Customer Service
Big gap in retailer customer engagement, claims research
August 3, 2022
There is a significant gap in how retailers are engaging with customers and it comes at a time when delivering exceptional experiences is more critical than ever to retention and revenue. Yet less than half of global business leaders rate customer engagement strategies as good or excellent.
That's a prime finding of a report from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, sponsored by Intercom.
The report revealed effective customer engagement is business critical amid economic uncertainty, according to a press release on the findings.
According to the report, 88% of global business leaders recognize customer engagement has a significant impact on their bottom line and 92% view effective customer engagement as "very" to "extremely'' critical to their organization's success, but only 9% say they have excellent engagement today.
Less than half are investing in new or improved customer engagement technologies, and only 40% say they are effectively using data to send customers the right message at the right time via the right channel, according to the release.
"As customers engage with leading brands that provide exceptional accuracy in their personalization and recommendations, they've come to expect that same level of service from all companies," Blake Morgan, author of The Customer of The Future: 10 Guiding Principles for Winning Tomorrow's Business, said in the release. "Accurate engagement today is more than just knowing a customer's name — it requires a deeper understanding of their preferences, values and demographics to show that an organization cares and can provide relevant engagement."
The main obstacles that prevent businesses from fully realizing these benefits include:
- Nearly half (44%) say a lack of collaboration and siloed efforts are the top impediments to successful customer engagement.
- Thirty-two percent say their organizations are failing to properly distribute data-driven customer insights throughout the organization, and another 32% say customer data is siloed or hard to extract insights from. Sixty percent also don't feel they're doing a good job of tailoring communications to customers with data.
- Over half (56%) of respondents encounter difficulty finding the right personnel to manage customer engagement efforts, and nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents "strongly agree" or "somewhat agree" that their organization is in need of employees with experience and expertise in customer engagement.
"This research shows that while business leaders understand the importance of customer engagement, they are encountering barriers in execution," Alex Clemente, managing director of Analytic Services at Harvard Business Review, said in the release. "Fostering a culture that supports more personalized engagement, eliminating data silos, deploying the right technologies and recruiting robust talent are all barriers that organizations will need to overcome to achieve effective customer engagement."
The global survey was fielded in April 2022 of 317 business leaders.
