In this rapidly expanding digital economy, the number and variety of digital devices that customers use to interact with companies continue to grow - from emails, social media and video conferencing tools to AI-powered interactive voice response systems and chatbots.
However, associated with all this is an increased tendency for customer interactions to be isolated from one another, causing incoherent and ineffective communication across the customer journey, and consequently, poor customer engagement. This becomes even more acute when such interactions on digital venues are interspersed with customer interactions in physical stores with company employees. How should a company engage with its customers in “one voice” so as to deliver seamless, harmonious and reliable interactions across diverse interfaces in the customers’ journey?
In this paper in the Journal of Service Research, Weatherhead faculty members Jagdip Singh and Satish Nambisan, along with additional coauthors, address this question by offering a conceptual model of “one-voice” strategy for customer engagement and illustrating it with examples from diverse industries and markets.
The central premise of this approach is that companies need to learn from each customer interaction—i.e., generate both local intelligence (highly contextualized knowledge pertaining to specific types of interactions) and collective intelligence (more generalizable knowledge that can be applied across a broad range of interactions)—and use this learning to coordinate future customer interactions. One-voice strategy thus relates to configuring (or linking) such learning and coordination capabilities appropriately to enhance engagement across the entire customer journey.
This research not only opens new pathways for future research at the intersection of machine-age technologies and customer engagement but also offers valuable practical insights for marketing professionals on ensuring continued customer engagement in an increasingly rich, complex and dynamic digital landscape.