When I was getting my feet wet in the consulting business I had a mentor tell me that, as I prepared for client meetings, I shouldn’t strive to be the “smartest guy in the room”. He must have noticed the intersection of a desire to succeed, a Type A personality and the tendency to be a perfectionist was creating unneeded and potentially destructive pressure.

This advice came from a person whose favorite answer to a tough question from a client was “it depends”. He thrived on being enigmatic and, by turning questions around and opening them up for discussion, he was able to encourage a room full of people to answer their own questions. Somehow in the process clients ate it up, often attributing the resulting consensus to my mentor as if he had come up with the ideas himself.

At the time I was not sure how to receive that message, but eventually realized there were several lessons to be learned:

1. As thought leaders, we have to be well read, well rounded and naturally inquisitive. Those are table stakes – essential minimums – if we are to successfully advise clients and lead roll-out of effective marketing campaigns.
2. We should be passionate for the subject we specialize in, Customer Strategy and Business Intelligence in this case. If not, then you will fail to rise above competition and clients may interpret your work as something closer to project management than strategic thinking.
3. We should realize that striving to be the “smartest person” in the room is probably shooting at the wrong target. In addition, we should accept the fact that we probably are not that person no matter how often we try. Everyone has a specialty or a specific experience set that brings fresh perspective to a project. By embracing the full project team and inviting different voices into the conversation, you can most effectively steward clients to meet their goals. That is the idea, isn’t it?

This is where tools and experience play a role. Consultants have methodologies for a reason as well as planning tools. Experience is something that cannot be manufactured or acquired by shortcut. It is like the power in a cyclist’s legs, it builds on a cumulative basis and gets better with age. The tools we create are improved through this experience and should be reusable to ensure that nothing is missed in the course of a planning exercise.

I’ve written before about why its important to hire a consultant from time to time, and the lessons here should help clients set expectations for the role of suppliers/consultants as well as provide a bit of solace to my colleagues in the marketing consulting community.

There has to be a balanced approach to project work in order to succeed. Being mechanical, aloof and enigmatic can cause clients to question your value. Being cute and arrogant doesn’t lead to success.

Leveraging the tools you have acquired and tested over time while honoring all those around the table will make you stand above the crowd. It will also draw easy recommendations from your clients for future business.

One of my favorite business quotes goes like this: “It is amazing how much people can get done if they do not worry about who gets the credit.” Remember that you should be shining brightly, just not too worried about shining the brightest.

In the final part of our Three Part interview series with Rob Markey, Bain & Company, we share insights from Mr. Markey on how to better execute surveys, whether to introduce incentives to improve survey responses, and get his opinions on whether NPS or other metrics will eventually influence share prices on public exchanges.

Oh yes, we’ll also get to the bottom of whether there really is “just one question” to get a grip on customer loyalty.

Many firms have response rates to surveys in the single digit range. Some respond by offering incentives to drive up response to their NPS surveys. Mr. Markey stated that “at Bain, this is evidence that you are not earning your customer’s feedback”, adding that “offering incentives is almost always a sign that a flaw exists in the customer feedback process”.

Listening to the results that do come in and making change on the front lines will earn your way to 30-40% response rates over time. Rackspace, one of the examples cited in The Ultimate Question 2.0 gets above 60% response rates to its surveys. “Here’s why” stated Markey “Rackspace earned participation in its surveys because they are meaningful to the customer”.

According to Markey, being satisfied with a 5 – 15% response rate is dangerous. Business should seek the root cause for low response rates and test surveys across groups that are weighted to promoters, passives and detractors. “Detractors are less likely to respond to a survey than prompters” said Mr. Markey, and “bias needs to be rationalized through testing”.

When I asked Mr. Markey if measures of customer value predicted by NPS or other scores would one day influence share price and market capitalization, he said that “it was already happening.” Though he cited confidentiality, Markey stated that “an average category leader in NPS scores grows at least 2X competitive growth rates”, adding that “several nationally recognized investment firms pay attention to NPS as an indicator of companies they would invest in”.

I couldn’t let my time with Rob Markey end without asking one big question: Is there just one question that companies can use to predict and / or measure customer loyalty? Markey explained that “when done on an apples-to-apples basis, NPS correlates closely with other measures such as satisfaction, but that “if the goal is to find the best statistical predictor of individual customer behaviour, most likely a multi-variable index will be superior to any single metric index”.

