A Look at the Impact of Customer Feelings on Technology
Customers, unlike data, like to be recognized as individuals, catered to in customized ways, and freed to interact with the sales process as they see fit, not as the enterprise process dictates.
I remember the days when I did business with proprietors who knew my name. I used to wander into a store where they would know my preferences and took extra special care of me because I was a "regular."
When I do business today, I don't expect a sales representative to remember my name, understand my preferences, or take care of me because I am a "regular." I seem to be constantly stuck on hold, in automated voicemails that do not recognize my customer number, or responding to emails from people who keep telling me that I'm important but ignore my requests for answers. When I get a live sales representative, their own computer system seems to make it impossible for me to get the answers to my questions. Or I catch them in a flurry of follow-up because I show up on their task list as a request to be processed, or as an irate customer that needs to be reasoned with.
In this day and age, the businesses I work with should be better at communicating with me as a person; not worse. And the sales representative I talk to should be interested in my business and not be a frustrated employee who tells me that he is just doing his job. These days, I am a frustrated customer who is tired of being treated as a stranger by companies I've done business with for years. Or worse, tired of being treated worse because they know I am a customer and not a new prospect.
Real Customer Focus for the First Time
Shortly after the first computer came into use, marketers everywhere began struggling with the idea of realizing the same gains that their business operations counterparts were achieving through automation. Accounting systems, inventory control, and enterprise management systems were revolutionizing back-office productivity, and upper management didnt want this revolution to stop there. Databases and selling systems were created and evolved into contact management and salesforce automation. All of the solutions focused on improving the enterprises ability to catalog and interact with the customer in the same way that the enterprises interacted with their accounting systems and raw materials. From the beginning, what was missing was a focus on the customers need to interact with other people during commerce.
Somewhere along this journey, customers have devolved into a world that is no longer human in nature. Customers are now pieces of data, trapped in a binary world cataloged as a sequence of ones and zeros. As companies spend billions on enterprise-level CRM systems in an attempt to "manage" customers in this data-intensive world, customers are revolting, and satisfaction levels are at all-time lows.
What's Missing?
Enterprise customers have embraced CRM like drowning sailors clutching a life preserver, particularly as we've watched the economy slump further and further into the doldrums. Why? Because enterprises in general have never done a good job of acquiring, organizing, and acting on customer data, and with the slowing economy, maximizing the value of every single customer relationship has become paramount. CRM systems have drastically improved companies' ability to contact, track, and respond to customer "events," even allowing proactive marketing campaigns and drastically improving forecasting.
CRM has evolved from humble beginnings as a customer data repository to include applications for salesforce automation, call center management, marketing management, PRM (partner relationship management), employee relationship management, and other "corporate" customer management functions. The resulting CRM suites provide a foundation for enterprise customer data management, but still lack much of the customer-centric functionality to provide robust, revenue-generating customer interaction. As the Gartner Group points out in CRM in 2002 and Beyond: CRM Application Suite Myths, " suites will be a part of most CRM solutions. Wrapped around these systems will be multiple point solutions and technologies that deliver the true value and power to interact with the customer." Clearly, CRM suites provide the foundation for enterprise customer data management. But as Gartner also states, " the immaturity of enterprise application architectures and the suites themselves will make reliance on CRM suites a poor or even dangerous standalone solution. They are more gap than solution."
What is still lacking is the emphasis on customer communications that makes a sale happen - the responsiveness, customization, and personal attention that knits a relationship into a sale. Customer-centric communication fills that gap with a cleverly designed and very sales-knowledgeable set of applications that make managing customer interaction both personal and effective. A customer-centric solution accurately identifies the key elements of customer interaction that a sales representative or customer support representative needs to have with a prospect or customer and develops interactive multiple channel support for those interactions.
Every "customer management" product available today still ignores this simple truth: customers may have data, but customers are not data.
How Many Opportunities Are You Losing?
For most businesses, it is not a question of losing opportunities because of your communication, it is about how many opportunities you are losing. Prospects' and customers' expectations for quality communication are increasing exponentially, and the capacity to meet their expectations is nearly impossible without help. Most likely, your sales process is suffering from the same illness. How many times have you walked away from a business because of poor follow-up? How many times have you paid more for a product because of better service?
Poor communication and/or lack of responsiveness is a leading reason customers leave businesses for a competitor. The most disconcerting issue is that there is no intent to deliver bad communication and most businesses pride themselves on great service. Poor communication often results because it is impossible to follow up properly with every opportunity.
Another problem that confronts sales organizations is the quality of the follow-up. For most, it takes time to build the relationship to the point at which people buy; and during the evaluation period, customers expect a quality experience. It's not enough to simply make phone calls and expect the rapport to come through voicemail messages. In fact, frequent calling can do more to create distrust than to endear a prospect to your business. What value do you leave in a voicemail message?
The Customer Communication Innovation
Customer-centric communication platforms are being driven from inception by the concept that customers want to be customers. Given the chance to exercise their individual preferences, they will not only buy, they will buy loyally from an enterprise that recognizes their individual values. What is more important is that customers don't like to be managed. People don't like to be managed. Before computers, business was done person-to-person. In a customer-centric approach, that fundamental principle has not changed.
