Online customer engagement – pressure is on

Analysts publishes a new report saying that the recession has led organisations to concentrate on improving their online engagement strategies

Forrester believes that information and knowledge management professionals who deal with public websites need to use a mix of different technologies from an ecosystem of providers – no single platform will meet all of their needs.

According to the Online Customer Engagement Software Ecosystem report’s authors, Stephen Powers, Matthew Brown and Peter Schmidt, the shaky economy has increased pressure on companies to engage customers more efficiently online. We agree that websites offer unmatchable economies of scale when it comes to interacting with customers, enabling better lead generation, increasing engagement, conversions and customer retention rates.

What the report doesn’t say is that the emergence of the real-time Web has also accelerated the need for technologies that can dynamically personalise the online experience and keep pace with rising consumer expectations for instant gratification. We believe this trend will be an even bigger catalyst for investing in these technologies in the months and years to come.

Forrester sees investments rising too:

“Our most recent data suggests this trend will continue into the next year. Consider that in 2010, 51% of organisations 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.”

While investments in online customer experience technologies are on the rise, Forrester notes that time-to-market for site changes, campaigns, and customer experiences have suffered. According to their client inquiries, “disjointed technology has become a prime factor behind time-to-market issues and the ability to achieve improved online processes.”

Forrester believes that four attributes will characterise the next phase of development of the Web. Online experiences will be: customised by the end user, aggregated at the point of use, relevant to the moment, and social as a rule, not an exception. In this report, we highlight companies that are providing online experiences that already exhibit one or more of these characteristics. To prepare for the future, customer experience professionals should develop multichannel personas, include social media behaviours in ethnographic research, prepare atomized content, establish an environment for testing new experiences, and seek out highly skilled interaction designers.