As a founding member of the Enterprise Engagement Alliance (on Twitter and LinkedIn), Peppers & Rogers Group has a vested interest in pursuing the issues involved in both customer and employee engagement. Our feeling is that the whole idea of "engaging" customers and employees is something that has become more and more obvious with the increasing use of collaborative technologies, social media, and customer-centric management practices.
However, while we all have our own ideas about what "engagement" should mean, because we all kind of understand the point that this word is getting at, generally, the fact is there's no real consensus around any particular definition of the concept. And unless we define the term more precisely, we'll soon hear complaints from the press, the blogosphere, and the digerati that the term "engagement" is too squishy and fungible to be useful. Wally Bock's recent post is a case in point.
When the same kind of controversy initially surrounded the whole 1-to-1 marketing and CRM definition, Martha and I proposed a very simple, four-word definition of CRM: "Treating different customers differently." This definition has pretty much survived intact, and was once even described by a Gartner analyst as the simplest, most obvious and straightforward definition of the CRM movement (importantly, he was talking about the business discipline of CRM, not the software domain).
So our equally simple, obvious, and direct definition of engagement is: "proactive involvement."
When a customer is engaged with your brand, they are proactively involved with it. They may help specify the product or service you're delivering to them. They may refer friends or colleagues to you. They may take an interest in your success or failure. All these behaviors are indicators of their engagement with the brand.
When an employee is engaged with their work, they are proactively involved with it. They may not wait for orders, but instead take their own initiative to solve problems. They may self-organize, with other workers, to accomplish the company's goals. They may actively promote and defend the business with friends, colleagues, or even among strangers. These behaviors indicate that an employee is engaged with the career they have at your firm.
Here is another opinion about engagement - http://www.mikemoran.com/biznology/archives/2009/10/why_is_engagement_important.html - "...we often use engagement as a surrogate for loyalty or intent to purchase or some other valuable business goal, when it is in fact just a means to an end...."
In another context and in another time, Albert O. Hirschman wrote a book called Exit, Voice and Loyalty. He was asking the question: how do people respond to "decline in firms, organizations, and states"?
Emigres, as he pointed out, were choosing exit. Those who stay in their countries, unhappily even, were considered loyal. It's the people with "voice," however, that would try to change the existing system from within -- or contribute to it to make it better. Your ideas around engagement, which strike me as true, seem to be along the lines of giving people voice and encouraging them to use it. If they don't, they are likely to be tomorrow's emigres. Loyalty is no longer enough.
So, yes, I agree that proactive and positive involvement is a good definition -- assuming, by "positive," you mean helpful. But I see you want to exclude the "highly active complainer." What about the "constructive criticizer"? That apparently engaged person has a voice -- and it's one you should definitely want to hear. Don't ya think?
Don,
Customers being sparked into engagement like a network of dry trees being sparked into a forest fire. Wow!
Let's stay close to the forest. In my belief the journey from just a customer to a committed or even better, an engaged customer, is like a journey through the wood.
As a company we try to get our customers moving towards us on our main path. But the company forest is a rather awkward forest. Along the path there are many other companies trying to lure away our customers. Some are yelling to draw attention, others are more seductive in their ways. But all of them are trying to get our customers moving away from us. And their are no roadblocks or fences for our customers. You can easily leave the main road and walk between the trees. Anywhere you like.
For an organisation customer engagement is the combined effort of making it worthwhile for our customers to keep moving towards us. It is the combined effort of us being inviting and valuable enough and our customer being committed enough to keep walking.
Robert:
I really like this as a definition of "committed" for a customer.
What I also like about it is that it it could be a good model for what precipitates a cascading effect in a social network. In a network, "influence" is a function not just of the persuasiveness of the influencer but of the susceptibility of the one being influenced. (For instance, networks of "committed" customers could be sparked into "engagement" with a company the same way a network of dry trees could be sparked into a forest fire.)
Great definition, would like to add a thought.
I believe a customer can be engaged to a company and its services without being proactive yet. Maybe committed is a better word for this customer state.
I believe a company should then be inviting enough to turn this committed customer into a proactive customer. The company should providing a low or no barrier platform for sharing ideas and suggestions for improvement. That might turn a committed customer into an engaged one.
