Customer Engagement in 2017

Key Themes for Customer Engagement in 2017

• Customer Experience is the battleground – In 2017 Customer experience will become the battleground for competitive advantage. What’s your Battle Cry going to be? Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!
• 2017 is the year of the customer journey. In 2017 the will be calling in a new dawn when the customer journey will become the primary lens through which businesses evaluate and measure customer experience.
• Management of consumer data in 2017 will become a competitive advantage for brands who fully embrace how they manage customer preferences, privacy and customer data ownership. Driven by enlightenment as much as legislation, brands will stop seeing management of customer data as a burden and instead will see positive outcomes in terms of marketing performance, customer loyalty and brand engagement.
• Marketers will become accountable for the end-to-end customer experience in 2017. The remit for Marketing will move beyond traditional campaign-based marketing to incorporate the complete customer life cycle. Marketers will be judged by new metrics that reflect retention, engagement, and Lifetime Customer Value. As a result, CMOs will become responsible for any customer metric, not just sales and leads.
• Engagement Marketing will be another string added to the Marketing bow in 2017. Marketers will add engagement marketing skills to their traditional campaign marketing CV. These ‘2-speed’ marketers will zoom ahead of those stuck in one gear. This is marketing in the context of customer journeys, where campaigns become invitations to a conversation with a brand, and marketers will be capable of both campaigning and engagement marketing.
• Customer Engagement will become the front line of digital transformation in 2017. Businesses will begin to understand that customer engagement and digital transformation are inextricably linked, and that, in the digital economy, every business is a service business, as we’ve already said.
• In 2017 the penny will finally drop with In 2017 the value of so called “intelligent” technologies (machine learning, AI, predictive technology, natural language processing, etc) lies in how it can transform business’ ability to understand and serve their customers better, working with them to meet their wants and needs and building long-term customer engagement.