For example, the investment firms cited earlier use NPS as a predictor of value, though it’s not the only metric considered. Having said that, Markey added that “in many instances, NPS will replace traditional customer satisfaction metrics, mostly for the practical superiority of the NPS system”.  “Not a single loyalty leader measured their way to success” said Markey, adding that “it’s hard to get employees fired up about some metric”.

For Markey and Reichheld, the metric is the starting point. It is the metric that provides the compass to navigate the path forward, but it is the system that is the path itself. The victory in where they have arrived with “The Ultimate Question 2.0” is that the system has been created and business now has a reliable option to predict customer loyalty and to help bring continuous improvement to the enterprise.

My interview with Rob Markey about the new book, The Ultimate Question 2.0 “How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World”, continues today with a closer look at how the “score” has evolved into a “system”.

The book includes a number of case studies ranging from Charles Schwab to Apple Retail to The Progressive Group of Insurance Companies. One common element of execution employed by each firm was to include a short-cycle, closed-loop feedback mechanism that turns survey results into usable business intelligence that front-line managers and employees can use to better serve customers.

Mr. Markey emphasized the importance of collecting accurate NPS survey scores but also to determine the root cause of interactions that leads to people becoming “promoters” or “detractors”. Was a price too high? Could a better deal be found at a competitor or did the competitor allow more flexibilities in service agreement rules? Whatever the reason, it is essential to be able to deliver feedback from customers to the employees most directly responsible to deliver enhanced customer experience. Through the accumulated experience from working with multiple companies across varied industries, Markey and Reichheld were able to dig deeper and understand practical methods to create change.

Markey stated “Everyone in the enterprise managing a customer touch point needs to build greater understanding of where they stand with their customers, whether front-line personnel or executives… for real change to take effect, business people have to translate elements of feedback into usable and actionable items that customers can understand.”

The second critical element Markey noted was the ability to connect NPS improvements to robust economics at the enterprise level. Markey explained “managers must be able to demonstrate what it’s worth to improve NPS scores versus the competition, or the value of changing a detractor to a promoter”.  This is aspect of developing a learning environment through working with multiple enterprises that has helped to transform the score into a system.

Markey capped off this line of thinking by sharing three essential elements to successfully putting NPS to work in your business:

1. There must be a reliable way to evaluate and sort customers and employees as promoters, passives, or detractors. This evaluation must then lead to identifying customer behaviors that can be analytically tied to positive business outcomes
2. An organization must create a fast-cycle, closed-loop learning process to deliver survey as well as verbatim results to customer-serving personnel. The organization should engage in “deliberate practice” over time to demonstrate to customers that they are listening to their critiques and expression of preferences.  This could be the most distinguishing characteristic of the three elements as traditional customer satisfaction research is anonymous and misses the opportunity to establish two-way communication with customers
3. The commitment to earning the loyalty of customers must be a top priority of the organization and be supported from the top down. This commitment must be embodied in daily actions and NPS must have a high level visibility with employees. Firms putting their weight behind NPS initiatives in a sincere manner earned the best results.

When asked about finding the balance between focusing on the customer and enabling employees / associates to deliver critical feedback, Markey responded “low employee engagement is impossible to coexist with high customer NPS”. He continued “a company may create a temporary market advantage through innovation or pricing, but it is difficult to sustain high levels of scores without employee engagement”.  “It’s not just the right thing to do”, added Markey, “it’s necessary to rise above the competition”.

Interestingly, only about half of the firms encountered by Bain & Company over the past 5 years working with NPS take such a position. Reflecting on the recent economic downturn, Markey cited that “the companies which entered the global financial crisis with higher reserves of goodwill and higher NPS experienced lower dips than the general marketplace”.

In the final part of the series later this week, we’ll share some interesting tips from Markey on successful survey execution and find out if there really is “just one question” that can be used to determine customer loyalty levels within a business.

In a previous post I mentioned that I was the beneficiary of a serendipitous moment in which I was given the opportunity to interview Rob Markey, a partner in Bain & Company’s New York Office and head of the firm’s global Customer Strategy and Marketing practice.

The topic was a new book, The Ultimate Question 2.0 “How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World”, which Markey co-authored with Fred Reichheld and published in September. The book was a revised and expanded edition of The Ultimate Question, the original book published in 2006 which introduced the world to the Net Promoter Score (NPS).

