Data, information, knowledge, wisdom
It should be obvious: knowing whom your customers are, what they do or don’t like, where they live, how they respond, and through which methods and platforms they are most frequently approached.
It should be – because these days no customer wishes to be logged as a bland ‘statistic’.
As customers get more intelligent and attuned with a variety of behaviors in which they can circumvent traditional customer service avenues the bar is raised higher for the quality of communication interactions, and the role of powerful customer analytics.
Let’s take a typical example.
When a customer (say, me) gets a text about a new product and purposely doesn’t respond yet uses the web and a mobile app to research the brand and fuller product portfolio, then receives a telephone call within 24 hours enquiring about interest in the original product, and a follow-up loyalty email which emphasizes the need to ‘act’ now– well that may be perceived by some (me, and those I tell around me) as akin to both marketing incompetence and also brand spam.
Customers want to be heard, satisfied, rewarded and pampered for their interest and actions.
After all, they/we are just human.
Subconsciously we wish to feel that we are getting heard by the best brands and partners with which we choose to indulge and spend hard-earned time and money in.
Ignoring these customers’ basic needs and desires is a little like being courted by a corporate social and emotional robot. The lack of appropriate emotional and behavioural marketing intelligences does not bode well for future brand interactions.
The important brand ‘trust’ factor gets further and further from sight.
What’s going on, and how can it get revised?
For a start, big companies can think about trusting in the power of customer call ‘whispering’ tracking technology and analytics to ‘know’ the customer’s web experience and precisely discover which marketing campaigns work.
Aligned, or in tandem, with best-in-class social, mobile and multi-channel grade CRM software and analytics these separate technologies will provide outstanding ahead-of-the-curve and stand-out customer answers and marketing offers.
We, the customer, will be blown away that you – the corporate representative and, intelligent marketer! – can effectively read, design, or pre-empt our minds and feelings in a bid to build a more fruitful and longer-term (profitable) relationship.
So, when I – the customer – next read about your product news, look on the web and click on an ad for that same product and seconds later work with a brand representative with exceptional knowledge of past my habits, timed actions and forward-thinking insights you can just bet I’m going to be singing that Abba song.
by Laura A
Image by Michael Kreil on Flickr
