How to achieve audience participation – 2010 Customer Engagement Research Report

The 4th Annual cScape-Econsultancy customer engagement survey is released today - this post is a preview featuring my contribution. You can download the full survey and read the introduction from the cScape site - this is worth downloading since as well as the research it has commentary from many well-known UK and US experts making recommendations in areas of engagement such as social media (of course), mobile, employee engagement and customer service. Here is my contribution.

Reviewing your opportunities for audience participation

In each of the four years of the cScape-Econsultancy customer engagement surveys, I have been struck by the diversity of aims of organisations in managing customer engagement. But with results now being reported we can see clear, common benefits. Analysis of this years survey of benefits achieved, suggests that the benefits are greatest where active audience or customer participation occurs. The three main types of participation are:

1. Recommendations participation. 41.8% of respondents reported that recommendations of product, service or brand had been a benefit of engagement initiatives. It seems that many customers love to participate! This is shown by the success of UK retailer Argos who received over 2 million customer reviews in a post-Christmas Email campaign to prompt participation.

2. Community participation. 34.4% reported benefits from audience participation in online communities or support. Only certain types of brand lend themselves well to communities on their own sites, but participation beyond your own site, for example through self-help support services like www.getsatisfaction.com should also be reviewed.

3. Feedback participation. 30.3% said they received benefits from regular customer feedback, for example through satisfaction surveys, Net Promoter Score or product feedback (there is some overlap with the first category). More intriguingly, 19.5% had seen benefits from customer participation in innovation and design. For me, this is one of the most exciting forms of online engagement - gaining direct feedback in a structured way through customer panels is tremendously powerful. I have compiled a list of some of the free and paid services that can be used for gaining direct feedback on website experiences at http://bit.ly/feedback-tools.

Benchmarking methods of achieving active participation within and beyond your sector can help you develop a participation strategy. Another aspect of participation strategy is to put in place measures which show the degree of participation.