Readiness, Use and Enablers of Digital Customer Interaction Tools in Austria

This contribution presents a first holistic measurement of Austrian B2B companies’ readiness to improve customer interaction and sales performance through the application of digital communication services. To this end, the necessary steps to craft a sustainable and comprehensive corporate strategy for this subject matter are highlighted and the status-quo of implementation in Austrian Businesses is presented by means of a novel digital customer interaction metric on a scale of 1 to 100. The discussed digital communication services entail – but are not restricted to – well-known social media outlets as well as the interaction facilitated though digital communication such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and YouTube, which belong to the most widely used tools globally. The conducted empirical analysis, which was carried out by means of a quantitative analysis among 74 representatives from different economic sectors, assessed the effects, which directly influence the degree to which Austrian businesses have implemented structured digital communication processes in sales and customer interaction service. The thereby gathered evidence supports the hypothesis of personal and industry-specific factors exhibiting the most significant effect on the introduction of digital customer interaction tools, as do the sales experiences based on digital lead and prospect generation. However, other often cited criteria, such as the size of the company, have not been found to directly influence the level of implementation likelihood.