Enterprise engagement is a sub-discipline of marketing and management that focuses on achieving long-term financial results by strategically fostering the proactive involvement and alignment of customers, distribution partners, salespeople, and all human capital outside and inside of an organization. Enterprise engagement is distinct from the traditional sub-disciplines of financial management, marketing, sales, operations, and human resources in that it seeks to achieve long-term success by integrating these various traditional business disciplines to consistently focus the organization on identifying and meeting target audience needs. [1] Enterprise Engagement is related to brand engagement, a term developed in Great Britain in the 2000s to describe an integrated external and internal marketing approach to achieving long-term success for a brand. Enterprise Engagement applies similar principals to the achievement of an organization's overall financial objectives.
Organizations run on the basis of enterprise engagement work collaboratively across departments and divisions to collectively find the best way to achieve long-term financial results by maximizing all human capital, from customers and distributors, agents, or other value-added resellers, to salespeople, employees, and even vendors and shareholders. [2] This approach unifies the organization around a brand and mission that continually seeks to find better ways to help the end-user customer, enhance the relationship with channel partners, suppliers, and employees and ultimately create new opportunities for the business, [3] rather than simply finding ways to improve processes. It looks at human capital in an integrated fashion, rather than separating customer and distribution partner engagement from sales or employee engagement.
Traditional organizations have a siloed approach, in which each business area often works quite independently from the other. Each business unit may or may not be directed to have specific goals related directly or indirectly to improving value or service to their audience – whether that be employees, channel partners, vendors or customers. The silos have a tendency to focus on maintaining and improving processes in order to promote their influence and share of resources. [4] This is demonstrated in the willingness of many companies to sacrifice customer satisfaction to save money on automated telephone answering systems; in this case they have determined that the cost savings of eliminating customer service employees outweighs the benefits of creating a more satisfying customer experience. It is easy to measure the cost savings involved with this decision, but not so easy to measure the impact on customer engagement over time.
While enterprise engagement is related to the field of integrated marketing and has part of its roots there, it is more related to Management in that it requires an integration of all business disciplines across the organization, and therefore cannot be easily organized under one specific sub-discipline of management or another.
Enterprise engagement has its roots in research conducted in the 1990s connecting financial results in Sears stores to the engagement of employees. [5]
In their 1993 book, The One to One Future, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers were among the early proponents of customer-focused rather than product- and process-focused marketing, [6] and identified the necessity to address the human element of relationships between customers and an organization.
Additional research on the connection between customer and employee engagement began to emerge in 1999, when Gallup published its ground-breaking book First, Break All the Rules by Buckingham and Coffman which was based on a meta-analysis of decades of employee and business outcomes data from over 100,000 employees and a wide range of industries. [7] They also began publishing studies on the cost of disengaged workers. [see: Would You Fire Your Boss, Gallup Management Journal, Sept. 2007.]. [8] In 2002, a study was released in Great Britain demonstrating a financial link between customer and employee engagement. [9]
In 1998, A.J. Rucci, S.P. Kim, and R.T. Quinn, authors of "The Employee–Customer Profit Chain at Sears" (Harvard Business Review, 1998), identified a direct connection between employee engagement and profitability in Sears stores.
Separately, in the July–August 2005 issue of the Harvard Business Review, the concept of linking customer and employee engagement that is the distinctive element of enterprise engagement was articulated in an article by John H. Fleming, Curt Coffman, and James K. Harter, entitled "Manage Your Human Sigma. [9] " The authors wrote, "It’s possible to arrive at a single measure of effectiveness for the employee-customer encounter, this measure has a high correlation with financial performance." Fleming along with co-author
In 2011, David Cameron, then Prime Minister of Great Britain, created the Employee Engagement Task Force "to launch a national conversation about employee engagement right across the private, public and other sectors, with a view to improving the U.K. economy." [10]
In the meantime, the technical committee responsible for the management of ISO 9000 quality process management issued Quality Management Principles and formal standards 10018 for the quality management of people involvement and competence. The principles and standards include the concept of an enterprise approach to engagement; i.e., a consideration of the need to address customers, employees, vendors, distribution partners, etc., in an integrated way to ensure alignment of priorities and expectations.
In August 2019, the Business Roundtable changed its definition of the corporation to focus on the need to benefit all stakeholders – customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders. [11]
In fall of 2020, the World Economic Forum issued recommendations for Stakeholder Capitalism metrics. [12]
In November 2020, the Securities & Exchange Commission required publicly held companies in the US to report on their human capital practices to the extent they are material to their businesses. [13] In June 2021, the SEC announced that it would begin the process to enhance human capital disclosures to require more detailed information. [14]
The emergence of enterprise engagement is based on the growing ability of organizations to measure the long-term benefits of engagement in a way that has drawn increasing attention to the subject from leading investors in public companies.
Engagement involves a broad range of disciplines and tactics. A comprehensive study of what motivates people in business conducted in 2002 by the International Society of Performance Improvement for the Incentive Research Foundation identified the following key factors:
Businesses use a wide array of tactics to address the above issues, including:
The expertise, products, and services related to these various practices comprise the emerging field of Enterprise Engagement. Bottom line: Much more research is needed to better understand how these various elements affect customer and employee engagement, and financial results.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or another organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information.
Marketing management is the strategic organizational discipline that focuses on the practical application of marketing orientation, techniques and methods inside enterprises and organizations and on the management of marketing resources and activities. Compare marketology, which Aghazadeh defines in terms of "recognizing, generating and disseminating market insight to ensure better market-related decisions".
