Online Customer Engagement Management

Online Customer

Engagement Management

A new trend?

Academic Report

By Georgia Fotaki, Nicole Gkerpini and Angeliki Iliana Triantou

Supervisor: Prof. Sjaak Brinkkemper

Utrecht Business University Informatics

October 2012

Online Customer Engagement Management: A new trend?

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Contents 1. Introduction 2. Market Analysis of Customer Driven Online Engagement 2.1. Customer Driven Online Engagement Market

2.1.1 Web analytics tools 2.1.2 Social media monitoring software 2.1.3 Web Content Management systems 2.1.4 Audience targeting

2.2 Representation of an Online Customer Engagement Management tool the Market

3. Online Customer Engagement Management (OCEM) Processes 3.1. OCEM Framework

3.2. Identification of Customer Engagement Behaviours 3.3. Evaluation Engagement Manifestations 3.4. Reaction on Customer Engagement behaviours 3.5. Online Customer Engagement Optimization

4. Survey Observations 5. Conclusions 6. References About


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1. Introduction In todays rapidly change and highly interactive business environment, “Online Customer Engagement Management” (OCEM) has already started attracting the attention of marketers. OCEM constitutes a way to deepen customer relationship, increase customer’s loyalty, as well as meet and serve individual customer needs. The real-time interactions and the potential of broader, richer and faster customer engagement through virtual environments allows companies to achieve an ongoing customer dialogue, in order to collect customers’ and prospective customers’ knowledge (Sawhney, Verona, & Prandelli, 2005). However, despite the growing interest, since the notion of “Customer Engagement” is newly introduced only a few are well informed about it and know the way to achieve it. Moreover, companies nowadays use several tools and solutions in order to achieve OCEM. Nevertheless, there are software tools available in the market, which are able to support all the steps of the Customer Engagement process. This report attempts to make clear the concept of OCEM and clarify the need of an OCEM tool. Therefore, a market analysis is conducted and an OCEM software tool is compared to other software solutions, and placed in the market. Moreover, OCEM analysis is defined by creating and presenting an OCEM framework. Finally, the report discloses results of a nationwide survey amongst marketers, which regards OCEM and the use of OCEM tools. The findings are very interesting, revealing growing trends in OCEM market. 2. Market Analysis of Customer Driven Online Engagement

2.1. Customer Driven Online Engagement Market Companies integrate various combinations of tools in their business processes in order to achieve customer engagement in their online channels. These tools can be either:

a) Tools that facilitate parts of the Online Customer Engagement process and form the market of Customer Driven Online Engagement or

b) Specific software tools intended to engage customers and assist the whole process of Online Customer Engagement, the OCEM tools.

It is obvious that OCEM market, which will be analysed in the next chapter, constitute a subset of the Customer Driven Online Engagement Market, but they differentiate by intending to support all of the stages of Customer Engagement and not only a part of them. This chapter discusses the general market of Customer Driven Online Engagement, although these tools do not provide the full set of functionality that OCEM solutions offer (even when combined), they do go a long way. Such solutions include Web Content Management, Customer Relation Management, Web Analytics or Social Media monitoring tools. The combination of such tools can provide the company with databases that contain information and statistics about website visitors’ trends, needs, purchasing habits and information about demographic characteristics. Though no vendor includes all of the functions that can be supported, it is necessary to report the functions and the capabilities that exist in the target market.

One$of$the$leading$solutions$in$this$0ield$is$BlueConic,$by$GX$Software$(www.BlueConic.com).


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These capabilities are included in the typical range of Customer Driven Online Engagement, as currently available in the Market, such as Web analytics tools, Social media monitoring software, Web Content Management systems and Audience Targeting tools. Software companies, however, do not publish detailed information about the functionalities of their products and this has been a serious limiting factor in analysing in-depth all their functions and characteristics.

