The Culture of Immediacy: How to Shape Customer Engagement Strategies in the Digital Era

Modern consumers aka Millennials and Gen Z must be dreaming of the ultimate Genie-like algorithm that addresses their online needs the moment they come to their minds. Such aspirations breed a culture of immediacy and the digital consciousness that makes businesses nervously juggle high-tech tools. It’s not surprising, as their customers expect a challenging combo: getting what they want anytime and anywhere.

What’s more, these same customers view their entire journey (no matter how hectic it can be) as something wholesome. In other words, whatever channel they arrive through, they expect a personalized approach and consistent engagement.

Let’s see who these digitally conscious customers are, what they expect, and what to expect from them.

Spoiler alert: all the strategies are inherently connected to data. Right now, data is not even king, it’s definitely joker, and you need to use it wisely. Having data up your sleeve opens many doors as well as sets traps. There are lots of conditions for data to become truly efficient.

One of the main tricks here is to have the right technology. Let’s look at how to leverage data wisely for each strategy, using the example of Salesforce—one of the market leaders among customer success platforms.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is unfolding as we speak. The technologies that it has brought, such as artificial intelligence and the internet of things, changed customer expectations. Once customers got a taste for connected devices and smart technologies, they came to raise the bar of how brands should engage them.

AI gets ingrained into everyday life. The most obvious example is voice assistants (often paired with connected devices), like Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant, and chatbots that are getting smarter, up to the point when it’s hard to tell who talks to you, a robot or a real person.

The same is true for ubiquitous connected devices, from fitness trackers to smart thermostats. According to the Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report, more than three quarters of customers have at least one connected device. As a result, customers have come to rely on connected devices in different ways while pursuing one simple intent—to make their lives easier. In no time, all devices will be able to talk to each other, and we will be quite powerful controlling everything via our smartphones.

When companies adopt these innovative technologies in their daily workflows, they hit multiple goals at a time. They help employees be more productive, leverage precise analytics, serve customers holistically as well as make them happy by delivering on their expectations.

Salesforce has the built-in AI called Einstein that caters to the expectations of both employees and customers:

When on mobile, you can also talk to Salesforce using Einstein Voice Assistant. It’s in pilot phase for the time being, but it’s already smart enough to give you regular voice-activated briefings, capture notes, relate them to associated records (accounts, contacts, cases), open dashboards, and display necessary information.

The proliferation of customer engagement personalization creates a paradox. While customers take personalization for granted, they are also highly concerned about security of their data. They realize that the data-driven world around them is never switched off; it’s tracking, watching, and listening non-stop, and they can’t control it. While most customers accept this state of things in exchange for relevant content, some get panicky and demand to delete everything companies have on them.

For this reason, companies get more mindful about the balance of personalization and data security than they were a few years ago. And it makes sense, as customers need to know that their data is not only safe but also used legitimately. According to the Salesforce State of Marketing report, while most marketing teams try to follow privacy regulations (such as the EU’s GDPR), one-third of them admit it’s quite hard to meet them.

While security is already a standard requirement for customer-brand relationships, ethics is soon to follow. More often than not, customers take into account brands’ ethical principles (toward climate change, charity, or equality) when making their purchasing decisions. Stats say that two-thirds of customers won’t buy from companies with poor ethics.

However, ethical limitations can be blurred due to different companies’ stances toward sensitive issues. Their stances may vary depending on the places of residence, allies, political views, target audiences, etc. The approach to data security and transparency, though, should be universal.

Centralized storage is one of the most essential conditions for data security. It’s hard to control customer data when it’s distributed across various sources, such as legacy systems, clouds, or third-party systems. In order to create a single point of truth, you need a platform that integrates all this disparate data.

Whether you opt for an in-house data system or a cloud solution, you will still run certain security risks. However, out of the two options, cloud services are deemed safer. When data is stored in the cloud, it won’t be damaged or lost forever due to flood or fire, or physically stolen in an office break-in.

Plus, the risk of cyber attacks is lower. Most cyber attacks are run by insiders or happen because of employees’ skill gaps in data security. Cloud service providers monitor access to data so that nobody would take away their clients’ secrets on their flash drive. They also put in much more resources into cyber security, both in terms of the staff and technologies, as their business is built on clients’ trust.

Salesforce positions itself as a secure cloud, and it incorporates a number of security tools into each product it provides. Salesforce also runs Salesforce Trust where users have access to the security status of every Salesforce product in terms of service availability, privacy, and compliance.

Salesforce also has tools for more granular monitoring and complex identity verification for those businesses that are subject to legislative regulations.

The issue of cyber attacks is tackled with Transport Layer Security that provides the most up-to-date data encryption. There are also instruments to control any security gaps induced by employees when it comes to passwords, network configurations, and session settings.