A few days in the beyond I have become requested for my pinnacle 5 hints for shops on how to connect to their clients, restricted to one hundred words.
For a topic that one may want to write down a singular on ?
Well, here is my answer:
- Help customers solving their problem. This distinguishes and makes you found by the customer
- Marketing/loyalty programs offer your customers value and are not mere vehicles to gather more data points
- Simplify your customers’ life, e.g. with a card wallet instead of own app that directly integrates with your CRM and POS
- Relevant communications at the right time, place with the right content – without appearing intrusive. For this you need to know your customer
- Consistent communications across channels and interactions, optimized for used touch point
They in all likelihood want some extra elaboration, especially the closing one.
First and foremost, the reason for any business to exist is making profit for its owners. This is not equal to producing and selling things (or providing a service) with a margin. The business will succeed only if it focuses on identifying its customers needs and then delivering solutions for these needs. It is not about pushing a product into the market (mostly, consider that needs can be created by smart businesses). This thought is well in the domain ofService Dominant Logic although I am not a strong proponent.
Marketing and loyalty packages are crucial interaction motors between companies and their customers. Both, mainly loyalty programs, want to be set up to be on the equal time beneficial. It isn't exceptional approximately accumulating extra client facts that can be utilized by the business enterprise. Still tremendous information, voluntarily given via customers, is wanted to be better capable of serve to clients? Wishes.
It is also no longer about providing a better fee to loyalty members. We all want a very good rate, but what does this assist if the product does now not art work, because it must without a help being around?
Similarly, advertising and advertising isn't a one-way speakme tool for businesses however a bi-directional interplay channel among organizations and (potential) customers. In this sense proper assist can be taken into consideration advertising, too; the absence of a NEED for help is even extra useful.
At the identical time it is a remarkable idea to already simplify clients? Life at an early degree in their interaction with the commercial organization. This does no longer first-class have a look at to the solution to your customers? Necessities that a business enterprise affords, but moreover to offerings round. A easy example is a loyalty app that a agency affords. Mostly one despite the fact that desires a plastic gambling cards to leverage any provide. On the other hand clever telephones gets overloaded with apps if each commercial enterprise insists in having an non-public app. So, why no longer presenting or participating in a card wallet device that is capable of retaining a couple of cards and integrates into the prevailing CRM- and POS systems?
This right now also addresses some other thing: Connecting the ones structures with the vicinity recognition of a smart phone can provide on the spot gain for all concerned parties. It creates more relevance because most effective the information is despatched to a client that has a relation to cutting-edge intentions on the cutting-edge time and region. The customer does no greater get bombarded with unsolicited e-mails or text messages that come at the time that is given by means of manner of the companies? Campaign plans but whilst they could take extra gain of the offers, they do no longer want to sift via pretty some applications, and that they preserve control with the resource of simply switching off communications of groups, if they may be not concerned at a time ? And transfer it on once more while there may be more interest.
This brings me to the final point of the listing: Businesses talk and engage with customers the usage of a huge style of channels; each of these have a number of ?Touch factors
Examples of touch points are: Store staff talking to me, a TV ad, a Facebook or Twitter ad, the layout of the loyalty card; the web site and its user interaction design offers many touch points, even the look and feel of the goods displayed for sales are touch points, not to talk of a customer using a purchased product to add value to the own life, or service interactions.
As you can see from this list, possible interactions are very different in nature. It is fairly easy to convey different messages through different channels and different touch points. Some examples again to illustrate this point: Advertisements position a brand as a high end brand with the goods displayed in the shop in a careless manner, or having unresponsive in-store staff; or getting different or even contradicting information using different channels (calling, web site, Facebook, …). Lastly, all these channels with their touch points have different capabilities: Look at a web site vs. mobile web site vs. mobile app vs. representation on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest vs. the possibility of direct interaction with in-store personnel or service personnel.
Because communication that happens across various channels and touch points is so diverse it needs to be consistent AND it needs to be optimised for the different touch points.
picture courtesy of Jeanne Claire Maarbes / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Comments
Post a Comment