2.1.1 Web analytics tools Analytics enable organizations to measure sales, and provide them with fresh insights on how visitors weave through their websites, how they reach the websites, and how they return back to the firms’ websites. Web analytics tools collect and measure web activity. Standard reports make it easy for the organization to measure and understand customer’s engagement on organization’s site. The user can quickly build out customized reports, visitor segments, and identify important data. Moreover, the user can further choose what data is important to view and can customize reports according organizations’ needs. There are many categories of web analytics products that have been created by giant companies like Google, Adobe, SAS, IBM etc. Google Analytics, Adobe Insight, SAS Web Analytics and IBM Coremetrics Web Analytics are respectively the products of the aforementioned companies that could be embedded in a company’s business functions and support some of the processes of online customer engagement management. Analytics is developed to provide timely, relevant and accurate information to enable real-time decision making. It enables the classification and categorization of data, which may drive to a better understanding of the needs and the trends of the market. Furthermore, predictive analytics have been employed to analyze current and recorded facts, and the relationships in the data for making predictions about future events (Raden, 2010). Moreover, Analytics tools can provide information on how often people visit each page of the business’s website and how long they stay in this page. They produce reports that help organizations to understand which parts of their sites are performing well and which pages are the most popular. They can also help an organization measure the impact of social media on the achievement of their business goals and the success that the organization’s social media programs have. Furthermore, Web Analytics can keep records on what impact mobile devices have on a website and how they drive customers to the organization. Also it is possible to measure the frequency of the use of the organization’s applications. Additionally, an analytics tool can collect information about the way in which the organization’s digital marketing channels work together to bring visitors to its website. They also measure sales, downloads, video plays, and other actions that are important for meeting the business goals. In addition, Web Analytics can find out the number of the customers attracted by the web site, the amount of purchases and the number of users who are engaging with the web site. In addition, Analytics tools can collect information about the effectiveness of the social media, mobile, search and display ads work and, finally, link the website activity to the marketing campaigns in order to improve the overall organization performance.


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2.1.2 Social media monitoring software

The rapid integration of Social Media Networks in global level was the inspiration of companies like Cisco to come into the market with products such as Cisco Social Miner that monitor Social Media Networks like Twitter, Facebook, or other public forums or blogging sites. Social media monitoring deploys and tracks messages, applications and activity on Social Networks. It is also known as social listening, and implies the process of identifying and assessing what is being said about a company and its products in the Social Media sites. Social Media monitoring tools involve text mining specific keywords on social networking websites, blogs, discussion forums and other social media. Such tools give to the firm the ability to listen and monitor conversations around its company, brand, products and services in order to transform their website to a more effective one. Additionally companies can respond to customers in real time using the same social networks.

2.1.3 Web Content Management systems

Web Content Management, manages and deploys content for web based channels. In 2002 Rothfuss & Ried defined Content Management as “the systematic and structures procurement, creation, preparation, management, presentation, processing, publication and reuse of content” (as cited in Souer, 2011, p. 10). In order to achieve customer engagement many companies adopted Web Content Management systems. The main capability of such systems is the effective delivery of the “right” online experience to the right website visitor at the right time. Online visitors receive content that is immediately and increasingly relevant to their previous preferences during their online journey. These tools also help marketers to drive businesses by delivering and engaging personalized experiences based on visitor’s behaviour across different devices and platforms. Tools like Adobe’s Web Experience Management Solution, Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Platform, Alterian’s Content Management (ACM) and SDL Tridion are launched in the market in order to facilitate the automation of processes and retain relationships with customers. Moreover, these tools contain systematic approaches for triggering email campaigns, and website personalization for the deepening of customer engagement. Furthermore, the individual customer history can be combined to provide the most relevant content to each customer.

