Marketing Experts Explore How and Whether Customer Engagement plus Customer Experience Equals Marketing Success
How do high profile companies gain and keep customers in today’s disruptive, competitive market? The Brierley Institute for Customer Engagement ponders whether “Customer Engagement plus Customer Experience” offers the solution. “CE + CX = A Winning Formula” was the title of a lively panel discussion hosted by the Brierley Institute for Customer Engagement October 30 at the SMU Cox School of Business.
How do high profile companies gain and keep customers in today’s disruptive, competitive market? The Brierley Institute for Customer Engagement ponders whether “Customer Engagement plus Customer Experience” offers the solution. “CE + CX = A Winning Formula” was the title of a lively panel discussion hosted by the Brierley Institute for Customer Engagement October 30 at the SMU Cox School of Business.
As the visionary behind some of the world’s most recognizable rewards programs, Institute benefactor and Executive in Residence Hal Brierley has been both a market disruptor and a disrupted marketer. He believes customer engagement programs play a key role in the way marketers “navigate the waves of disruption,” but such programs are only part of the formula. Brierley was joined by Darshan Gad, vice president of marketing and customer innovation, Neiman Marcus; Frank Hamlin, executive vice president and chief customer officer, GameStop; and Sherif Mityas, chief experience officer, TGI Fridays. Brierley Endowed Professor Marci Armstrong, director of the Brierley Institute for Customer Engagement, moderated the discussion, exploring what these popular brands are doing to enhance customer experience and whether and how customer engagement is factored into those efforts.
According to Brierley, rewards programs were originally envisioned to enhance customer engagement, a way to gain share of wallet, but he contends that “share of attention and how customers spend time—i.e., customer experience—is the next big battleground.” TGI Fridays’ Sharif believes successful marketing is a right brain/left brain endeavor: “All customers have both. You have to engage with both sides . . . and ask yourself how did you engage with the customer at the meaningful moment in that customer’s journey.”
To keep current customers and attract new ones, GameStop’s Hamlin cites his own formula: “Celebrate the passion before the transaction.” Gad of Neiman Marcus reinforces the importance of both engagement and experience: “Because customer experience and customer engagement are so important, marketers and business folks who understand both and understand the intersection [of both] are the ones who are going to succeed. They’re actually the ones getting all the attention, all the resources, all the dollars—and they are ultimately the ones driving all the business.”
The symposium was the fourth in a series hosted annually by the Brierley Institute for Customer Engagement.
About the Brierley Institute for Customer Engagement at SMU Cox
The Brierley Institute, founded in 2016 as the first academic institute in the nation devoted to the study of customer engagement, provides support for research, scholarship, teaching and corporate partnership in the area of customer engagement including, but not limited to, loyalty programs, customer insights and relationship management, in the Cox School of Business. Committed to a transition from traditional customer loyalty to a more holistic view of Customer Engagement, the Institute explores the potential possibility of data-driven personalization and how to motivate behavior change and drive incremental revenue. Funding to establish the Institute was provided by the Hal and Diane Brierley Foundation.
