Continuous Customer Dialogues: Strategies for Growth and Loyalty
Enterprising companies around the world are increasingly developing and implementing customer-centric growth strategies, based on deepening relationships with their customers, to emphasize long-term satisfaction over short-term sales conversions. With these strategies, the key indicator of success is customer lifetime value, a measurement of the customerâs value over the life of the relationship. Other key metrics include share of wallet, products per customer, average revenue per user loyalty, retention and onboarding conversion rates.
The challenges of implementing a customer-centric strategy can be addressed along two dimensions: Do you have the right insight into the customer, and do you have the ability to respond to the needs and interests of the customer based on that insight? An organizational self-assessment will identify the key challenges and opportunities for any organization:
- Customer-specific Offers. Rather than pushing products, does your organization have enough insight about the customer to create offers based on the individual needs of those specific customers at the moment of interaction?
- Consistent Customer Experience. Does your company provide a consistent experience for each customer-initiated contact across multichannel touch points, defined as the Web, call center, kiosk or retail outlet? Does your company take this opportunity to understand the geographic, demographic and psychographic characteristics of the customer and build trust and strengthen their emotional ties to the company?
Leading customer-oriented companies see every customer interaction as an opportunity to retain a valued customer, increase revenue, build loyalty or strengthen a brand. These enterprises look to customer relationship management solutions to help them connect with customers, anticipate their needs and deliver the products and services they want â when they want them.
The need for customer insight and responsiveness to that insight is the foundation and driving rationale for the emerging CRM concept of continuous customer dialogue through multichannel touch points.
The continuous customer dialogue vision brings together strategic issues such as customer profiling, customer data integration and multichannel, closed-loop and real-time marketing into a single comprehensive framework. The following outlines how organizations can implement this vision, adapt quickly to their dynamic business needs and deliver measurable business results.
Create a Single View of the Customer
Companies across the globe have commented that this is the most challenging data aspect of their IT initiatives due to disparate, legacy, external and nonintegrated systems. The term âcustomer data integrationâ refers to the creation of the single view of the customer. Todayâs reality is that most companies must unify customer data from numerous systems and databases, and will need to continue this practice because of compliance regulations and other requirements. New technology approaches, such as Web-services and service-oriented architectures are making this process easier and more efficient than in the past.
The additional complexity with building customer profiles is to incorporate both the individual unit and the aggregate unit (family member versus family; procurement manager versus company; legal business unit versus global entity) needed to deliver a consistent customer experience across influencers and buyers in the same unit. Building a comprehensive profile also includes historical, personal and contextual data on the basic purchasing unit as the foundation on which you can take the next step in enhancing your customersâ experiences with your company.
Deploy Analytics to Gain Customer Insight
Gaining customer insight requires analytical capabilities as a first step for developing predictable customer behavior based on a set of criteria. Depending on the volume and complexity of customers, products and services, organizations may deploy various data mining, data analysis or optimization technologies. Market leaders are deploying self-learning analytics that learn continuously as customers accept and decline offers. A self-learning analytic system can output relevant feedback, including which characteristics are most predictive of customer acceptance, and adjust targeting for all subsequent interactions. Results from this self-learning analytics enable organizations to receive significant âliftâ in the channel that was deployed with this strategy.
Make Every Customer Interaction Count
Each customer-initiated contact â whether it is through the Web, call center, kiosk or retail outlet â is more than an opportunity to address a specific transactional need; it is an opportunity to strengthen the overall emotional ties with the customer. Customer-initiated interactions are proven to be several times more effective and efficient as sellerinitiated interactions. Though customer contact through a call center may be focused on a specific problem, the knowledge and attitude of the call center employee, and the efficiency with which the problem is resolved contribute to the customerâs overall impression. Therefore it is vital to make a concerted effort to use all inbound interactions as opportunities to build trust with the customer. This in turn, supports the continuous customer dialogue strategy and serves the companyâs long-term financial interests.
Deliver Consistent Multichannel Customer Service
As customers become more sophisticated, they want to trust the companies they buy from and want to build a lasting relationship with these companies. At the same time, brand loyalty is eroding through the commoditization of products and services, a process that is being accelerated by multichannel sales and marketing through the Web, call center, kiosks, direct mail, advertising, agents and retail outlets. As a result, there is a need for more innovative and creative approaches to gaining customer trust and enhancing the customer experience. Dialogue with the customer has always been the most successful way to build this customer loyalty, and now newer processes and technologies are available to organizations seeking to engage their customers in consistent and continuous dialogues across all channels. Multichannel dialogue must provide value to both parties and requires organizations to change their processes. Not all organizations are ready for this; however, it is the only way to differentiate in todayâs market and realize a lift in revenue.
Close the Loop
The previously discussed techniques and technologies do not displace âtraditionalâ outbound marketing. However, they do report campaign results in real time, enabling marketers to understand which customer attributes most influence offer acceptance. For example, a report produced as a result of inbound marketing activities may indicate what characteristics (number of children, income, ZIP code, etc.) will most likely lead a customer toward accepting or rejecting an offer made in outbound marketing. Using this insight, marketers can identify the ideal customer for each offer and execute outbound campaigns to those customers within hours. They can also initiate event-driven campaigns, targeting customers who meet certain criteria during interaction with the company; for example, exceeding defined service levels or spending levels that are characteristic for their profile. With more extensive customer profiles, it is possible to segment customers to a greater degree, and offer products and services that address specific needs. Targeting specific needs in outbound offers increases both customer loyalty and response rates. The result can be unprecedented campaign velocity.
Continuous Customer Dialogues
The more you know about your customers, the more your marketing and sales initiatives can be structured to maintain a continuous dialogue with them. Mastering inbound and outbound communications across multiple channels is a process that perpetuates itself. The more you maintain a seamless conversation with customers, the more opportunities you have to learn their wants and needs. In turn, you now have more chances to propose products and services that address these wants and needs. Continuous dialogue improves your decision making while affording you more opportunities to be part of the customerâs decision-making process. Customers who have a positive experience with your company want to buy more products. The key takeaway is making them feel comfortable doing business with you by proving that you know who they are and what they desire from your organization.
Conclusion
Maintaining a continuous dialogue with customers is the key to a customer-centric growth strategy. Customers have choice. In order to win their loyalty, the company must win their trust. Delivering a consistently positive experience to the customer through an ongoing, multichannel dialogue enhances value for both parties over the lifetime of the relationship.
At the end of the workday, itâs all about your customer. All of your effort â your research, your product development, your marketing efforts, the investment youâve made in your operations â comes down to capturing the customer at the point of interaction. You want more customers to buy more products, so you need them to feel comfortable doing business with you. You need to find a way to make your channels highly productive and focused. You need to interact with your customer at the precise time to increase your share of wallet, cross-sell, upsell, all while increasing the emotions for loyalty and retention.
