Customer Engagement in a Big Data World

Purpose: We propose that the literature on customer engagement has emphasized the benefits of customer engagement to the firm and to a large extent ignored the customers’ perspective. By drawing upon co-creation and other literature, this paper attempts to alleviate this gap by proposing a strategic framework that aligns both the customer and firm perspectives in successfully creating engagement that generates value for both the customer and the bottom line.
Design/methodology/approach: A strategic framework is proposed that includes the necessary firm resources, data, process, timeline and goals for engagement, and captures customers’ motives, situational factors, and preferred engagement styles.
Findings: We argue that sustainability of data-driven customer engagement require a dynamic and iterative value generation process involving 1) customers recognizing the value of engagement behaviours and 2) firm’s ability to capture and passing value back to customers.
Originality/value: This paper proposes a dynamic strategic value creation framework that comprehensively captures both the customer and firm perspectives to data-driven customer engagement.