When I spoke with Mr. Markey, he was quick to shift my focus from “book review” to developing an understanding of how NPS had evolved from a scoring metric to a system which had developed through the collective experience of the thousands of companies working with NPS since 2006. With so much to talk about in a brief period of time, I have crafted a three part series of posts covering the interview, of which this is the first.

Having received a copy of Fred Reichheld’s book, The Loyalty Effect upon walking into the doors of Frequency Marketing in 1999, I was more than familiar with Reichheld’s ground breaking thought that “loyalty” had to be formed with top-down strategy that included not just customers, but also employees, shareholders, even suppliers.

This timeless path to creating sustainable competitive advantage has been followed by thought leaders in the loyalty marketing industry, though much of what we see in the market today known as loyalty or rewards programs have fallen short by focusing on customers, while giving a disappointing hand-wave to the interests of the other constituents.

There are voices in darkness supporting Mr. Reichheld’s original thesis. One industry group has emerged, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance, which is “dedicated to the concept that engagement is an enterprise-wide endeavour that begins with people and ends with profitability”. The organization’s principle mission is to support research and education to help brands “make the connection between engaging people in business and long-term financial performance”. Colloquy has a renewed focus on Enterprise Loyalty, and I have taken my stand by preferring to frame our work for clients as delivering Customer Strategy. In my opinion, every organization needs a well planned and executed Customer Strategy, while not all need a “Loyalty program”.

Markey started off by sharing that his initial interest in this topic came through reading Reichheld’s 1990 article “Zero defections: quality comes to services”. Markey’s curiosity to identify tools for making decisions on behalf of customers instead of just shareholders led him to Bain and Company and he has been working closely with Mr. Reichheld ever since.

Markey told me that this 20 year quest has led him to adopt a simplified notion of the ultimate objective – to transform the golden rule from something nice to say about customer relationship management, to something that can be implemented and drive tangible results to a business. Working with Reichheld, a system of thought was developed that, if implemented as intended, would lead to sustained market improvement and to making good decisions to earn customer loyalty.

When asked about the central point of the new book, Markey explained that the 2006 “one big question” book was meant to introduce the thesis, explain the metric construct, show how to measure, it and lay out the argument for adoption. In essence, it was a starting point.

When asked what he had learned in the years between 2006 and today, Markey pointed to the fact that Bain & Company has worked with dozens of companies around the world to implement NPS in their operations and have seen tremendous results returned, from lower churn rates, lower acquisition costs, and improved sales and profitability per customer.

In short, the “score” had become a “system” with a solid methodology to help firms guide implementation and enough market feedback to confidently predict results. Part Two of the three part series will cover how the systems works as well as share the three essential elements to successfully putting NPS to work in your business.

Editor’s Note: Frequency Marketing has since become LoyaltyOne, while The Loyalty Effect still sits on the shelf in my office, dog-eared as all good books should be.

Of all the social media communications channels I invest in, Twitter is the most enigmatic to me.

I use it and find value in posts from both followers and those I follow. At the same time, I encounter quizzical looks from friends who think I am somehow child-like and time-wasting to be spending time writing updates that are always compressed, sometimes cryptic and on occasion in-decipherable.

I’ll admit to a few things:

• Twitter presents the constant temptation to become a one-way broadcaster of self-promotional messages. All I can say is resist, resist, resist. In real life, people don’t fall in love with others who talk about themselves constantly. Why should it be any different online?
• I don’t always engage in conversations. Because there is such a thing as “real business” to attend to, I can’t sit and watch the stream all day, responding promptly to replies, DM’s, and other comments. Thankfully, there are some really great tools to help you manage your social medial channels and I use one of the best, Sprnklr. I do respond to just about everyone, but with timeliness that is often suspect.
• I’m not consistent. Social Media muse @TheDudeDean told me long ago to tweet consistently. I do my best, but there are gaps. This week is an example with cross country air travel and day-long meetings cramping my Twitter style. I acknowledge this but don’t necessarily apologize. We’ve got to have priorities and Twitter should not rule your life.

I read an article this week which mused that Twitter could be destined to “occupy a niche as addiction to few and irritant to many.”  I’m quite comfortable with this reality and take it into account when recommending communication strategies for clients.

It is not mandatory that every customer facing marketing strategy incorporate Twitter, Foursquare, or even Facebook. While it is absolutely right for some, others will find it a waste of time and resource.

