Visibility Into The Ultimate Consumer Is Key To Customer Growth
Understanding the customer is critical to CRM success. For business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, gaining visibility into the ultimate consumer is key not only to CRM success, but to strategic and operational success as well. Unless a method exists to evaluate how products or services are being received in real time, you run the risk of missing opportunities to identify and respond to change or secure additional market share.
Business journals are filled with examples of B2C companies that have relinquished their leadership position, missed quarterly projections or failed entirely in the execution of their operating and marketing strategies. Marketleading companies such as Kmart, Polaroid and Firestone have all suffered the consequences of losing touch with consumers.
Most companies have systems in place, either manual or automated, to capture consumer concerns in order for agents to remedy these situations. Forward-thinking companies go beyond the basics and are using their contact centers to identify and remedy problems that are keeping them from executing on their business strategies. Here are three examples of companies using their consumer contact center to close the loop and gain strategic advantage through consumer relationship management.
McDonalds
McDonalds became the global leader in the quick-service restaurant business by focusing on customer service and operational excellence. In 2003, the company posted its first-ever quarter of negative earnings, and stories about how the company had lost touch with its customers were popping up everywhere.
Fortunately, McDonalds had already started implementing solutions that enabled the company to maintain its strategic advantage while enhancing consumer relations and visibility. In June 2002, the company launched its first national toll-free customer hotline.
Working with Astute Solutions, McDonalds was able to implement a first-of-its-kind closedloop customer interaction system that combines centralized interaction management with local franchise resolution and customer recovery. Toll-free calls and emails from the companys Web site are managed centrally but trigger automatic notification to the McDonalds independent franchise owner best able to resolve the issue. Franchise owners are then able to access the consumer file and even listen to a recording of the call to ensure they have all the information needed prior to attempting to recover any dissatisfied customers.
Utilizing consolidated reports from all consumer touch points, McDonalds now has an additional means of gauging consumer reaction to new offerings, and can more quickly identify issues impacting customer loyalty and identify franchise locations that are not meeting company standards. This has helped the company to once again solidify its position at the top of its industry.
The Scotts Company
The Scotts Company is the world leader in do-ityourself lawn and garden products, with more than 50 percent market share in the US. Scotts was one of the first to implement a national tollfree customer service number and has long made customer care an integral part of corporate strategy. After a merger with Ortho in 1999, the company realized its existing contact center management system was limiting its ability to execute on this strategy.
Working with Astute Solutions, Scotts implemented Astutes closed-loop consumer contact center solution that allowed Scotts to take consumer relations to a whole new level. Astute helped Scotts design a system that not only handled traditional contact center incidents, but also helped the company increase revenues by providing more personalized information to consumers and using information from the contact center more effectively. Here are two examples of how Scotts uses technology to support its business strategy:
- When a consumer contacts Scotts, the Scotts agent can pull up a five-day weather forecast based on a callers location. This allows the agent to personalize product usage questions and instructions based on expected weather patterns and suggest additional Scotts products to help the consumer achieve their desired results.
- Scotts has implemented an opt-in email alert program to notify consumers of emerging pest problems affecting their geographic area. Using threshold-based reporting, Scotts can identify emerging threats early and issue an alert to consumers in affected regions. When the company conducted a followup survey of a recent alert that arose out of the contact center, it found that a startling 65 percent of consumers who opened the alert purchased additional Scotts products.
In both cases, the consumer gets more than she expected enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty and Scotts continues to stay ahead of their competition.
Leading Global Fashion And Personal Care Company
This company also partnered with Astute to strengthen its competitive position. With over 4,000 retail outlets as well as catalog operations supporting leading apparel, intimate and personal care products stores, the company strategy is to lead and influence consumer trends.
Working with Astute Solutions, the company implemented a closed-loop consumer-response initiative that focuses on enhancing the consumer experience while maintaining the relationship with each stakeholder of the brands business. The company needed a business solution that would maintain data integrity, identify potential liabilities and notify enterprise stakeholders in real time.
The initiative has already yielded measurable results, and the company views the solution as a strategic tool in servicing its consumers. Internal functions of the business have benefited from the identification of loyal buying consumers with a 71 percent increase in contact retention and segmentation. Brand recognition is at 97 percent, customer interactions are up 25 percent and customer recovery has gone up 400 percent. The solutions incorporate all channels of communication for the contact center and automate workflow to close the loop initiated in the contact center while keeping issue resolution at the responsible department.
Equally important, the company is now better able to mitigate risk with regard to regulatory issues and has gained better insight into consumer trends across all brands, enhancing brand planning and market awareness. Taking action to close the loop on all interactions is providing the company with real-time knowledge that can be used to improve product quality, identify consumer desires, reduce operational costs and strengthen consumer loyalty all keys to achieving brand dominance.
B2C businesses were the first to embrace technology to help validate business strategies through point-ofsale analytics. Today, technologies exist that help companies better manage all consumer touch points, from presale to post-sale, providing greater insight into how your company is performing.
The contact center can make a significant contribution to that effort. By employing strategies that personalize the consumer experience and ensuring data from the contact center is available throughout the organization, B2C companies can identify and correct product or operational issues, gain a better understanding of how products and services are being used, and transform unhappy consumers into loyal customers.
About Astute Solutions
Winner of four consecutive annual user choice awards, Astute is the leading provider of vertically focused consumer contact center solutions for Fortune 1000 companies. Astute has gained a reputation as having the best consumer-based contact center solution in the customer care market space. Astute provides closed-loop customer interaction systems that help companies gain a competitive advantage by achieving greater visibility into the consumer. These solutions are being used by a number of world-class organizations, including the companies in this article as well as Nationwide Insurance, Georgia Pacific Corp., GlaxoSmithKline, British Airways, Toro Co., Abbott Laboratories, Walgreen Co., Kroger Co., Neutrogena, Sara Lee, Nestlé USA, Kraft Foods, LOreal USA Products and many others.
