Customer engagement stretches in many directions and continues to evolve as technology paves the way for new forms of digital interaction. According to the recent report by eConsultancy, 86% of businesses believe that an online customer engagement strategy to be either important or essential to their success. Our speciality within this environment has focused traditionally on engaging customers and prospective customers through the form of referral marketing – electronic word of mouth through incentivised member get member schemes, as we have developed in cooperation with Dell, Experian and O2 to name but a few. Unsurprisingly, the provision of these services have led us to look more closely at parallel technologies within the engagement world and in turn to consider how these solutions influence our world and vice versa.

One example of this relates to customer reviews – once the battle ground of the SEO-led ‘content is king’ strategy, this has now evolved into a critical aspect of the consumer product selection process. Those companies providing proximity and availability of ratings and filtered commentary within their website reduce the call for the user to look elsewhere by providing all details in one place – take the example of the Reevoo integration into the O2 Ireland shop or indeed the incentivised review functionality in Otto’s Austrian store. The importance of consumer reviews has more recently been underlined by the integration of product and advertiser ratings with Google AdWords and within Google Products – no doubt having a fairly clear influence on the popularity of individual listings and their subsequent ranking.

Elsewhere,  once the defining feature of the Amazon personalised homepage, 3rd party recommendation engines have become widely available for retailers to personalise their user experience. Initially this has been in the form of customer activity analysis but more recently harnessing the profiling power of facebook connect – customising what you see based on your facebook activity and stretching this over to, for example, suggest presents for your friends.

So what started as 3 disparate technologies are rapidly merging around the topic of ‘recommendations’. Whereas the offline word of mouth phenomena will remain key to every business, the ability to digitise this and more importantly to integrate this with a coherent review solution and recommendation engine will be key to paving the way for an increasingly powerful interaction with your target audience.

As a final thought, taking your 3R strategy one step further and integrating it into your own rewards platform provides an ideal framework to show appreciation in a consistent and cost-effective manner be it through mobile, web or offline.

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