If your customers are all online, talk to them through that medium. If they are sitting at the kitchen table reading their mail, you better find your way to that venue. Usually it is through a mix of several channels that you can create customer engagement. The big challenge is to identify which ones matter and to prioritize their importance.

To sum it up, there is wisdom in discerning between “everyone is doing it” and “I need to do it”.

Sounds like Twitter material to me!

Disappointing economic results were reported this week, with retail sales stagnating in August due to less than robust job growth and consumer confidence that continues to waiver. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that median income figures, adjusted for inflation, have declined 2.3% since 2009.

In related news, a report from the Conference Board on World Income Inequality stated that the gap between rich and poor in both the United States and Canada is growing to record proportions. Surprisingly resilient Canada has seen its span between have and have-nots growing at even a faster rate than the U.S..

Recent activity by Walmart indicates they are not only aware of these trends but are ahead of the curve introducing measures to engage and increase share of wallet with customers.  In fact, they added several features to their loyalty program over the past few weeks.

You didn’t know that Walmart had a loyalty program? Here are some of the key features:

• Supporting its brand promise of “Everyday low prices” with weekly price scans of 60 competitors to make sure they deliver on the promise
• A renewed layaway payment plan to ease the pain of major purchases for customers
• Re-stocking it shelves with a broader selection of goods, reversing an attempt to streamline inventory and offering more choice to customers
• Giving attention to private label product lines, focusing on its George clothing line

Walmart doesn’t have an explicitly named loyalty program, nor is it awarding promotional currency or giving away punch cards and key fobs at the register.

It does have a Customer Strategy, however, one that is based on understanding of its competitive environment and the needs of its customer base, while leveraging its supply chain advantage.

The illustration of Walmart’s approach to attracting and retaining customers is an example of how building Customer Strategies contrast from launching loyalty and rewards programs. Walmart is also unique in its market position and their strategy is not easily emulated by Target, Costco, BJ’s or others seeking traction with consumers in tough times. There can only be one low-price leader in a category and when that leader also happens to be the supply-chain gorilla, there are diminishing returns to be reaped as a follower, fast, slow or any speed in between.

When you sit down to create strategy to meet client objectives, keep Walmart in mind. They may be the anti-loyalty enterprise in a traditional sense, but they do represent a valuable case study in building effective Customer Strategy.

Speak the word Loyalty and you get a range of predictable reactions. If you’re at any number of marketing conferences, the word association game leads to responses of “points”, “miles”, or “discounts”. If you mention loyalty to your friends on the golf course, the reactions range from conversation about one’s dog to “those crummy punch cards” that have been stashed away in a drawer at home.

Because the “L” word evokes such biased responses, thought leaders in our industry have worked hard to redefine the game we are playing. Formal descriptions of “data driven marketing strategy designed to change customer purchase behavior on a sustainable basis” are accurate, though not inspiring. Over the past several years, I’ve move towards Customer Strategy as a broader term that speaks to the need for any company to address the needs of its customer base in a systematic and measurable manner.

My preferred tagline is to say that “everyone needs a customer strategy, but not everyone needs a loyalty program”.

That’s just me, and I have several colleagues who have chosen different paths, either sticking with Loyalty as the descriptor to keep it simple or who have taken up a seat under the big tent of CRM or Customer Management to describe our business.

Then came Twitter. My early web sherpa, The Dude Dean, taught me how to use hashtags effectively among other little pearls of wisdom to create “Google juice”. To create a conversation about our corner of the direct marketing world, it seemed common sense to use #Loyalty after each tweet. Searching on the term a few months ago, I discovered it was time for a change.

#Loyalty denoted a stream of passionate epithets that looked like a painfully assembled chat room for people looking for dating advice. I consulted with other loyalty marketers active in social media and we agreed to use #Lmktg as a way to separate business from personal “loyalty” matters. Thanks to Barry Kirk for his leadership in this effort.

Occasionally though, I check in with the old term to see if anything has changed. Today the #Loyalty Twitter stream offered these bursts of passion for our consumption:

#LOYALTY is the key to a successful friendship or any relationship

show me #Honesty …. ill show u Loyalty

#Loyalty is non existent these days

#Loyalty is so rare these days

Finally I was able to find one Tweet that hit closer to a business related take on Loyalty:

#Loyalty is not about some card an airline gives you for miles. Loyalty is wanting to do business with you, not having to

Reading the comments in the stream, I realized that what these people were talking about is indicative of why its so hard for brands to create long term value with customers. Business has to behave sincerely, as it if really wants to build a relationship, not just manipulate the customer into some form of behavior that is more beneficial to brand than human being.

