There is so much time spent on the “How” of developing a single view of the customer— public or private cloud tenancy, data cleansing and hygiene, establishing access and permissions, and so on— that sometimes “Why” gets lost in the weeds.
Would you like to know when your clients are engaging— at the very moment of engagement?
Forget how you get there, if you could be magically teleported to a place where you’re made aware when each and every one of your clients is interacting with your product or brand across any of your touchpoints— your website, your physical store, a reseller, your app, the mobile web, an inbound CSR call, or across any of your burgeoning number of IoT channels— you’d want to know, correct? If you know they’re engaging with you, you can then engage with them back. And the fact that you’ll know which channel they’re engaging with, as well as potentially which piece of content, message, product, or offer, makes your first move significantly easier than flying blind.
With a real-time operational profile in place, you’ll know more sooner. That usually translates to being better, winning more, and fostering deeper relationships with your customers.
“I wish I knew then what I know now”— says no one ever again
The only thing cooler than a millisecond-grade customer engagement detection system is the ability to almost literally stop time. You can’t really stop it, of course, but you can seemingly speed it up to where in the blink of an eye you can do things that previously would have taken minutes, hours, days or weeks.
Say someone sets up a Registry on your eComm site. Now you know and can serve her up a How-To tutorial video, a social media feed of people just like her who’ve done similar in the past, and a host of other things.
Eventually.
Now you can do it at the point of initial engagement. Pretty cool, and very effective. BUT WAIT. THERE’S MORE! With a modern architecture with customer profiles stored in the cloud you can also see how this woman has engaged with your brand previously? What is her LTV? What product categories has she purchased historically? How engaged is she with your social channels if at all? All of this not only can be, but also should be factored into your response.
Delivering thoughtful, impactful and profitable customer experiences isn’t overly difficult when you know who you’re dealing with. It’s extraordinarily challenging when you don’t.
“Oh, it looks like this may be a second little ‘bundle of joy’. Congratulations. You can pull forward anything from your first registry by…”
Do less
When you engage a customer thoughtfully (right product, right offer, right size or shape based on prior transaction history…) you find that there is far less post-transaction mishegas than if you don’t use historical information or when every customer is essentially treated as a new customer because you can’t identify them and their history in a timely fashion. Same with stored payment information, shipping addresses, one-click re-orders and so forth. The more people have to do, the saltier they become and the greater the opportunity for failure on one side or the other.
The ultimate example of this is the irate customer who calls into your CSR unit. He’s ‘mad as hell and he’s not going to take it any more.’ The best way to talk him down? Probably not, Sir, I realize you gave your account number to the last three people but if you could give it to me again and tell me what happened all over in exquisite detail, that’d be great. If he told your front-line clerk or store manager the problem, your CSR should have instant access to it even though he may be miles, states, or even countries away from the front-lines.
All customers want to be heard. What they don’t want is to have to repeat themselves. Capturing data, good and bad, and then making it accessible instantaneously across your entire organization (with appropriate permissions and controls, of course) can allow you to save a customer when you might ordinarily have lost one.
Along with their entire social graph.
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