Have just read the “how engaged are your customers?” report from Adobe and Forrester – it is a very interesting document and is a good document for discussion around customer engagement and the changing role of the Information and Technology professionals within organisations.

From a customer engagement perspective the key takeaways are around the changing nature of an organisations relationship with their customers and the move towards providing them with the means, opportunity and platforms to become more empowered customers. Through empowerment comes a higher level of engagement with an organisation and in turn a stronger loyalty

Historically many organisations have created customer focus groups who have been involved in many areas of an organisations growth. For example

• technology companies have customer led user groups who have been involved in the ongoing development of the features and functionality of the technology products
• consumer product companies have customer focus groups which are used to test new product ideas and refine them before going to market

Today there are multiple channels which can be used to support customer engagement strategies and create interdependent relationships between an organisation and their customer community. These channels may online, offline be created and maintained by the organisation themselves or may be owned by an independent organisation – the key to is embrace the empowered and engaged customer voice and to learn from the dialogue – whichever platform or channel it is taking place on.