Today, your customers are engaging with your brand in so many ways, it can seem daunting. Social media, information availability, and choice have forever changed the way in which people buy and make decisions about those purchases.
Just think of all the technological changes over the last few years alone. Every company has had to make adjustments to stay competitive. Conventional marketing has given way to customer experience where engagement, rather than promotion, is key. Armed with insight derived from data, analytics, and technology, it’s possible to truly engage your customers in an informed, intuitive, and timely manner.
Recently, Quaero created the Accelerated Customer Engagement (ACE) Survey to help us explore the different aspects of customer engagement and determine how customer engagement programs are created and evolve within customer-focused companies. The survey was divided into three areas: 
Strategy & Analytics, Data & Technology, and Organization & Process. Responses were scored on a simple scale of 1-4, where 4 was strongest and 1 weakest. We sent the survey to a number of clients, prospects and leaders in the industry and the response was incredible. We had a variety of senior marketing and customer intelligence professionals across many different industries participate to determine how they fare compared to their peers.
What did we learn? Quite a few noteworthy points, many of which should be insightful to marketers and CI professionals. Two in particular, however, stand out: Our respondents rated their performance highly on the Strategy & Analytics dimension and poorly on the Data & Technology dimension. Our experience as well tells us that many companies tend to have strong visions for how to leverage customer intelligence and analytics skills, but often see the desire hampered by limited access to and understanding of the customer data they have available.
In fact, the number one problem respondents identified is the overall lack of data understanding within their organizations. Only 6% indicated that their organizations have a universal understanding of data that is supported by source documentation. More than half of the companies must rely on technical experts with an understanding of data sources or on documentation that is infrequently updated and not widely available.
The ACE Survey was an effort to find out what challenges are hampering CI professionals’ abilities to become more engaged with their customers across touchpoints and channels. After all, that is something we all aspire to do. It’s clear from our research that marketers and CI professionals are making strides with respect to customer engagement, but still face challenges.
In the next post, we’ll give you a thorough overview of how our participants ranked across each of the dimensions and dive more deeply into the data and technology dimension that rose to the top of the list as the single greatest area of improvement. Interested in taking it yourself? You can find it here.
