By M. Isi Eromosele

Customer Engagement behavior became prominent with the advent of the social media phenomenon. Creating and stimulating customer engagement behavior has recently become an explicit aim of organizations in the belief that engaging target customers to a high degree is conducive to furthering business objectives.

“Repeated interactions strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment a customer has in a brand.”

A customer’s degree of engagement with a company lies in a range that represents the strength of his investment in that company. Positive experiences with the company strengthen that investment and move the customer up the line of engagement.

What is important in measuring degrees of involvement is the ability of defining and quantifying the stages on the range.

Engagement is a holistic characterization of a consumer’s behavior, encompassing a host of sub-aspects of behavior such as loyalty, satisfaction, involvement, Word of Mouth marketing, complaining and more.

• Satisfaction: Satisfaction is simply the foundation, and the minimum requirement, for a continuing relationship with customers. Engagement extends beyond mere satisfaction.
• Loyalty - Retention: Highly engaged consumers are more loyal. Increasing the engagement of target customers increases the rate of customer retention.
• Word of Mouth marketing - advocacy: Highly engaged customers are more likely to engage in free (for the company), credible (for their audience) Word of Mouth marketing. This can drive new customer acquisition and can have viral effects.
• Awareness - Effectiveness of communications: When customers are exposed to communication from a company that they are highly engaged with, they tend to actively elaborate on its central idea. This brings about high degrees of central processing and recall.
• Filtering: Consumers filter, categorize and rate the market from start to finish, creating multiple, overlapping classifications through tagging, reviewing, rating and recommending.
• Complaint-behavior: Highly engaged customers are less likely to complain to other current or potential customers, but will address the company directly instead.
• Marketing intelligence: Highly engaged customers can give valuable recommendations for improving quality of offering.

The behavioral outcomes of an engaged consumer is what links Customer Engagement to profits. From this point of view:

“Customer Engagement is the best measure of current and future performance; an engaged relationship is probably the only guarantee for a return on your organization’s business objectives.”

Simply attaining a high level of customer satisfaction does not seem to guarantee the customer’s business. 60 percent to 80 percent of customers who defect to a competitor said they were satisfied or very satisfied just prior to their defection.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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