A guest blog by Robin Fisk.
Have you ever considered that a lack of internal innovation is affecting your business’s ability to connect with your customers to get the best results?
Getting routine customer communication techniques right can provide a better experience for your customer, help you to measure and see the impact of your communications investment and help your organisation to grow.
There are several ways to be more proactive in improving your customer communication (and hopefully) experience. One is through good tech integration.
When it comes to managing your customer data, using a customer relationship management system or CRM will help you get a deeper understanding of how customers directly interact with your business.
A CRM will give you insight on how they became a prospect, what converted them to a customer, what they have bought and so on. Understanding how, why and when people interact with you is invaluable when trying to grow or sustain your business.
Using a CRM will also enable you to automate various parts of supporter or your customer communications, including marketing. Implementing marketing automation frees you and your team up from tedious manual work, so you can take a step back and focus on other things with potential to make more impact.
For example, you may already pre-schedule your social media posts, but are you doing the same with emails?
Email marketing automation lets you trigger emails to customers at key times and points when they’re interacting with your website, product or service, as opposed to emailing them at random times with potentially irrelevant content.
In practice, this means that after someone has made a purchase on your website, they automatically receive a thank-you email or an email with relevant information based on their purchase. If you get this right, the email will help to make your customer feel valued and they tell other people. Given that people trust recommendations over advertising this is marketing gold.
Automation can also help you make sure your customers are getting what they need, when they need it.
If a customer emails you with a question, they should automatically receive an email acknowledging their message and linking them to helpful resources while they’re waiting for a ‘real’ person to get back to them with more information.
Something as simple as this type of auto-response on email can result in higher customer satisfaction at a lower cost to your business.
In fact according to McKinsey and Company customers who are able to resolve their issue through digital channels only report a higher level of satisfaction than those who are forced to use a ‘traditional’ communication channel like a telephone.
Econsultancy writes about keeping up a good customer journey in a multi-channel world, emphasising how – armed with accurate, real-time information about how customers interact with them across their various channels – brands can target digital marketing campaigns and allocate budget more effectively. As Sebastian Gutierrez, Enterprise Senior Product & Partnerships Manager at eBay, says:
“Aggregating and analysing data on a consumer’s interactions across various channels not only improves understanding of the role that each channel plays in influencing their decision, but also provides valuable information as to the relative impact and ROI of specific channels.”
To implement tech automation that syncs up with your other data, your CRM should include integrations with the tools you’re already using, including email services like MailChimp, payment services like Stripe and event management tools like Eventbrite.
Businesses who aren’t yet taking advantage of web analytics; the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage are also missing out on valuable data about their customers. By integrating web analytics with consumer touch points (business jargon for any encounter where customers and business engage to exchange information, provide a service, or handle transactions – also referred to as a touch point, contact point or point of contact) you can learn a lot more about the behaviour of your audience.
For example IBM calls this their ‘360 Customer View’, and they collect data about their customers in real-time to craft ‘exceptional experiences’. This is achieved by giving their customer-facing professionals – the ones who deal directly with customers in the call center, in person, or through social media, email or chat – important information. This approach makes it much easier for them to engage, develop trusted relationships, solve problems and eventually sell the right products. In order to do this, they need to be able to zero in on what a particular customer needs, not spend time searching for information.
Another example is Amazon, who has a ‘culture of metrics’ that encourages their team to push data-driven changes to their customer service journey on a regular basis. Perhaps this explains how ‘customers who bought X…, also bought Y’ has become synonymous with Amazon.
Better tech integration is not reserved for larger companies, implementing your own smart analytics across various customer touch points, will help you to better understand your customers needs and in turn help you grow your business.
If your analytics suggest that one group of customers have a regular behaviour pattern, look at ways to connect these customers with more personalised data along their customer journey. You can then use this data to predict what someone wants in advance by monitoring behaviour over time.
Brian Manusama, a research director at Gartner, explained to Computer Weekly that organisations that use data for customer service will increase customer satisfaction by providing personalised customer services:
“Through analysis, organisations can get a better understanding of the service issues customers are experiencing, and take action to avoid problems and resolve issues before customers are reaching out to customer service.”
Charity CRM provider Donorfy has written about creating a ‘donor journey’ to improve charity fundraising, and traditional businesses can use a similar model when it comes to mapping their ‘customer journey’ and increasing both brand loyalty and sales.
Take the time to map out your customer journey. Customer experience matters and good use of technology can help you to improve it.
Robin Fisk is founder of Donorfy, which was recently voted #1 charity CRM and fundraising software in the UK.