Dig Deeper Into Extensible Customer Engagement (ECE)

What is ECE?
ECE is a systematic approach to customer lifecycle management. It allows companies to more effectively and cost-efficiently manage interactions and campaigns to different customer segments, across all media and channels. This approach initiates a deeper, more meaningful customer engagement over an extended period of time, optimizing revenue potential while building true brand loyalty.

What is the premise?
To make customers care about your brand, you have to show your customers you care about them. How? Each customer interaction provides an opportunity for a subsequent action or series of actions. This leads to a transactional situation via a predetermined move strategy – while simultaneously building a deeper, more personal level of engagement based on trust, familiarity and relevance.

What is a "deeper level of engagement”?
Engagement at an emotional level (trust/gratification), not just rational (price/specification); moving the relationship from transactional to personal; from single to multi-channel; online and offline; single to multi-product; incidental to habitual; passive to interactive; from BI | Digital Marketing brand loyalty to advocacy.

Why is it extensible?

• Extends from transactional to emotional engagement

• Extends over time, across the customer lifecycle

• Extends across large and diverse customer bases

• Extends across multiple media and channels

• Extends into the organization and the interactions of employees with customers

How does it benefit your organization?
Customers: Using enhanced customer insight, mapping and segmentation, ECE provides a blueprint for planning and executing a more targeted, cohesive and cost-efficient customer lifecycle management program. ECE optimizes short-term revenue while building longer-term customer value. Employees: ECE provides employee insight and mapping necessary to align the organization to a customer-centric mode of operation.

How does ECE work?
BI | Digital Marketing will provide services, expertise and an operating infrastructure to plan and implement an extensible customer engagement program. This will be an orchestrated series of cross-media campaigns, interactions and triggered communications driven by data insight and delivered through an automated system. Message, information, content and offers are tailored to touch rational and emotional decision drivers across narrowly defined customer segments. The implementation and delivery infrastructure includes database services, campaign and program management, reporting, and measurement.

What are the barriers?

• The business itself. Most companies were built for a push, not a pull, economy. Organizations are typically structured around products and sales/distribution channels, with silos and business units that are often not aligned with a customer-centric business strategy.

• Employees. A meaningful customer engagement program cannot be sustained unless employees are engaged first. There must be unity of focus, culture and compensation.

• Executive leadership. A lack of commitment from executive leadership, a lack of customer insight, and focusing on short-term objectives can sabotage ECE.
  

Where do we start?
A no-cost initial assessment and consultation will determine a starting point, followed by a proposal with deliverables and next steps outlined. Our intent is to work in partnership to augment, rather than duplicate, a client’s existing resources.

What does it cost?
Program development is done in five stages with clearly defined metrics and deliverables. The fee structure is modular, based on services provided at each stage of development, budgeted on an annualized basis.

How is ECE different than CRM?
ECE extends beyond the analytic and database management software. ECE is an implementation model that brings data to an ongoing customer contact/engagement program, linking disparate marketing activities and campaigns to a common, integrated program. ECE is a methodology that delivers what CRM proposed.

Why is it different than 1:1 marketing?
ECE is in practice what 1:1 marketing professed in theory -- the idea of bringing mass marketing to an individual level. One-to-one marketing is a wonderful philosophy, but requires methodology for execution to go from premise to practice.