Literally billions of dollars have been spent by enterprises on in-house solutions, custom integration, and CRM platforms in attempts to better manage the customer (data). Yet none of these approaches has managed to escape the "data-centric" models dictated by conventional data-processing thinking and moved to the "customer-centric" model that creates real, valued customer interaction and active buying environments.
The customer-centric communication product suite provides not only follow-up, but also personalization at the individual interaction level. For example, after the completion of a sales call, a sales representative can follow up by clicking on a button that invokes a scripted set of actions that provides relevant information for moving forward. In addition, this process can solicit feedback and referrals. This truly is a "customer-centric communication" process emphasizing the philosophy of asking, listening, and responding accordingly throughout the entire campaign.
A customer-centric communication platform enables businesses to take a different approach to common media used in their everyday business, such as:
- Survey automation. Customer-centric surveys give every customer and prospect the opportunity for feedback. Withquestions focusing on relationships as much as product and educational information, being customer-centric means changing surveys to fine-tune specific needs in order to understand the changing attitudes and trends of customers. Best of all, marketing and customer support staff are able to make these changes and add new surveys on demand, without depending on development resources to find out how customers feel about your business.
- Online feedback forms. Customer-centric processes include several places for feedback so customers and prospects don't have to look too hard to share their concerns or ask their questions. With automated responses, intelligent routing, and notifications to specific personnel to insure quick response to questions and concerns, the ability to quickly create new feedback forms is important for understanding how customers feel as well as ensuring proper response and customer satisfaction.
- Profile choice and self-management. Giving customers the ability to choose their profile is fundamental to being customer-centric, and sending information that customers don't want is the biggest mistake you can make.
- Automated personalized correspondence. Automated messages not only address your contacts on a first-name basis, they also make your staff look like great communicators with little or no effort on their part. Whether saying "thank you" after a sale or asking for feedback after a support call, attention to the details of your customers' profiles and personal experiences is the key to making them feel important.
- Educational newsletter series. Customer-centric newsletters do more than send content to your list of names on a monthly basis; they offer the ability to educate customers automatically with custom content based on their interests and the transactions they are experiencing. o Individualized Web site content. Static Web sites can be detrimental to customer satisfaction. Customer-centric Web sites identify visitors and differentiate customers with acknowledgement of their preferences and personal selection of content with access to profile information behind log-on and password authentication.
- Personalized marketing series. Personalize marketing to prospect and customer profiles ensuring they see what they want to see and don't see what they don't want. Permission to send and follow through with that commitment are critical in effective marketing and credibility with your customers. o Referral marketing campaigns. The ultimate test of customer satisfaction is the extent to which your business is built through referrals. Customer-centric businesses have tools to help their satisfied clients evangelize their business among friends and associates.
- Automation, automation, automation. Successful customer-centric communication happens automatically, following up on behalf of your sales representatives or customer support personnel. This eliminates the potential failure of task items being left undone. It's not the "scheduling" of an activity; it's the completion of the activity with a personal touch.
- Access to real people. Customer-centric communication leverages personal productivity through automated sequencing of messages, Web sites, surveys, and more. Each message connects contacts with your staff, which effectively increases their individual power to communicate and gives staff the ability to support customers with content that is fresh and relative to their circumstances.
Unlike current CRM campaign management that originated from dealing with customers as target "classes," customer-centric communication campaigns provide uniquely customized dialogue between sales representatives and customers that reflect each customer's needs and preferences - singling out unique relationships and giving control of the interaction to the sales representatives while balancing permission and choices given to the customer (with options for corporate campaign design and standardization of messaging, branding, and content). This results in ongoing, sales-actionable customer feedback and word-of-mouth marketing.
Ease of Implementation
Unlike the massive integration and consolidation efforts required for CRM platform implementations, customer-centric communication platforms must be designed to be rapidly configured and deployed by nontechnical marketing and sales personnel. The very nature of being customer-centric demands regular revisions to the communication process, and this cannot be done with significant disconnects between customers and the staff that are attempting to communicate with them. Customer-centric systems require a strong set of tools to administrate and change campaigns quickly, or they are not customer-centric at all.
Structuring and scripting customer interactions must be designed to allow implementation and supervision of campaigns by marketing and sales personnel within weeks, not months. Your solution and modifications to it must be up and running within a matter of days providing effective communications campaigns and follow-up. Imagine empowering your marketing staff to design and execute campaigns (and subsequent revisions) without dependence on the IT staff. Granted, there may be exceptions when you'll need to edit something and may call on a resource for help; but your projects should be manageable and attainable as something you can learn and implement on your own.
Immediate Results and CRM Integration
Customer-centric communication can be implemented alone or as an enhancement to existing enterprise software systems to provide the missing elements of a complete, proactive, customer-centric sales solution. Simple SOAP, XML, or URL calls can invoke functionality to tie communications to your current enterprise platform. However, your campaigns may need to go to work immediately to generate customer interaction and follow-up and to be integrated when time permits with other CRM functionality in your organization.
Multichannel Support
Customer-centric communication platforms can be accessed in wired and wireless configurations with support for both user and customer multichannel access. Email, your Web site, and customer wireless access can all trigger customer-centric communication responses as well as provide sales, marketing, and support triggers for action within your organization. When integrated with your call center operations, your communication platform can become the "assured response" that "ensures customer satisfaction."
