Revolutionizing Customer Engagement: How this Disruptive Strategy is Changing the Game
Customer engagement is poised for disruption. Upending the current brand-centric approach, we create ecosystems where consumers come together as communities behind common purposes. Brands that join an ecosystem are thus perceived as native to (or at least part of) the purpose and therefore able to achieve greater engagement with consumers.
Customer journeys and engagement
The customer journey is made up of numerous touch points from the moment the consumer considers a product/service all the way to the decision to purchase. Customer engagement is about providing a customer experience at each of those touch points. Doing it right grows a brand and builds customer loyalty that can drive revenues. These experiences are about inspiring customers to interact with businesses and such engagement are both digital and physical (“phygital”). Indeed, Constellation Research reports that companies that improve engagement can increase cross-sell revenue by 22 percent, up-sell revenue by 38 percent and order size by 5 to 85 percent. Reputation.com research backs this up, showing that a high rate of customer engagement increases Reputation Score, with direct links between high scores and revenue in multiple industries, including Automotive and Healthcare.
Purpose-led Data Ecosystem for creating audiences
Whether you are trying to build awareness of new products, acquire new customers or engage them in their journey, a purpose-led self-sovereign data ecosystem is the latest approach to hit the Marketing/Customer engagement space.
Traditional marketing puts the business or brand first, then customers and partners surrounding the brand. Since customer journeys cross multiple touchpoints including that of partners and other businesses, the messaging of each different business are often not joined up to the customer’s motivation and journey. This results in fragmented engagements.
Purpose-led ecosystem marketing seeks to address this misalignment through an ecosystem approach that puts purpose first. By focusing on a purpose, ie. the reason for an ecosystem to exist, the ecosystem can be designed to drive alignment between relevant partner businesses as well as the customer journeys, binding everything together with a cohesive, purpose-led narrative. This narrative enables marketers to create audiences that are aligned to the purpose.
Case Study: SejutaKG Health Hunt
SejutaKG, a health movement in Malaysia, is a purpose-led self-sovereign data ecosystem that did just that.
SejutaKG set the purpose of living healthier lifestyles for its ecosystem: it wanted to address how 71% of deaths in the world are caused by non-communicable diseases which can be prevented by reducing common risk factors such as physical inactivity and eating unhealthy diets.
With Dataswyft’s support, SejutaKG created the brand story and mission around this strong purpose. This helped SejutaKG build multiple audiences to achieve its goals. More importantly, contributions from partner businesses enable the ecosystem to generate revenues and be sustainable.
Inspiring engagement across customers and partners
Campaigns can only do so much. Metrics and bringing together customer data across partners are key to successful partner and customer journey engagement. For that, SejutaKG uses Dataswyft’s Self-sovereign Data Wallets. Verified data is the digital form of verified behaviours, and the use of a data wallet to hold such data makes it possible to reward, incentivise and promote changes in customer habits that are not only verifiable, shareable and scalable, but can potentially reduce obesity rates at a macro level.
The SejutaKG data wallet holds verified data (behaviours) of weight loss and exercising. This data wallet was recently used for a “health hunt” campaign which involved collaborations with physical retailers and brands to incentivise healthy eating and lifestyles. Among the tasks that health hunters had to complete were exercising and getting free fresh fruit from designated retailers.
Self-sovereign Data Wallets enable location-based marketing and verified behaviours without compromising on privacy. Since customers own their data (which is what “self-sovereign” means), their location and their verified behaviours/data can be confirmed without having to divulge their identities. And since these actions are verified, this makes rewards, incentives and recommendations more accurate, creating a win-win for both customers and businesses. The data wallet is the beginning of a Programmatic “Phygital” engagement platform to enable the automatic matching of products and services with consumers for purpose-led ecosystems.
Says Erika Seow, Director of Marketing and Campaigns at Dataswyft, the ecosystem designers of SejutaKG: “The focus on healthier lifestyles as a purpose helps drive customer engagement to develop better health habits. This can then be matched with brands and retailers who are aligned on the same purpose. The ultimate goal of SejutaKG is to reduce obesity rates, currently at epidemic levels in Malaysia.”
Better together and better with partners
A purpose-led ecosystem approach brings an entire community together, combining customer journeys, customer acquisition, partners and inspiring engagement that is self-reinforcing due the strength of the purpose. Best of all, any data generated can be used with another ecosystem since customers bring their data with them, rewarding the producers of the data when they are used again and again.
Dataswyft offers a Data Ecosystem Program to help businesses design and create purpose-led ecosystems. Businesses that prefer to innovate and learn to do it at their own pace can join the HATLAB Studio.
Are you ready for a purpose-led ecosystem? Or join one of our ecosystems? Contact Dataswyft to learn more.