Customer engagement: a systematic review and future research agenda

Abstract

Customer engagement (CE) is an emerging research area that is receiving considerable attention not only from the management practitioners but the academicians as well. Regardless of the huge number of research initiated in this area, the available literature looks splintered and lacks conceptual unidirectionality. Therefore, present research aims at administering a domain-based 'structured systematic review' to give an insight into the existing state of CE construct and suggest future research agenda. A total of 191 studies extending from 2005 onwards on this construct were selected and analysed using various qualitative analysis software. We found that customer engagement research has gained notable momentum after 2010 and very few scholars have specialised in studying customer engagement to date. 'CE on Social media', was found to be the most prominent theme of the existing studies followed by 'customer experience and CE', and 'brand prestige and CE'. Lastly, this study proposes an AMDO framework of customer engagement and builds on the future research agenda. Since this study is exploratory in nature, conclusive research can be conducted. Also, our proposed framework is preliminary and needs further empirical testing.