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Top1. Introduction
Marketers require engaging customers and managing relationships with customers to grow in the competitive business environment and to achieve business excellence (Mazurek-Łopacińska, 2021). Companies focus on a number of steps in the marketing process – understanding the marketplace and customer needs, designing a customer value-driven marketing strategy, and constructing a marketing program (Novandalina, Khajar, Ghoniyah, & Wijayanto, 2022). All the steps are important to understand customers and to serve them efficiently and effectively. Companies understand the marketplace and customer needs by collecting and analyzing relevant marketing information, and by generating deep customer insights (Mandal, 2018). Companies then aim to engage customers and to manage profitable customer relationships. Companies will not succeed unless customers are engaged and unless effective customer relationships are developed and managed properly (Sarkum & Syamsuri, 2021). Companies adopt a number of measures and strategies to engage customers on a deeper level. They employ digital and social marketing extensively to achieve the purpose (Nagaraj, 2020).
The importance of engaging customers and managing customer relationships cannot be overemphasized. Companies will not be able to compete in the business environment and achieve success in the long run unless they are able to engage their customers, and develop and build profitable customer relationships. Although the topic is important, there are few studies addressing the issue. The study aims to address this research gap.
The objective of the study is to understand the importance of engaging customers. The study aims to analyze how companies engage their customers, and develop and manage effective and profitable customer relationships.
The methodology of the study is to conduct a conceptual analysis and to understand the connections among engaging customers, managing customer relationships, and achieving business excellence. The research design consists of conceptual analysis of the literature and generating insights from such analysis.
The novelty and the contributions of the study lie in the fact that a conceptual analysis of the various aspects of customer value, customer engagement, customer relationship management, and partner relationship management is done. The relationships among all these aspects are highlighted. The importance of digital and social media in customer engagement and customer relationship is emphasized. Both academicians and practicing managers will benefit from the discussions. Academicians will be able to analyze and understand the conceptual aspects related to customer engagement. They may suggest models related to customer engagement and customer relationship. The models may be effective and may be implemented. Managers will be able to realize the various practical aspects related to customer value, customer engagement, and customer relationship management. They will be able to analyze the existing strategies and initiatives in their companies and to understand which strategies and initiatives should be implemented in future. Business ecosystems and business platform perspective of the issues are also discussed. All these will help companies to engage better, to manage customer relationship, and to achieve business excellence in the long run.
The study is structured as follows.
The importance of building relationships with customers is discussed in section 2. The sub-sections discuss the two relationship building blocks – customer value and customer satisfaction (discussed in sub-section 2.1) and customer relationship levels and tools (discussed in sub-section 2.2). The roles and importance of digital and social media in customer engagement are discussed in section 3. Consumers generate substantial amount of marketing content. Consumer-generated marketing is discussed in section 4. Companies should develop relationships not only with customers, but also with other channel partners like suppliers, distributors, and retailers. Partner relationship management is discussed in section 5. Section 6 focuses on the salient points of the study with sub-sections 6.1 and 6.2 highlighting the theoretical implications and the managerial implications of the study respectively. Section 7 concludes the study with sub-sections 7.1 and 7.2 highlighting the limitations of the study and the avenues of future research respectively.