Customer Engagement

Abstract

Stories are probably as old as the human race, but in recent years, businesses have increasingly come to recognise the importance of storytelling. This chapter offers an exploratory review of how leading UK retailers are using stories as part of their approach to customer engagement on the Internet and to offer some reflections on the role of storytelling in customer engagement by retailers. The chapter provides an outline of the characteristics of storytelling within the corporate world and reviews the ways storytelling is employed by the UK's top ten retailers to improve customer engagement. This review suggests that while the selected retailers posted stories on the internet to promote and publicise a wide range of topics, customer engagement was the fundamental underlying theme. The authors suggest that the retailers' use of storytelling in customer engagement raises a number of issues, including the ways stories can be used to enhance customer engagement and brand loyalty and challenges to the positive images of retailers look to portray in the stories they post on the internet.