2.1.4 Audience targeting This field includes the targeting and the delivering of advertisements in selected web audience through advertising networks. Organizations use algorithms to show users the right advertisement at the right time with the right offer. Companies like Criteo and Baynote created tools that expertise in turning browsers into buyers. Furthermore recommendation engines enable vendors to show additional products to websites visitors according to what the customer is looking for based on specific keywords. 2.2 Representation of OCEM in the Market Based on Market Analysis of the tools described previously, we illustrate in Figure 1 the position of OCEM products in the Customer Driven Online Engagement


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market. The basic features of OCEM solutions are represented in such way, so as to make obvious the similarities and the differences between the products. This overview combines characteristics and functions of the most popular Customer Driven Online Engagement tools that exist in the market at this moment. OCEM tools are composed of the Functions of Customers Profiling, Dynamic Segmentation, Interaction Management and Analytics and Reporting. OCEM also integrates different customer data silos and provides visitors with a personalized online experience. As it can be seen in Figure 1, OCEM solutions contain characteristics that exist in different categories of software tools in the market.

Social Media Monitoring Predictions about future events.Social

Listening (deploys messages, apps & activity on Social Networks).

Real-time respond through Social Netwoks (comments, complaints, etc.).

Ads based on specific keywords.

Audience Targeting

Triggering email campaigns (by using systematic approaches).

Web Content Management

Web Analytics

Analyze Web Activity. Provide suggestions for real-time

Decision Making. Predictions and Recommendations

about future events.

OCEM Anonymous Visitors Profiling Real-time Segmentation

Measure Web Activity (sales, web traffic, etc.).

Collect Web Activity. Report Web Activity. Define visitors segments

(Grouping visitors).

Collect & Share information via Social Networks.

Target audience Deliver ads in

selected web audience.

Send relevant content to online visitors

Real-time interactions Deliver ‘right’ online

experience Website

personalization

Figure 1: Customer Driven Online Engagement Market

Web Analytics tools and the OCEM tools have in common the Collection, the Measuring and the Reporting of web activity and the definition of visitors segments. However, the OCEM tools do not seem to provide the user with suggestions on real-time decision making process, or make predictions about future events. In the Social Media Monitoring sector, the OCEM tools Collect and Share information via Social Networks, but they neither deploy personalized messages, apps and activity on Social Networks nor give the opportunity to users to respond in real-time to comments , complaints etc, about the company through these sites. In comparison with the group of Web Content Management tools, the OCEM solutions include Real-time interactions, Delivery of the ‘right’ online experience, Website personalization and the sending of Relevant Content to


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visitors. Finally, the OCEM tools Target Audience, based on visitors’ segments. Although OCEM does deliver advertisements in selected web audience, it does not seem to deliver advertisements based on specific keywords. Additionally, OCEM tools contain the Real-time creation of visitors Profiles and integrate different customer’s data silos. The functions and sub functions of the OCEM tools collaborate with each other in order to achieve true Online Customer Engagement Optimization. As it has been mentioned above the specific information about products that currently exist in the market were limited, thus it is possible that some sub functions and specific key elements that are included in these products might be missing. It is important to note, that OCEM solutions provide two features that are not found in the rest of the market. First, OCEM takes into consideration not only the existing customers of the organization but also the anonymous visitors that enter the channels. The anonymous visitors profiling is a great advantage in the customer engagement process because it captures the visitors’ buying cycle stage from the initial moment. Second, the Real-Time Segmentation differentiates the OCEM market, because the categorization of the visitor in the segments is not static, but it is modified and thus, optimized, depending on the visitor’s preferences. In the following chapter we introduce a Framework for Online Customer Engagement Management (OCEM). This Framework covers all the elements that are required in order to achieve Online Customer Engagement Optimization. 3. Online Customer Engagement Management (OCEM) Processes 3.1. OCEM Framework To get a good overview of the OCEM market, it is necessary to identify and report the organizational processes of OCEM. Combining the theoretical foundations of existing literature into one framework, we will be able to map the functional architecture of OCEM products to the business processes that can be assisted by such tools. Eventually, from the results of the survey conducted we will gain insights concerning the performance of these processes by the online marketers. Customer Engagement aims to go beyond transactions and to be defined as the customer’s behavioural manifestations that have a brand or firm focus resulting from motivational drivers (Doorn et al., 2010). To become more precise and focus in the scope of this research OCEM processes must be defined. This is essential in order to provide a concrete definition of the enterprise functions that OCEM covers. Though no definition of OCEM has been found, theory may be combined in order to focus on this subcategory of Customer Management. Doorn et al. (2010) have presented three stages of Customer Engagement. The organizational processes described were:

