The days of courting your customers' hand in marriage and earning long term loyalty are over. We must work harder to gain the life long commitment of our beloved customer. Fickle, they can be anywhere and want to see us any time and so we must go no matter where our betrothed may be . They don't seek us out like they used to. The customer doesn't go to the store to browse much anymore... the store must go to the customer.
We must travel to a place where standard measurements turned upsidedown as a result of the tectonic shift that changed the landscape where consumerism rules. And the rules and standards are not, well, standard yet. So how does a company derive the return on investment made by listening to the cacophony of conversations happening in the unpredictable, truly mobile, increasingly social world we find ourselves struggling to navigate and gain traction in when we hardly recognize the territory?
The good news for some is that marketers’ value jumped significantly as enterprises recognized investments in the web and e-commerce broadened consumer spending power and simultaneously amplified consumer vocal power. The voice of the customer echoed through the halls of marketing departments, the same department that set the strategy and spent the budgets for those very programs that got the customer to come to them in the first place. Nice closed loop siloed away from the contact center. The very same formerly central function, aside from sales, where the customer speaks to the company about their experience.
The joining of care and marketing: customer experience.
What could be more intimate: I am walking the aisles of a store, with a company through it’s live agent who is ready to procure my size shoe, my flavor ice cream, my prescription, my insurance policy. That’s the moment we must learn to seize in the online world too. Instant, satisfying, personal, and human.
To that end, real-time conversations begin well before a customer makes that ever important decision to choose a particular brand in a specific location. At home or anywhere for that matter a consumer is connected and collecting information, price shopping, interacting in conversations about product and service benefits and complaints.
It was consumers who dragged marketers into the contact center. However, it wasn't social media that began the call to action into the contact center. Retail provides us a blueprint into the new consumer ecosystem. Consumers retail buying habits evolved, transformed by the convenience of e-commerce and mobile/ smartphone applications and secured a place in nearly every market and throughout every buying cycle.
Consequently, customer service has taken on an additional role in the information gathering and purchase stages of the buying cycle. Agents now shop with their new-found friends in both virtual and brick and mortar outlets using chat, multi-browse, and intelligent content delivery. For the most part, marketing does not participate in this part of the conversation. Stove-piped from operational decisions in the past, the costs associated with marketing became the opportunities lost in the new value chain, created by the web and reinforced by mobility.
Romeo and Juliet, we know their fate...but this story needn’t be tragic.
No company can risk their customer’s satisfaction when you can make smarter cross functional decisions. Real time customer feedback and inputs can come from many channels. In fact customer care departments participation increases the value of marketing activities exponentially. Conversely, contact center data collection and interactions become more valuable when marketing can utilize it before creating the next programs or promotions.
Investments in customer satisfaction and intimacy can be leveraged to support measurement tools used by Customer Experience and Contact Centers to deliver insight to their end users. So you can measure the conversations that transpire in any channel, with holistic rather than stove piped approaches. Make your wealth of knowledge relevant, dynamic, and available anywhere, anytime. At the very least you’ll deliver better customer service and learn something about what our customers want.
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