There are lessons to be learned, even in the Twitter stream. All business owners and managers should revisit the purpose behind his/her marketing efforts. If it is to treat the customer as they wish to be treated, to offer tangible value for repeat purchase, to treat customer data collected like the gold that it is, and to provide customer service to match, then the foundation for success is in place.

If anything less than this, a shift in focus is heartily recommended. Why? Because as the last Tweet of note today said:

The moment you find #loyalty is the moment you’ve found everything!!!

In business, there are things we believe in, things we sell, and things that work.

In a post last week, David Slavick offered advice to retailers on how to prepare and manage a “deal of the day” offer with Groupon, Living Social and others assembling collective buying discounts. That great information will be followed in the next week with a concise go-forward planning methodology useful for any retailer.

Meanwhile, the daily deluge of deep discounts continues to flood our email inbox. I have noticed the range of offer sponsors to be widening, now including Chiropractors and other medical professionals as well as the local newspaper. National restaurant chain Quiznos has created a campaign with Groupon intended to blend the traditional punch card offer with the discounts expected from collective purchase.

The Quiznos campaign is positioned as a way to create repeat business via the Groupon model but let’s see how that goes. If I were privy to the data, I would be interested to understand how many single-use cherry-pickers are converted to multiple-use cherry-pickers.

I’d also like to know if the element of captured loyalty (I’ve paid for 8 subs and had better use them up) results in continued use after expiration of the Groupon or if brand boredom takes hold and these same customers don’t come back for months. It’s all entirely possible.

Amidst all the Groupon-like activity (the term has nearly assumed verb status in the same way as Kleenex, Xerox, FedEx), I received an email from Best Buy touting (gasp!) a 10% discount on a variety of products leading up to the Memorial Day weekend.

I have to wonder openly if a 10% discount, with restrictions by product category that require reading of the “smaller print” are still changing consumer behavior these days. There are a few possibilities:

1. Best Buy is smarter than the rest of us: If your numbers tell you that 10% works, why play the deep discounting game? Doing so would be akin to creating a Facebook Fan page with no idea why you are doing so.
2. Best Buy is weathering the deep discount storm: Hoping that collective buying is a fad that will go away soon, the company could be persevering with proven tactics hoping to preserve margins as long as possible.
3. Best Buy is asleep: Sure, they could be missing the boat, watching as the market moves away from them, but this is highly doubtful. The folks in Minneapolis are very good at their trade and the collective buying storm has mostly been directed at local merchants rather than national chains, Gap a notable exception.

For many retailers, 20% has been the magical number at which consumers give attention and reach for their wallets. 10% is just plain uninteresting in my book and the fact that I have to spend time to understand which products qualify is mildly annoying.

The attraction of coupons to me is clarity – WYSIWYG – but offering coupons is a mercenary game in which the bigger numbers get the most play. It’s also a highly destructive game – to profit margins that is.

Though collective buying is “something we sell” and “something that is working” these days, I’d rather advocate “something I believe in” which is integrated customer strategy that yields measurable results over the long term.

Let me know if agree or disagree. That’s why Wordpress includes a comment box!

On the same date of this post, two news items hit that are worthy of an update: Groupon filed for an IPO valued initially at US750 Million and also floated another offer with a national merchant chain, this time Old Navy.

Neil Rogers was the original “shock jock” in South Florida radio. Not being a fan, I was in a clear minority as he stacked up top ratings year after year before retiring in 2009.

Part of Mr. Roger’s shtick was living in the gray area of FCC regulation, and he was reminded from time to time by his employer that there are 7 dirty words that can’t be spoken on the air.

Rick Barlow was a man of different fiber. Mr. Barlow was the founder of Frequency Marketing, a company conceived and developed as the Loyalty marketing business unfolded.

Barlow had a laser-like focus on perfecting the art and science to “identify, maintain, and grow best customers through long term, interactive, value-added relationships”. That phrase is emblazoned on a coffee cup still in my cupboard, a souvenir from my days in Barlow’s Cincinnati office.

The evolution of the marketplace has placed pressure on “Loyalty” and how it is defined. Use the “L” word in a meeting and most people instantly think of points and miles, selling the concept short.

Has this made “Loyalty” a dirty word?