Relationship marketing is a form of marketing developed from direct response marketing campaigns that emphasizes customer retention and satisfaction rather than sales transactions. It differentiates from other forms of marketing in that it recognises the long-term value of customer relationships and extends communication beyond intrusive advertising and sales promotional messages. With the growth of the Internet and mobile platforms, relationship marketing has continued to evolve as technology opens more collaborative and social communication channels such as tools for managing relationships with customers that go beyond demographics and customer service data collection. Relationship marketing extends to include inbound marketing, a combination of search optimization and strategic content, public relations, social media and application development.
The loyalty business model is a business model used in strategic management in which a company's resources are employed so as to increase the loyalty of customers and other stakeholders in the expectation that corporate objectives will be met or surpassed. A typical example of this type of model is where quality of product or service leads to customer satisfaction, which leads to customer loyalty, which leads to profitability.
Organizational behavior or organisational behaviour is the "study of human behavior in organizational settings, the interface between human behavior and the organization, and the organization itself". Organizational behavioral research can be categorized in at least three ways:
A performance indicator or key performance indicator (KPI) is a type of performance measurement. KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity in which it engages. KPIs provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making and help focus attention on what matters most.
Shareholder value is a business term, sometimes phrased as shareholder value maximization. The term expresses the idea that the primary goal for a business is to increase the wealth of its shareholders (owners) by paying dividends and/or causing the company's stock price to increase. It became a prominent idea during the 1980s and 1990s, along with the management principle value-based management or managing for value.
In management, business value is an informal term that includes all forms of value that determine the health and well-being of the firm in the long run. Business value expands concept of value of the firm beyond economic value to include other forms of value such as employee value, customer value, supplier value, channel partner value, alliance partner value, managerial value, and societal value. Many of these forms of value are not directly measured in monetary terms. According to the Project Management Institute, business value is the "net quantifiable benefit derived from a business endeavor that may be tangible, intangible, or both."
Employee engagement is a fundamental concept in the effort to understand and describe, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the nature of the relationship between an organization and its employees. An "engaged employee" is defined as one who is fully absorbed by and enthusiastic about their work and so takes positive action to further the organization's reputation and interests. An engaged employee has a positive attitude towards the organization and its values. In contrast, a disengaged employee may range from someone doing the bare minimum at work, up to an employee who is actively damaging the company's work output and reputation.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to business management:
An incentive program is a formal scheme used to promote or encourage specific actions or behavior by a specific group of people during a defined period of time. Incentive programs are particularly used in business management to motivate employees and in sales to attract and retain customers. Scientific literature also refers to this concept as pay for performance.
Customer retention refers to the ability of a company or product to retain its customers over some specified period. High customer retention means customers of the product or business tend to return to, continue to buy or in some other way not defect to another product or business, or to non-use entirely. Selling organizations generally attempt to reduce customer defections. Customer retention starts with the first contact an organization has with a customer and continues throughout the entire lifetime of a relationship and successful retention efforts take this entire lifecycle into account. A company's ability to attract and retain new customers is related not only to its product or services, but also to the way it services its existing customers, the value the customers actually perceive as a result of utilizing the solutions, and the reputation it creates within and across the marketplace.
Service climate is a concept rooted in the study of social climate, describing the collective perceptions within a group regarding customer service practices, behaviors, and values. It relates to how employees view organizational priorities and standards related to customer service quality and reflects how these priorities influence employee and customer behavior. The term "climate" is used metaphorically, likening it to atmospheric climate in that service climate, like weather, is relatively stable across groups but can vary over time within the same group, influencing the behaviors and attitudes of those within the environment. Originating from research in social psychology, service climate has grown as a topic of study within business management and organizational psychology, and its principles are applied in various fields to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
A management control system (MCS) is a system which gathers and uses information to evaluate the performance of different organizational resources like human, physical, financial and also the organization as a whole in light of the organizational strategies pursued.
Business Relationship Management (BRM) is viewed as a philosophy, capability, discipline, and role to evolve culture, build partnerships, drive value, and satisfy purpose.
Employer brand is branding and marketing the entirety of the employment experience. It describes an employer's reputation as a place to work, and their employee value proposition, as opposed to the more general corporate brand reputation and value proposition to customers. The term was first used in the early 1990s, and has since become widely adopted by the global management community. Minchington describes employer brand as "the image of your organization as a 'great place to work' in the mind of current employees and key stakeholders in the external market. The art and science of employer branding is therefore concerned with the attraction, engagement and retention initiatives targeted at enhancing your company's employer brand."
Business relations are connections between stakeholders in the process of businesses, such as employer–employee relationships, managers as well as outsourced business partners. The association of businesses began relationships that have been constructed through communication channels such as the likes of telephones, personal contacts, and e-mails. These types of contacts are maintained and deepened through similar channels in internal businesses and organizations.
Employee morale or workspace morale is the morale of employees in workspace environment. It is proven to have a direct effect on productivity.
A social employee is a worker operating within a social business model. Following an organization's social computing guidelines, social employees use social media tools both for internal workflow and collaboration purposes and for external engagement with customers, prospects and stakeholders through a combination of social media marketing, content marketing, social marketing, and social selling. Social employee programs are considered to be as much about culture and engagement as they are about business processes and best practices. In addition to increased leads and sales, social employee best practices are said to improve business outcomes important to social media marketing, such as increased connections and web traffic, improved brand identification and "chatter", and better customer advocacy.
Employee-driven growth (EDG) is a business philosophy that centers an organization’s growth on employee support, engagement, and development. It uses employee recognition, engagement, and rewards as strategies for business growth and customer satisfaction.
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