a) Identify Customer Engagement Behaviour and Customers, b) Evaluate Engagement Manifestations, c) Reacting on Customer Engagement Behaviours.

Another team (Neslin et al., 2006) has defined Multichannel Customer Management as the coordination and evaluation of channels where the interaction


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between the firm and the customers take place with the goal of enhancing customer value through effective customer development, acquisition and retention. Challenges such as data integration, understanding and tracking consumer behaviour, channel evaluation, allocation of resources across channels, and coordination of channel strategies must be addressed to the marketing management team in order to assure the achievement of the business objectives. An additional challenge is to transform the online channel customer experience from traditional and firm-centred into individualized and customer-centric. OCEM should deal with this challenge by providing real-time dialogue that progressively learns about and learns from individual customers and groups of customers (Sawhney, 2005). We, therefore, created a new framework that describes the ongoing process of the Online Customer Engagement Management optimization. The OCEM framework, depicted in Figure 2, presents the processes that have to be addressed by Customer Management of the firm accompanied by the functional requirements of a tool able to assist the processes. In the following paragraphs of these sections, we explain the three processes, Identification, Evaluation and Reactions, as well as the result of the continuous circulation of these processes; the OCEM optimization.

TASKS Evaluation of online channel traffic

Customers’ Grouping Testing of variants Identifying errors

Reporting

FUNCTIONALREQUIREMENTS

Web traffic Segmentation

Analytics Recommendations

Reporting

TASKS Target campaign depending on visitors’ gathered information Listening on visitor’s reaction Optimize visitor’s experience Individualize online communication

TASKS Identify channels Identify customer behavior metrics Track and integrate customer behavior metrics

FUNCTIONALREQUIREMENTS Customer Tracking Customer Profile Creation Profile Merging Data Integration

3. Reaction

1. Id

entif

icatio

n

Online Customer Engagement Optimization

Online Customer Engagement Optimization

2. Evaluation

FUNCTIONALREQUIREMENTS

Interactions mapping to segments

Listen/track actions Create ongoing dialogues

Figure 2: Online Customer Engagement Management (OCEM) Framework 3.2. Identification of Customer Engagement Behaviours This process requires the identification of online channels where customer engagement behaviours are manifesting (web-sites, blogs, social media firm’s pages, emails, search engines etc). This is derived from the marketing and sales strategy that the firm opts to follow. Following, the Customer Engagement