I’m not dropping the L word, but I do prefer to talk with clients about the need for a well planned and executed Customer Strategy. The broader term remains founded on the blending of behavioral and attitudinal data to create profitable behavior change across a portfolio, customer base, or market. The advantage of a Customer Strategy is that it allows for forms of execution well beyond points or miles and can be effective using no currency at all.

To underscore that I am not the only one concerned about being labeled the “points” guy, I was witness to a lengthy discussion at Templeton College where a room full of loyalty “experts” debated whether they should use different language to describe what they do. Suggestions ranged from “Customer Management” to “CRM” to “Relationship Management”, but in the end the group agreed it was becoming overly narcissistic and stuck with Loyalty.

Today, the idea of creating enduring customer loyalty to a brand is a lofty goal. Mark Johnson, CEO Loyalty 360 was recently interviewed by Fox Business on the subject and I have included the video here.

As Mark mentions, it is well within the capability of business to use its data intelligently to build relationships to give it an edge over competitors using pricing and discount strategies.

Loyalty lives, it’s just a lot more complex to deliver these days.

Trendy business buzzwords aren’t any fun until you form an opinion and seek feedback to get to the substance of the issue.

Customer Engagement is one of those terms that is being mentioned more frequently than Kim Kardashian was during the Super Bowl. It’s the 2010 version of “what’s hot, what’s new, what’s next?”

The question is, should Customer Engagement be treated as a new marketing sub-set, on par with Loyalty and Word of Mouth Marketing, or is it a concept that’s been around for quite some time and just happens to be a point of pain in the Relationship Value Chain (RVP) for marketers today?

Relationship Value Chain? That’s the term that my good friend and former Colloquy colleague, Kelly Hlavinka, coined almost 10 years ago. The experience of many at the once proud Frequency Marketing was that customer value increased across a spectrum of customer interaction. Link the points of interaction and you had a value chain that loyalty marketers could use to influence communication plans and allocate marketing budget dollars to encourage specific behaviors.

The RVP is similar to the “acquisition – activation – usage – retention” lifecycle marketing that credit card issuers have been using for years, but takes objectives down to a more granular level.

One example of a flow that constitutes a RVP:

• Awareness
• Response to Invitation
• Program Enrollment
• First purchase
• Multiple purchases in response to offers
• Redemption for Reward
• Response to Survey
• Response to Future Bonus
• Multiple Redemptions

No one has a lock on defining the steps in the chain as they should be customized to the business situation under review. Going to back to Customer Engagement, just where does it live in the value chain used as an example here?

Let’s look at a few steps in the RVP and see where, if accused of being “Engaged”, there would be enough evidence to gain a conviction!

Program Enrollment – Doesn’t everyone enroll in programs without much care for future interactions? I enroll in just about every program where I know the odds are that I’ll be back (by choice or force) and the offer looks worthy enough to give it a whirl. The only caveat is that I won’t sign up if the data collection hurdle is too high at the outset.

First Purchase – You’ve got my attention, but what makes you think I’m “Engaged”? I may be a cherry-picking consumer or have just satisfied a one-time need for your product or service. Not enough evidence to convict me as engaged at this point in time.

First Redemption – I’ve stayed around long enough to make multiple purchases over time – how else would I have qualified to redeem? But did you catch me in a cycle of life that won’t soon be repeated, or can you count on me to do it again? Engagement? We’re getting closer, some say “yes”.

Survey Response – I’ve transacted, collected, redeemed, and now I am willing to actually have a conversation. You’ve got my attention, but I am skeptical of what you will do with the information and if I will hear from you again. Does this sound akin to dating? Conversation is certainly an accelerator to engagement, but does not constitute the end goal itself.

Multiple Redemptions – Once I’ve completed the purchase/collection/redemption cycle more than once, I think you can count me as “Engaged”. The focus shifts now to retaining my interest, expanding the conversation, and developing more business as a result.

My take on Customer Engagement is that it describes an end objective that marketers hope to achieve through smart execution of a well designed data-driven Customer Strategy. If you try to define engagement as one of the individual steps, take Enrollment as an example, then what you are truly talking about is more tactical ala “how to create awareness for a program and convert interest to enrollment”.

It’s a step along the way, not engagement itself.

The Loyalty Truth on Customer Engagement is that it has been around for quite a while. The reason the topic has been deserving of the spotlight lately is that customers are increasing difficult to engage, not to mention retain.

What’s your take?