The Cost of Breaking the Engagement Off
Customer Loyalty is a critical component of any successful customer relationship and can be a key differentiator in a competitive economy where choice is far more available to your customer. Business needs to understand the fundamentals of loyalty. It is not just the redemption of points from a membership system; it includes every interaction both physical and virtual. How you are perceived, how you interact, response times, resolution processes, sales and marketing campaigns, service deliverables, press releases and how engaged you are with your customer at every opportunity. No matter how brief the touch point, it is your chance to WOW your customer, attract your competitor’s customer and increase the value proposition to add to the bottom line results.
Engage employees better across all departments so that they have visibility of your customers. Collective knowledge improves your ability to interact and better embrace your customers. Consumer insights gained from relationships allow you to know the person and then the customer and with the information gained you have the ability to influence customer behaviour and achieve a desired result for both parties.
Today’s world is about meeting the demands of the time poor and efficient customer. As technology continues to advance, companies need to deploy tools that allow interaction points that the customer wants. Web 2.0 has seen the focus shift towards multiple channel engagement. Social communities and mobile technologies have moved business to be more front-office-centric for everyday customer interactions, as communication puts your business in front of a much wider and more diverse audience, willing to scrutinize every relationship.
Business needs to understand that they no longer control consumer behaviour or what products they will buy. This has turned around to the point where the customer is now in control. Through the use of current technological channels, your organisation is now more exposed than ever before. Buying decisions are made on a much more global scale and conversations are no longer confined to the dinning table. Customers can now find out everything about your organisation that will influence their purchasing decisions. Accordingly, Web 2.0 has significantly changed customer behaviour.
As almost everything is now just a click away from the customer, they expect business to react with the same precision and timing in the way they furnish information back to them. For this to successfully occur, CRM feedback systems need to be easy to use, intuitive, have workflows that match your consumers thinking and leverage collective intelligence so that your customer relationship is not departmentalised and therefore restricting opportunity to engage better with your customer. Business must monitor the internet for blogs, comment and other published material and mine that information for improved customer service. If you understand your customers needs you can sell to them more effectively and improve the ROI (return on Investment) made to acquire that customer in the first instance. The cost to maintain them is far less than the cost to find them – don’t lose sight of this.
Detailed data mining and intuitive reporting is crucial to understand today’s customer so that management are able to make the right decisions based around customer needs.
Collectively work together across all departments to develop a strategic approach to connect, interact and share in customer behaviour to gain, maintain and retain customers for improved bottom line results.
Today more customers own communications technology and they use this as their primary source for news and company research. Mobile phones have become more intuitive and conversations are not limited to voice and news travels at an alarming pace – globally and without reservation. They live with high expectations for themselves, for you and they won’t wait around to see if you agree and are not afraid to voice their displeasure. In fact they revel in the ability to use the tools that are available to them today to tell as many people as possible, and make no mistake they have access to thousands of your customers across the Web 2.0 world of technology. A technology that now influences purchasing decisions and company brands like never before.
In summary:
Business and more specifically CEO’s, need to stop believing that they deserve customer loyalty by having a good product. Adopt a whole of organization approach (as discussed in the SFI ROI Study 2006) to engage with your internal customer to better engage with you external customer. They both own you. How staff feel at work and how engaged they are with your company can impact the customer experience.
Business needs to have a social media presence. According to the Cone Study of 2008, 56% of customers felt a stronger connection with a company that provided communication through social media and 57% felt they were better serviced. Look to provide podcasts, blogs, community forums and on line video communication to touch today’s customer.
Social media can no longer be ignored by business as a preferred method for communication. According to Coleman Parkes Research 2008, 78% of companies surveyed stated that they saw improved feedback once they integrated CRM with social media. 75% found that customers saw them as more forward thinking and a much speedier communication channel. This leads to greater customer satisfaction. If you aren't fully equipped and staffed to handle customer complaints immediately and effectively the whole portrayal of being customer focussed can blow up in your face. Customers no longer give you the latitude to choose when you respond or even if you respond.
The research paper sponsored by SFI International and delivered by Competitive Edge Research looks at the difference between satisfaction and Resolution. In the near future, we will look to define key consumer triggers that businesses need to understand to "get it right" and retain and grow customer loyalty which ultimately builds better bottom line
