Running the MiM Award over the past couple of weeks has been like throwing a fancy dress party. We’ve issued the invitations, ordered the beer, and now old friends and new are getting in touch. ‘Shall I wear this?’, ‘Can I invite Sarah, she wants to come as a penicillin molecule?’
In particular, I’ve had a number of conversations with people who don’t think they have a customer engagement costume. Of course, they do: let me say up front that anyone who is building tools that help businesses communicate with customers, at any time, in any location, is involved in customer engagement.
PWC’s Trendsetter Barometer is quite clear about the scope of what is being done at the moment – 47% of companies surveyed are using mobile and social media channels for some form of customer outreach. Right now, popular applications include better targeted marketing campaigns, word of mouth promotions, and customer feedback for product development.
Of course, this is just a snapshot of what is popular now. The unique ability of mobile devices to be always present and always useful throughout a customer’s day means there are thousands of opportunity to improve customer engagement in ways which are not even mentioned here, and the MiM Award is designed to pick out great ideas that help companies do that.
For inspiration, our good friends at Twilio have some great case studies on the use of mobile throughout the customer engagement cycle, for example:
- using mobile to deliver and track effectiveness of localised advertising campaigns
- replacing click-throughs with tracked call throughs
- and completely changing the customer’s experience of purchasing parking – from paper tickets and machines to touch phone and open barrier
So, to summarise: if your business helps enterprises use mobile tools to communicate with their customers, or serve their customers more efficiently, then it’s in customer engagement. Hope that’s clear: just don’t ask us about the dress code for MiM, unless you want to come as a penicillin molecule.