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Management team needs to identify the visitors of the channels and understand their online behaviour. This means to select the characteristics of certain behaviours (customer metrics) that can be measured in order to group visitors afterwards. Apart from the customer characteristics that may be collected by such channels, customer bases and silos (e.g. CRM) contain necessary data about the customers that can be integrated with the rest of the information to create a unified view of an individual. The survey has shown that the most important customer engagement metrics are the statistical data from online channels, keywords that visitors have used in order to find the organization’s products or services, individual’s interactions with campaigns, visitor’s product interests, and visitors persona. Other metrics less used, probably because of lack of tracking tools or tools that combine this information, are visitors’ online behaviour, individual’s buying cycle stage, visitors’ vertical and demographics. It is obvious that in Identification process, it is required from the company to define the customer metrics that are able to measure the organization's customer engagement level. This should be done in a way that facilitates the achievement of its strategic objectives. The survey has also shown that most marketers use data silos such as CRM, Web Analytics and Google Analytics and other similar tool. However, a growing number of respondents reported to be using Online Visitor Profiling and are creating a unified view of the customer by integrating customer data silos. This process of identifying the Customer Engagement behaviour can be inefficient and time consuming. A tool may facilitate this process by profiling the visitors over multiple channels and combine this information with the existing data of customer bases. Our survey shows that already 24% of respondents are using customer engagement tools, as opposed to other solutions to perform the task, and a majority of respondents (79%), declare to be familiar with the topic of customer engagement. 3.3. Evaluation Engagement Manifestations The process of the Evaluation contains basically the reporting and the evaluation of online channels. The task concerns tracking and grouping of visitors’ interactions with campaigns, counting online visitors on owned online channels and generally listening to engagement manifestations. The marketer needs to use the customer metrics identified in the previous process in order to group visitors. This might be a great challenge for the marketers, basically because of the volume of the data and the rapidly change of visitors’ preferences in online channels. The evaluation should not only provide information about the segmentation and the positive channel performance. It should also uncover the interactions that are less obvious, so as to facilitate the correction of errors in customer’s experiences. Ideally the evaluation includes multivariate testing of customer metrics, analytics and automated recommendations that enable the marketer to opt for the best customer segmentation. Reporting is also an important task of the evaluation process, because it visualizes opportunities and weaknesses of the marketing strategy. The survey has shown that almost 60% of the respondents perform customer grouping at least to some extend and are likely to use online visitor segmentation tools and campaign management tools to assist the task. On the other hand, the rest 40% of the respondents do not use any tool for customer grouping by


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customer metrics. This percentage consists mostly of responders that admit grouping to a small extent or not grouping at all their customers. Online customer engagement software that supports segmentation, analytics and recommendations and is able to present the evaluation in a neat way could be considered effective for the highest performance of the business process. 3.4 . Reaction on Customer Engagement behaviour

The process of reacting on Customer Engagement behaviours is to create specific content for each group of customers and deliver an online channel experience through relevant dialogues. Marketers should target their campaigns depending on the visitors’ information. The individualization of messages promotes customer engagement in the multiple channels. Modelling and interacting through relevant dialogues, optimizes online channels in terms of intended communication effect. Listening to the reactions of the visitors the marketer may track additional information and optimize the dialogue. It is obvious, that the automation of the aforementioned tasks is essential, and thus online marketers should implement a relevant tool in order to perform these tasks. The survey has shown that 1 out of the five respondents are targeting their campaigns depending on the online visitor’s information to a great or a moderate extent. 14% of respondents optimize the online visitor’s buying cycle through target messages to a very great, great or moderate extent. Email-marketing tools are the tools that are mostly used by the respondents, followed by Campaign Management tools. Though OCEM market is relatively new, a stunning 14.3% of respondents already use Customer Engagement tools for the purposes of reaction on Customer Engagement behaviour. The functions that have to be included in a tool that supports the reaction to customer behaviour should obviously not only support online user experience optimization, but also traditional techniques such as emailing services. OCEM brings all of these functions together in one unified system that provides this full control over the holistic customer experience. 3.5. Online CE Optimization Finally, it is important to note that the customer engagement team should never stay complacent to a static model of customer engagement metrics. In order to be able to improve and keep the online visitors’ interest there has to be an ongoing optimization. The team has to model and measure interactions as customer metrics in order to re-segment the visitor. Combining the historical data and the current reactions, there is the opportunity to derive the intelligence required to decide the follow-up dialogues. Only interactively and incrementally the communication between online visitors and the firm will be optimized. The key functional requirements in this case are real-time segmentation and an ongoing adaptive dialogue to the visitors’ interests. 4. Survey Observations By observing and analyzing the results derived from the conducted survey on Online Customer Engagement Management very interesting findings were emerged. The answers given by the respondents were quite contradictory proving


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that there is still confusion about how OCEM can be achieved and how OCEM tools can be utilized. The basic findings of the survey are provided below.

