The New Landscape for Customer Engagement

This chapter focuses on the changed landscape for customer engagement. The challenges for retailers—be they long-established or new to the sector—in these very changed shopper engagement landscapes are considerable. They are especially around the risks of introducing into the enterprise more cost, more complexity, and simultaneously more risk of under-delivery to the shopper. But the opportunities are enormous for those that can create truly shopper-centric enterprises that are genuinely equipped to engage effectively and efficiently with shoppers in the ways in which they now wish to be engaged. Many leaders of retail businesses talk of having seen in the last five to ten years change in consumer landscapes on an unprecedented scale. But, even so, we are today still only in the early stages of a transformation which is rapidly and fundamentally reframing the shopper engagement landscape.