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the Free CMSWire NewsletterThe notions of web presence and customer engagement aren’t new, but are gaining in interest as web presence expands beyond the corporate website and as companies must know more about effective means of connecting to customers. Many questions swirl around understanding what engagement is, what defining characteristics should be measured and why, how to align metrics to goals and which metrics matter the most. Context — or even hierarchies of context — plays a major role for selecting metrics, analyzing the data returned by metrics and understanding what to do with the data.
Engagement, like influence, is at heart an abstract. For purposes of customer engagement on the web, engagement can be thought of as the measurement of attention to something, which takes us to the "can of worms" of what constitutes customer attention to a company’s web presence. For each company, what comprises engagement can be fairly individual, generally derived from a matrix of attributes, in turn leading to a matrix of metrics. As web presence becomes more far-flung and sophisticated, the metrics, tools, data and analyses become more complex.
Which are the right attributes and metrics? For each company, they are the ones that measure actions and events that relate to key business context and goals. Many domain experts offer many different metrics from which to choose, any of which could be relevant to individual companies. Once a matrix of metrics has been selected, it’s likely that each organization will constantly need to assess that set of metrics for validity and effectiveness – and that the change of metrics selection will be continuous, hopefully to reflect actions taken in response to analysis, new markets explored and company innovations.
Jumping into an assessment of customer engagement is not a simple undertaking and will take a lot of work. Monitoring web presence on sites other than the corporate website is still a new undertaking, with the tech tools still evolving. Also in continuing evolution is the understanding of how to interpret data collected and how to use that data to make decisions for solution offerings, customer connections and communication and business strategy. A company will need to define both the current status and the desired status for what constitutes an "engaged customer" — yet another definition set that should continuously evolve.
Why Understanding Engagement Matters
Most organizations have moved well beyond clocking the number of hits on a web page. Not only do these organizations have a tall order to provide personalized experiences as well as high-quality content on the corporate website, but visitors to the site must be sufficiently engaged to take action. What sort of action is taken depends on the company’s strategy for web presence and customer engagement, further in support of overall business strategies and goals.
Forrester analyst Stephen Powers covers web content management solutions, and to a certain extent, web engagement. In The Online Customer Engagement Software Ecosystem, 2010 Powers discusses engagement:
Customer Engagement Remains Top of Mind For Companies
The uncertain economy has increased pressure on companies to engage customers more efficiently, especially via online channels that offer lower-cost ways to interact with customers, enable better lead generation and increase customer retention rates. This is likely why investments in software to manage customer experiences has held up relatively well in the current economy.Our most recent data suggests this trend will continue into the next year. Consider that in 2010, 51% of organizations plan content management implementations, more than one-third will implement or upgrade customer relationship management tools and one in four is planning marketing automation software investments."
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