Forrester’s latest research “Real-time Unified Customer Engagement: how to delight empowered users” confirms what is core to our beliefs: the importance of reaching the right customer at the right time with the right message. Customers today are more empowered than ever when it comes to making purchase decisions with increased accessibility to information and having multiple touch point options with brands.

Adopting a real-time unified customer engagement (RUCE) strategy helps companies deliver consistent and timely interactions, which in turn, bring in higher customer satisfaction and average profit margin per customer.

The report defines RUCE as “an enterprise-level initiative where numerous organizational stakeholders – e.g. sales, marketing and customer service – work together to deliver consistent messages that address each buyer’s needs through multichannel and multi-touch interactions aimed at engaging buyers in a relevant and timely fashion.”

That’s a lot to take in, isn’t it? Basically it means clearer internal communication of external interactions for more informed and consistent reactions. That being said, here are 5 key building blocks of a successful RUCE strategy:

  • Formally defined performance metrics to gauge the effectiveness of customer engagement efforts;

  • A centralized repository of product and service information;

  • The ability to personalize customer messaging by using customer behavior and feedback data;

  • The ability to segment customers by multiple criteria; and

  • Facilitating employee collaboration in the execution of a consistent CEM program.

Touching on the last point, only 21% of the businesses surveyed had implemented a RUCE strategy through a CRM that “enables them to convert the wealth of information that lies in customer feedback and behavioral data into relevant and timely customer interactions across numerous touch points”; and they were the ones who outperform their peers in growing revenue by 64% more year-over-year (11.3% vs 6.9%).

The three key technology enablers support RUCE initiatives are:

  • Customer relationship management

  • Customer database management

  • Customer communications management

The bottom line: putting in a formal strategy to manage and understand customer interactions will make your engagements more relevant and profitable. Interested in learning how to get started?

Talk to us to learn how Totango can address all 5 of those building blocks. Comment below, contact us or send a tweet.