Key Strategic Drivers of Customer Engagement : A managerial perspective in the Swedish pension industry

Abstract: Customer engagement has become a hot topic in business journals emerging in the beginning of 2000s, elucidating a new paradigm of marketing science. Despite an increased interest in engagement, both academics and practitioners lack an explicit understanding of the focal firm’s role in the creation of engagement and how a firm’s internal factors contribute to the creation of customer engagement. Simultaneously, the Swedish pension industry has a challenge in creating engagement due to barriers such as complex system structure, industry ambiguity, and customer distance to the time horizon. This paper therefore examines how focal firms can create customer engagement in the context of the Swedish pension industry. Our research develops a holistic model of Customer Engagement Sub-processes and suggests a pivotal importance of internal factors that influence the other engagement sub-processes including learning, sharing, advocating, socializing and co-developing. Mainly, internal factors explain how a focal firm creates customer engagement by aligning employees, employee training and motivation, corporate culture, service quality, and managerial objectives and vision in order to enhance the other sub-processes. Finally, we suggest that customer engagement should be paid greater attention within the industry to enhance business possibilities.