It is apparent that the vast majority of the marketers are aware of the

term “Online Customer Engagement Management” and they seem to consider OCEM important for the success of their organization.

The use of online channels as opposed to offline channels is considered

more efficient, while at the same time the use of traditional offline marketing techniques such as TV and Radio advertising, telemarketing, phone calls etc. is not that popular, probably due to the fact that they are time consuming, more expensive and in many cases less effective than the online marketing techniques.

Half of companies focus on retaining customers, indicating that

Customer Relationship Management is very important for the companies, and so is customer engagement.

The majority of the companies make use of Web analytic tools to gather

analyze customer data and characteristics in order to improve campaigns and communication on online channels. However, a growing percentage uses OCEM tools for this purpose.

Companies are interested in gathering and analyzing customer data, and

there are a few that use them (basically at moderate extent) to target their online campaigns and to optimize visitors buying cycle. However, little attention is paid on the evaluation of the performance of their online channels. These results indicate that marketers are not fully aware either of the basic stages needed for reaching OCEM or of how the available software solutions can be utilized in order to reach OCEM.

The majority considers OCEM tools supportive indicating that there is a

growing interest in adopting such tools, although at the moment only a few companies use them.

5. Conclusions

To sum up, it can be concluded that the OCEM market is large and still in its infancy, while OCEM has already started becoming the new trend. However, as OCEM is a quite new concept for the marketing field, marketers still need to gain more knowledge on how customer engagement in the online channels can be achieved, so as to understand the importance of OCEM tools and to be able to utilize the capabilities of such tools in order to support their marketing goals.


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6. References Bijmolt, T. H. A., Leeflang, P. S. H., Block, F., Eisenbeiss, M., Hardie, B. G. S.,

Lemmens, A., & Saffert, P. (2010). Analytics for Customer Engagement. Journal of Service Research, 13(3), 341–356. doi:10.1177/1094670510375603

Doorn, J. van, Lemon, K. N., Mittal, V., Nass, S., Pick, D., Pirner, P., & Verhoef, P. C.

(2010). Customer Engagement Behavior: Theoretical Foundations and Research Directions. Journal of Service Research, 13(3), 253–266. doi:10.1177/1094670510375599

Neslin, S. A., Grewal, D., Leghorn, R., Shankar, V., Teerling, M. L., Thomas, J. S., &

Verhoef, P. C. (2006). Challenges and Opportunities in Multichannel Customer Management. Journal of Service Research, 9(2), 95–112. doi:10.1177/1094670506293559

Sawhney, M., Verona, G., & Prandelli, E. (2005). Collaborating to create: The

Internet as a platform for customer engagement in product innovation. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 19(4), 4–17. doi:10.1002/dir.20046

Souer, J. (2012). Development of Content Management System-based Web

Applications. SIKS dissertation series, 2012-04. About the Report This document constitutes the public version of a Research regarding Online Customer Engagement Management (OCEM) Software, which has been conducted by University of Utrecht. Under the supervision of Professor Sjaak Brinkkemper, the team has conducted a case study, accompanied by a Market Analysis and a Survey addressed to people involved in Online Marketing. For the purposes of the research, a new framework, the OCEM Framework, was developed by the authors. The sections included in this document, form the results of the research that the public might be interested in. Online Marketers or people involved in the Strategic Marketing of an enterprise can deduct important information from the report that analyses in depth the online customer engagement management processes. Additionally, the differentiation of OCEM Software becomes clearer in the Customer Driven Online Engagement market, and thus, it is easier for them to choose a software product depending on the necessities of the enterprise. For more information about the research, please contact the authors.

About the Authors Fotaki Georgia, MSc Business Informatics, Utrecht University [email protected] Gkerpini Nikol, MSc Business Informatics, Utrecht University [email protected] Triantou Iliana Angeliki, MSc Business Informatics, Utrecht University [email protected]

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