

So what do you need to do in order to flip the situation around? Well, part of the problem is the notion that we can regain control. I don't think we can. What we can do however is map how consumers behave, and indeed how their attitudes will shape how they behave in the future. By going down this route rather than trying to gather the brand in, you can extend the brand into the customer's territory, give them more control by enabling free interpretation of the brand's essence. And that takes not only courage, but data too.

Customer insight is the product of data. The three dimensions of segmentation (what we call 3D Segmentation) are:

• Demographic - who the customer is;
• Behavioural - what they do and have done;
• Motivation - why they do it. 

Demography is slow moving, so we use it as a kind of snapshot to describe people. It means we can target them accurately. Behaviour is retrospective, but we can observe behaviours and trends and make extrapolations based on probability and this gives us propensity models. This means we can target them efficiently. The final dimension is about motivations, attitudes and 'need states'. Sports brand ASICS leverages this in its MyASICS loyalty programme: by understanding why a runner runs, we can talk to them in terms that resonate… the desire to be fitter, or to win, or to raise money for a cause. By talking to its customers about those things that address their motivation, ASICS creates extreme loyalty, increasing sales. Worldwide. And MyASICS is served by a website, and emails, and mobile. All of which feed back data so we can hone the programme.

These days the various digital channels are so well established that the mechanisms that allow you to track a customer in their journey in one can easily be joined with the mechanism in all the others. It means we can effectively create a joined-up process to track a customer across all digital channels as they weave about their daily lives. This ability extends even to the real world - we work with clients who have incorporated data from electronic point of sale (EPoS) systems into their customer view, so we can attribute till sales to pay per click (PPC) campaigns and journeys via every imaginable digital touch-point.

And it's not that difficult, and you don't need to buy a DunnHumby or a data team to do it. The concept of rapid prototyping has been very successfully applied to creating online customer labs and pilot programmes. For instance, brands like Bupa have used it incredibly effectively to build online communities at very low cost before making decisions about major investment (my agency, Underwired, created Bupa's Carewell using this rapid prototyping approach – saving the client around £150,000).

Forget the Single Customer View and its squillions in Capital Expenditure; rope together several separate systems based only on those components you actually require to do the job of proving return on investment (ROI) and use it to monitor customer behaviour in response to the insights you generate from simple data analysis. In my experience six or seven segments gets the job done - segments of one are for when you're already at the outer extremes of wringing profit from data and not when you're mid-shift towards putting your customers at the centre of the brand universe.

Last night I found myself crying in my car at the traffic lights

Mandela was my hero. For a significant part of my youth I campaigned - in the way teens do - for a cause I believed in.

I became politicised when I was 12. I spent my teens marching for CND, and with the Anti Nazi League. On Saturdays I was usually either on a march or outside the South African embassy. Mandela was my, and our hero. I spent time in wooden-floored halls listening to men with thick accents in balaclavas.

I wore an Artists Against Apartheid patch on the sleeves of my coats and got terrible stick for it at school, though I didn't help myself by being vocal about my views. I painted AAM panels on leathers and I wrote to Katherine Hamnett when she designed an AAA T-shirt and wore the one she donated when I did sponsored events proudly.

My focus for my white London teens was the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and Mandela a beacon for justice, humanity and tolerance in a Thatcher-riven, suss-driven south London youth with black friends when mixing was pretty unusual.

Last night I found myself listening to a programme on the radio about the Hindu concept of renewal, when it was interrupted withe the long-expected news. And I cried, there at the lights, in my car. Mandela, humanity personified: thank you.

Do One Thing Well

Marketing is a collection of lots of activities, all working or acting together, sometimes in concert, to fulfil several roles. These include brand awareness, prospecting, engagement, conversion, retention, generating advocacy and so on. Often we want all our marketing to do all of these things. But the reality is, great communication is about being single-minded.

This singularity of purpose is obvious when it comes to a TV advert because you've only got thirty seconds to make a point. For instance,doing an advert which first makes the consumer think "ooh, cute puppy", then offers a discount, then states how many sheets there are on a toilet roll and then finally a message to visit the website to sign-up for points, alongside the obligatory Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat logos, would of course be ridiculous. It’s the same with a magazine display advert. For each one it either needs to be about the brand or a single call to action. Simple.

So, why do we not treat email like this too?

There are two dimensions to this way of thinking. The first is really, really simple: the more stuff you ask the email recipient to read, evaluate and discern their choice of call-to-action response, the less they will be able to respond. This is because there is more choice, more confusion, and more time is required.

Inevitably, in these instances, people will either choose the middle option (basic Goldilocks psychology) – which tells you nothing about their real values or propensities – or they will defer the decision altogether (which in sales terms is a 'no'). So you should make the choice simple: do, or don't do. Or: pick this one or that one (that's the assumptive version).

Email marketing should therefore be short, to the point and present only one or two choices. This will maximise impact and increase response rate. You will also be seen to be efficient, clean, straightforward and direct; the simple choice compared to your competitors. Think of the emails you get from Apple (if you're a customer), which are single-minded and clear to the point of asceticism; which is ironic really given how much an iPad costs.

I mentioned a second dimension. We’ve already talked about how any given email needs to have a single purpose and therefore simple, easy to parse content. However, now we need to consider the role of an email in a long-term email-driven relationship. This adds ‘time’ into the mix.

This is where we dive into the principles of customer engagement strategy or ‘CRM’, where each email is designed to move the relationship on from where it is, using knowledge gathered from where it was, to where you want it to go next. In other words, we know that to build a logical customer relationship takes a series of incremental steps, and CRM-oriented email campaigns can do this really efficiently. But, because each of these steps is discrete and purposeful, it is imperative that each step is delivered as effectively as possible.  Each message must be single-minded in its purpose of preparing the customer for the next contact. For instance, the sole purpose of one email may be to make the customer think you're nice. This might be by saying, "thank you" after a purchase. This is a good tactic, because if the customer thinks you're nice, they're more likely to read your next email.

So, single-mindedness must be an attribute and quality of every email you send. Each email can do many things and have many messages in it, but none will be effective. By doing one thing well, you will get the best response to an email, and ultimately the best possible result for your email marketing campaign.