Process control for monitoring customer engagement

Customer engagement behaviors (CEBs) with marketing content or contacts, such as downloading a whitepaper or attending an event, can increasingly be recorded for individual customers. We develop a five-step process for monitoring CEBs. This engagement monitoring process requires understanding which CEBs relate to relevant outcomes and detecting when engagement levels are aberrant. The process is illustrated with a case study, which uses 4 years of data tracing 160,448 customers from 784 key accounts of a leading professional service provider that uses content and contact marketing. As marketer move away from traditional yearly marketing plans in an effort to operate in real-time in the face of vast change in the communication environment, process control of this kind can allow marketers to be agile without losing strategic discipline.