Customer Engagement

Customer engagement (CE) has become a hot topic of today's business. It has been widely recognized as one of the most important drivers of a business's prosperity. Customer engagement (CE) is considered as a perfect predictor of firm's growth as it works as an effective strategy to build and maintain strong relationship between customers and firms. This chapter is aimed to explore the theoretical foundations of customer engagement (CE) and provides clear insight and comprehensive knowledge about customer engagement and CE models that widely used by firms to engage their customers, contribution of CE in value creation process, as well as barriers apparent in introducing customer engagement analytics and their capabilities of dealing with large customer data-set as well. This chapter is beneficial for a reason that it may provide a comprehensive knowledge about customer engagement to the academics (i.e., marketing students, scholars, and researchers) as well as practitioners of various industries.

The Role of Customer Engagement in the COVID-19 Era

Costumer engagement is a multidimensional concept which develops over the time and is widely studied in the literature of marketing. Consumers attached to the brand tend to be more involved in behaviors that support the brand. On the other side, brand-self connection is an important element in consumer-brand relationship being part of brand attachment, where social media have a special role. Playfulness and informativeness of video have a significant impact on the value of social media ads, and the authors present the relationship between these two variables and customer engagement. The study will present an investigation with 235 Portuguese individuals during the months of confinement justified by the pandemic COVID-19. The results show that customer engagement depends on informativeness, playfulness, and brand-self connection. Throughout this empirical study, they show that social media brand engagement is explained by these variables. This chapter enhances knowledge on costumer engagement, brand-self connection, and video informativeness and playfulness, supporting new researches in this topic.

Review of Customer Activism Concepts

The concept of customer engagement (CE) refers to the customer activism in value formation which is not a new notion in the marketing and management literature. Existing theories of customer activism constitute particular anchors for systemizing the knowledge on optimal CE and offer considerable value to the developing literature on the profitable CE management. Those notions are associated with two influential metatheories, such as value co-creation and network management, and include prosumption, customer participation, service and service-dominant logic, customer resource integration, extended resource-based view, user and open innovation, and customer integration in innovation process. The main objective of this chapter is to review the above-mentioned concepts in order to recognize their managerial implications which might inform CE management efforts undertaken by managers in each stage of this process. This chapter contributes to a better understanding of the CE management challenges and provides additional insights for advancing the research in this domain.

Determinants of Customer Engagement in Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) Communication

The technological advancement in the usage of social networking sites (SNSs) has grown beyond boundaries. This expansion helps organizations to capture the attention of online customers towards their products and services. The primary purpose of the study is to list the drivers of eWOM credibility and explore its role in customer engagement at SNSs. A conceptual model that categorizes source credibility, trustability, knowledge, tie strength, and homophily are identified as the drivers of eWOM source credibility in SNSs. Similarly, valence, volume, consistency, emotions, quality, and rating are listed as the drivers of eWOM message credibility. This study suggested that drivers of eWOM will impact on customer engagement and that will, in turn, result in building a positive attitude, brand image, and behaviour towards the product or service listed in the SNSs. Further, the study discusses the theoretical and managerial implications in engaging customers through eWOM.

Online Retailing and Customer Engagement

The growth of online retail has changed the course of customer relationship management (CRM) at large. There are a variety of challenges faced by the marketers besides the opportunities of doing business online although the application of advance technologies has helped resolve issues pertaining to CRM to the maximum extent. However, customer engagement (CE), one very important of aspects of CRM, is very critical in online retailing and dynamically complex. Online retailers are using advance technologies and social media platforms to engage customers and optimize the benefits of customer engagement. To gain new customers and retain loyal ones have been challenging tasks, and hence, continuous customer engagement with creative ideas and content is the only solution. The present chapter focuses on the important of customer engagement by online retailers, factors influencing CE, and how marketers need to optimize customer engagement through innovative and analytical methods.

It's All About Creating Customer Value

In a digitally (em)powered age, customers expect a service and product experience in line with continuously evolving expectations. This induces great potential for organisations that shape engagement before, during, or after the main customer touch points. Powered by insights coming from the CRM driven 360° view, they entail even more value when enabling a company to quickly and continuously learn from its experiences. This chapter will illustrate that project managers need to master a dual dynamic to attain through activated customer engagement. On the one hand, new types of projects, changing expectations, and shifting habits offer humbling challenges. On the other hand, governance, change, and delivery continue to be the foundational baseline. By integrating theoretical insights and real-life cases, the author wants to stimulate project managers. Rather than seeing the digital era as a transformational tsunami for customer engagement, they should see it as an opportunity to go beyond things in a reality where rapidly changing demand entails growth, learning, and great value.

Creative and Innovative Ways of Consumer Engagement

Customer engagement simply means connecting with your customers. The objective of customer engagement is to build a strong emotional bond between your brand and your customer. A study by McKinsey And Company rated customer engagement as the top priority of all businesses. There is no doubt on the point that customer engagement leads to consumer loyalty. Companies need to think about innovative and unique ways to engage our customers. The objective of writing this chapter is to unfold the various creative and innovative ways for customer engagement. For this purpose, the author has discussed the various examples across the industries. The author has tried to explain how different sectors are working on this strategy with the help of new technology. This chapter is going to be extremely useful for the researchers, scholars and strategy makers by educating them and presenting the new horizons of consumer engagements.

Firms and Consumer Attitudes in the Digital Market

With the digitalization experienced as a result of technological developments, global economies have been affected in various ways, and data and information flows have accelerated. Technological developments that significantly increased the spread of information have undoubtedly affected all consumers and businesses. Especially with the widespread use of mobile-internet-based applications, consumers spend more time and shop on digital platforms. It is thought that businesses need to analyze digital consumer attitudes and benefit from marketing activities and digital marketing opportunities to gain a competitive advantage in digital markets. For this reason, it is aimed to determine the criteria that affect the consumer attitude in digital markets and the most suitable firm according to these criteria by using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method. Within the scope of the research, three different firms in the field of e-trade were evaluated based on expert opinion according to five criteria.

Valuing Wellbeing

In an era marked by rampant switching behaviors, “customer engagement” has come to the rescue of firms with its promised potential of long-term loyalty. However, firms' attempts to engage customers without a clear understanding of its long-term impact on consumer wellbeing may backfire the entire effort by hampering customer perceived value and satisfaction associated with the service. Thus, the chapter revolves around the notion that customer engagement, when designed with the vision of adding meaning and value to customer life, becomes in true sense “optimal.” In support of this argument, the chapter documents the cases of customer engagement campaigns which have failed utterly in the long run due to their adverse effects on consumer wellbeing. Light is also casted upon successful engagement events which have brought meaning and wellbeing to all within its ambit. Using insights from in-depth interviews, four major factors ruining engagement efforts have been identified, namely over-engagement, irrelevant content, over-personalization, and inauthenticity.

Artificial Intelligence in the Hospitality Sector

Hospitality is one of the most important sectors of the economy and offers employment to thousands of people. The recent advances in technology has seen that quite a few of the players in this industry have successfully deployed artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. This chapter delves into the details of such deployment in the various processes in this sector and discusses the short-term, medium-term, and long-term impact of these technologies on all the major stakeholders of this industry. The author also looks at the cost benefit analysis of this technologies and concludes that most players sooner, rather than later would be forced by competition to strongly adopt them. The chapter also briefly discusses the changing roles of human employees in this scenario.