Delegates brought their own experiences, questions, and challenges to the table for open discussion.

Below is a summary of the main talking points that arose during the day on the first topic, Engagement & Measuring ROI.

Before we start, we’d like to let you know about a couple of things:

  1. Econsultancy will be holding a roundtable in Shanghai on Wednesday, April 27th.  Exclusively for client-side marketers, the topic will be “Customer Experience (CX) Management” and it will run from 8:30AM – 12:30PM. Client-side marketers in Shanghai can sign up here.
  2. We are also conducting a survey of marketers in Australia and New Zealand about how organisations in the region are approaching customer experience and customer journeys. We are offering a free, advanced copy of the report to those who complete the survey by 14th March, 2016.  Click here to take the survey now!

Both the event and the survey are being conducted with kind support from our sponsor Epsilon.

And now, here is what the participants in our Mumbai roundtable had to say about Engagement & Measuring ROI.

1. Start with the customers

A lot of talk these days is about which platform is the best for engagement. A lot of surveys ask people this very question and some argue that Facebook, or a messaging app are the most engaging platforms.

But the platforms themselves do not determine engagement, customers do. Customers are looking to your product and your company as a way for them to save time, effort, and money.

So to increase engagement, first talk to customers and find out how they interact with the product.

Ask:

  • What are your customers trying to achieve?
  • How are you helping them?
  • What could you do better?

Then, when you have some answers, think about the platforms and what needs to be on the platforms to help them.

For example, many companies have found that Twitter is an excellent place to manage customer complaints and certainly brands find plenty of complaints to manage there.

But when they are surveyed, many customers reveal that they do not use Twitter at all and so they are unaware both of other people’s complaints or the company’s ability to manage them on the platform.

So by standard metrics, the brand is engaging well on Twitter, but in reality the company is not achieving the business goal of managing customer complaints.

2. Don’t limit yourself to a single platform

There is a tendency now to take a single platform and put all of the company’s effort there to providing the best customer engagement possible.

For example, popular Indian grocery retailer Flipkart decided to go ‘app only’ recently as it felt that mobile was the platform on which it could deliver the best customer experience and engagement.

One reason for this is that apps offer companies access to much more data than just a login name and can read all sorts of things via the phone’s sensors – location, phone orientation, even how fast its customers are travelling.

But customers do not operate in this way. Many use multiple devices to connect to the internet and, as the chart below shows, people will do so more and more in the future.

Optimizing for one device may be leaving many others out in the cold.

So, by improving your ability to engage with customers on one device, you may actually be reducing their ability to engage with you across all of the channels they use.

Instead, participants advised looking at multiple channels to see how you can provide value on the ones which matter to your customers.

One added that ‘connecting with people, no matter where they are, is becoming very important for business success’.

And what about Flipkart? How is its ‘app only’ model going? Well, shortly after it ran a five-day Big Billion Day Sale on the app alone, Flipkart backpeddled and reintroduced a mobile website, Flipkart Lite.

3. Segment and personalize to increase engagement

Providing the services your customers want on the platforms that they use will definitely help with engagement, but what about delivering and measuring ROI?

Participants argued that segmenting customers is key to delivering ROI. Segmentation allows you to provide high-quality service to high-value customers and then calculate the value separately of providing that level of service.

Personalization is also key to both deliver ROI and measure it effectively. Participants said that in India vernacular language and personalization should be the result of all of the data that platforms are now collecting.

Then, when you know your customers better, you can provide personalized content which advises them and helps them along the customer decision journey, again and again.

And, a final word on this topic from participants, is that customer preferences are dynamic.

So any segmentation or personalization must be updated regularly to keep enjoying the same ROI.

A word of thanks

Econsultancy would like to thank all of the client-side marketers who participated on the day and especially our table moderators:

  • Muthukumar Sudarsanam, Regional Marketing Manager, India, MEA & SEE, Lloyd’s Register.
  • Ashish Jain, AVP, Reliance Retail.
  • Umesh Choori, VP Analytics, Reliance Jio.

And our sponsor for the event, Epsilon, along with subject matter expert Jeff Evans, VP of Digital, APAC, Epsilon.

Hope to see you all at future Mumbai Econsultancy events!