Enabling success through pervasive engagement management

By Robert Carroll

A new technology platform is emerging that redefines customer engagement management, a platform that fully leverages multiple channels to involve customers in a completely interactive exchange – anytime and anywhere. Companies that succeed will leverage this platform in order to fully engage their prospects and obtain real-time knowledge and understanding through a continuous current of constant, relevant dialogue across smart phones, tablets, laptops, public kiosks – any communication vehicle you can imagine.

In the initial stages of online marketing, consumers often simply handed information over directly. They entered the data themselves, set permissions, perhaps changed things around and personalized their own preferences based on personal interests. Think 'My Yahoo'.

Over time, online marketing has become much more interactive. When prospects make purchases, marketing groups obtain a few data points that directly impact the goods that consumers are offered. Today's systems primarily involve monitoring buying behavior, obtaining data points, and making a push on that limited data.

But, in the evolution of online marketing, these systems are limited in scope and don't have the industrial strength capacities to help businesses meet tomorrow's possibilities.

Enter the brave new world of pervasive engagement management. This solution is all encompassing - a two-way interaction that is facilitated and managed through sophisticated and industrial-strength targeting, profiling and personalization. Those three components provide the foundation for a solution that brings customer engagement to an entirely new level.

Just what does this new global engagement solution look like?

Advanced technology systems will segment consumers before they even visit a website, serving up the best possible content - promotions, advertisements and links - specifically targeted toward that particular customer. No assumptions are made. Analysis is conducted across multiple data points to generate the most accurate profile possible. Real-time segmentation of potential customers will also give businesses the ability to instantaneously rate prospects against multiple potential products.

Online customers will expect the company to know their product likes and dislikes, and businesses will be able to determine whether visitors are new or returning customers and what offers and products are attractive to them. Through heightened personalization, companies can more accurately identify what is relevant to a prospect, leading to greater levels of customer satisfaction, increasing average order values, as well as customer brand loyalty.

By listening to prospects in unprecedented ways, businesses can engage and begin a meaningful interaction, more accurately assessing and meeting the consumer's needs. By looking at past purchases, other sites visited and utilizing advanced analytics, the system puts all of the combined data into context and makes a prediction on the prospect based on the particular profile. This ability enables companies to more accurately pinpoint a prospect's exact needs and facilitate an ongoing customer relationship.

Using an industrial-strength customer engagement platform, for example, a worldwide retailer with revenues of more than $19 billion was able to design and customize a system with more than 400 navigational filters and management rules, allowing them to optimize ad campaigns and affiliate feed programs. The result was enhanced customer engagement across multiple networks - expanding beyond landing pages to provide ubiquitous engagement integrated throughout the entire site, giving the ability to offer the right product at just the right moment. With this type of industrial system in place, the retailer achieved a growth rate of 29% in 2009 - a year when most retailers struggled.

The companies that will dominate in the future are the companies that will be able to leverage two-way interaction and customer engagement to its fullest capacity - through advanced targeting, profiling and personalization. For those that do, the results will be transformational.

Biography

Robert Carroll (rcarroll@sdl.com) is CMO of SDL's Web Content Management Solutions Division in North America. SDL delivers highly targeted, global customer engagements based on language, location, and profiling and personalization. For more information, please visit http://www.sdl.com.