Methodology

We don’t profess a marketing philosophy, we apply a methodology that employs new technology and media tools to a fundamental business purpose. We call it ECE: Extensible Customer Engagement. Over the past 14 years we have developed a strategic framework and an operational process for more effective customer lifecycle management – leveraging business intelligence, digital technology and creativity to initiate a deeper level of customer engagement and to sustain that engagement over time.

History
Customer Engagement (CE) evolved from Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM), which offered the right premise but got lost in its own technology and largely failed to deliver. Rather than focusing on database management, CE is about leveraging data insight to engage in more meaningful customer interactions. We have taken CE to the next evolutionary stage: Extend engagement over time and across the customer lifecycle by extending it to the organization. Our approach is not a philosophy or a technology; it’s an extensible methodology. We call it ECE: Extensible Customer Engagement.

Premise
Moving customer interaction to action provides the opportunity to initiate a response interaction that, when sustained, creates a more personal, extensible engagement. In turn, that engagement serves to modify and reinforce purchase behavior while building familiarity and brand trust.

The foundation: employee-customer engagement
An organization cannot effectively execute a customer engagement strategy without its employees, culture and operations aligned to optimize every customer interaction, at every touch point. Employee training, incentives, compensation and performance metrics are essential to effect the right behavioral modification and reinforcement.

A deeper level of engagement

• Customer engagement is defined on two levels: rational (price, specification) and emotional (trust, self-actualization).
• It’s not about the brand. It’s how it affects the lives of different customers – how it makes them feel.
  
• To make customers care about your brand, you must show that you care about them:
  
  • Engage at a rational and emotional level
    
  • Engage online and offline
    
  • Engage from single channel to multi-channel
    
  • Engage from single product to multi-product
    
  • Engage from one-time purchase to repeat purchase
    
  • Engage from incidental to habitual
  • Engage personally, not just transactionally