How do you measure Customer Engagement?

Customer Engagement is a somewhat nebulous concept to measure as it exists across a number of dimensions.

These dimensions include :

• brand awareness and corporate culture
• breadth, depth and accuracy of customer data
• comprehensiveness of customer services available, both online and offline, within the CLCI framework
• comprehensiveness of channels, both electronic and non-electronic
• architectural and technical readiness to improve customer engagement

A ready way to measure and audit a customer engagement position of a company is to use a maturity matrix structure across these dimensions.

Such a maturity matrix will be published shortly.

Engagement as 3rd wave of transformation

Customer engagement is emerging as the third wave of business transformation.

The first wave of transformation was facilitated by ERP software during the mid and late 90's. This drove major internal efficiencies for corporate businesses.

Then in the late 90's, CRM software emerged to initiate the second wave of transformation. This addressed customer data and processes, but importantly from an internal perspective. So it can be said that these two waves of transformation were internally focused and driven "inside-out".

The emerging third wave addresses the needs of customers but is taking a perspective from outside of the business, an "outside-in" perspective. The customers needs for interaction with the business are paramount in the designing of the digital touch points. Much of this third wave is enabled by the technologies delivered by Adobe, particularly their RIAs and Intelligent Documents. This third wave also runs in parallel with the emergence of WOA as an architectural approach.

All-on-all, the foundation for a very exciting few years ahead!!