So the journey between the committed state (ready to engage) and the engaged state rests mainly with a company.
It is very constructive definition and being in analytical business I would like to figure out how to measure it. You have mentioned in your post or comments NPS, and I am well aware of it's shortcomings, but it is probably the best indicator of customer engagement. Most NPS detractors correctly point out the fact that it is not an actionable metric, but I am not aware of any ONE metric that by itself can provide such a guidance. There is a good reason humanity needed 3 points of reference for successful navigation. Does anyone know methodology for measurement of employee engagement?
Here are my two cents. I have always thought of engagement as how people think (intellectaul component) and feel (emotional component)about an organization which leads to incremental effort. I have often struggled with the incremental effort part of this definition because it can imply that engagement is meausured in part by the number of hours an employee works. It can also imply that an employer who is seeking to improve employee engagement is doing so to get more time from them. Neither implication is necessarily desirable.
Proactive is a great term. To me it makes me think of initiative, focus and intent, with or without incremental effort. A precursor to proactivity may include an intellectual component AND/OR an emotional component. So, proactive works for me here.
Regarding the concept of negative engagement, to me it is more intuitive to refer to these people as disengaged and actively disengaged rather than negatively engaged.
When you put it that way, Paul, I think certainly do have a point. But that means that a company's goal should not be to have "engaged customers" but to have "positively engaged customers," right?
Is this a more useful way to think of "engagement"? Anyone else have an opinion on it?
I think you've nailed the basics of engagement - proactive and involved. With one or the other you can't say anyone is engaged.
I do think there is a place for a negative number. As social media has shown - I can have a following that is positive and supportive - but I can have a following that is negative and unsupportive. Many companies are just as concerned with fixing the problems (the negatives) as they are in reinforcing the positives.
I think engagement should have a similar approach. The net promoter score (love it or hate it) is a net result of positive and negative numbers and I think that engagement should include that as well.
Only defining your engagement by looking at the positives is a bit like only measuring your business by the revenue line - with no visibility of the cost line. True performance is profit - the net result of positive and negative numbers.
More on this issue. Someone suggested that to be "engaged" a customer should be "emotionally invested" - should that be part of the definition?
Well, I would agree that people who are more emotionally invested are more likely to be engaged, as well, but I don’t think you HAVE to be emotionally invested in order to be engaged.
For instance, if I elect to get heavily involved in specifying the type of computer I get from Dell, or if I take the initiative to change how an airline alerts me to flight interruptions, then by the “proactive involvement” definition I would be an engaged customer. And I think that this is an accurate description. But I am not emotionally invested.
Also, what if we’re talking about a B2B customer? If Walgreen Drugstores gets heavily involved in specifying the computer system they are buying from NCR, for instance, wouldn’t that be classified as “engagement” on Walgreen’s part? But it’s not emotional.
As for employees, the same goes. Having an employee take proactive steps to accomplish the job or to finish the task even beyond his or her job description would, in my mind, constitute engagement. And while it’s likely that the employee is emotionally invested, as well, it isn’t necessary, is it?
I've had some feedback on this definition, and we'll be having a full discussion of the issues'
One test of a good definition is to consider what would NOT be included in it. So applying this test, we'd have to ask what actions, attitudes, or other customer-employee states would not be considered “engagement.”
In my opinion, simply being a satisfied or loyal customer does not make you “engaged,” at least not by this definition. Being high-value doesn’t make you engaged, nor are you engaged just because you have a high degree of preference for a product. Instead, I think if engagement requires proactive involvement, then an engaged customer is a customer that can be expected to initiate actions themselves which demonstrate their involvement or concern for the brand, and an engaged employee is someone who takes a similar approach toward his company or his work at the company.
And what about negative engagement? Could a customer or employee be inclined to take negative actions, and would THAT be considered "engagement"? I had an email conversation with someone who suggested that it might indeed suggest engagement, but I'm inclined to think not. I think a workable, useful definition of "engagement" should probably be designed so as to exclude the highly active complainer, and to exclude the destructive employee. Not to exclude such activities would limit the usefulness of the term itself, don't you think?
So, perhaps a REVISED definition would be "proactive and positive involvement" on the part of a customer or employee. Any thoughts on that?.