Touchpoint Marketing Chapter 7: Entrenching Committed Customers through the ELATEd Customer Experience

Touchpoint Marketing: Entrenching Committed Customers through the ELATEd Customer Experience

This is the conclusive part of a seven-part series on Touchpoint Marketing. Catch-up on the first, second, third, fourth , fifth and sixth parts to know more about the thought process that has led to this ELATE Framework

Engage

Through your unique Brand Personality

Link

One Brand, One Customer, One Experience

Address

Improve retention by understanding and providing actionable insights about service breaks as they occur

 

Track

Know You Customer, and not just his finances!

Entrench

Multiply favorable customer experiences

Having now taken the entire long and committed route of Engaging, Linking-Up, Addressing and Tracking your customers across Touchpoints, it is but obvious for you to leverage the wealth of experience and more importantly the data collected along the way. It’s here that the magic of Predictive Analytics and paves way for you to replicate and multiply your Touchpoint success.

There could be an entire battery of profitable business strategies through hawk-eye and creative data mining and advanced analytics (on your Touchpoint data) -

• Increase sales by understanding and acting  on buying patterns.
• Increase the ROI from customer relationship management by targeting the right offer, to the right customers, at the right time.
• Build profitable new business models, like subscriptions for digital content.
• Reduce churn and boost retention with data-driven strategies to maximize profit.

Predictive analytics solutions could help companies solve a range of business problems, such as:

Acquisition:  Who is most likely to subscribe in the next week?

Churn and attrition:  How likely is this customer to leave us in the next 30 days?

Segmentation and pricing:  Will this segment buy more if we lower the price?

Relationship management:  Should we assign a dedicated sales rep or sell to this customer from a contact center?

Leverage your social media presence to meet key business objectives and drive customer advocacy

• Adapt your marketing and sales strategies to the evolving landscape of social business
• Develop metrics to benchmark your efforts and guide content strategy
• Multiply favorable customer experiences through a much larger base of general Twitter and Facebook users, as well as through third-party user community websites.

Conclusion

To sum it up, Touchpoint Marketing is no revolutionary concept or yet another marketing jargon to herald a new phenomenon in today’s hyperactive times. In fact, it’s the return to good old concept of ‘Customer is King’ and trying to bring him back, right in the centre of marketing ecosystem. Every day, every moment multiple brands are touching him through multiple Touchpoints. But how many of them are really touching him? And how many are merely just another channel of grabbing his already spread too thin attention?

 

Touchpoint Marketing intends to develop a focused 360-degree plan that ELATEs this customer by -

·         Mapping the customer experience lifecycle across Touchpoints.

·         Build a holistic customer experience strategy by integrating social media with internal customer data and syndicated sources.

·         Develop a strategic plan and tactical blueprint to prioritize and act on insights.

·         Apply predictive analytics to social media findings to drive marketing opportunities.

·         Engage him, Link up his experiences, Address his concerns, Track his journey and Entrench him…or rather get our Brands entrenched to his ecosystem!

Its time, the organizations adapt to Touchpoint Marketing and keep in touch with their dynamically changing, highly aware and aggressively seduced customers.  It’s time, we actually Touch our customers, the Touchpoint Marketing way!

Touchpoint Marketing Chapter 6: Tracking the Customer Journey

Touchpoint Marketing: Tracking the Customer Journey through the ELATE framework

This is the sixth part of a seven-part series on Touchpoint Marketing. Catch-up on the first, second, third, fourth and fifth parts to know more about the thought process that has led to this ELATE Framework

Engage

Through your unique Brand Personality

Link

One Brand, One Customer, One Experience

Address

Improve retention by understanding and providing actionable insights about service breaks as they occur

  

Track

Know You Customer, and not just his finances!

Many marketers launch, manage and measure marketing efforts in silos or “swim lanes”: “I sent out X mailers, and got Y response/results.” Those results are measured against other direct mail campaigns, but never truly correlated with parallel marketing efforts across other channels; at best, a senior manager may review the overall results and make rough calculations. Like swimmers, marketers are furiously paddling with their heads down in their own lanes.

Touchpoint Marketing is all about looking at the powerful new “holistic models” that look and measure activities across all of the swim lanes. Or rather, how are all the Touchpoints collectively Linking into the ‘Customer Experience’ scheme of things.

Brands need to invest in complete holistic views of their customer ecosystem. Swim lanes and piecemeal marketing approaches will no longer work as companies demand more program accountability and results. But this is only part of a much broader drive for a complete holistic view of the customer ecosystem. Many factors affect marketing, such as distribution, sales calls, and innovation to just name three. Strong performance in these areas will naturally help your marketing efforts. Your brand overall has an enormous impact on your marketing (Apple is a premier example). Yet companies have done a poor job in calculating these as part of their marketing model. This needs to witness a complete and rapid overhaul. Companies should increasingly be able to identify these key drivers and allocate funds accordingly. They should be able to evaluate exactly how much affect customer service, for one, has on marketing success. If it’s large, they might decide to allocate funds now being funneled into marketing programs, into the customer experience and drive new business with existing customers. 

Increase new customer acquisition by leveraging social media to increase awareness and educate consumers about the brand.

We could also call this the “big pool” approach. Like Brand health tracking surveys, the approach intends to put money to our‘Customer-centric’ claims by virtue of Customer Health Tracks. With their eye on the total pool or picture, marketers will have a better grasp on which activities (across Touchpoints) are contributing the most, which are killing my customers and how they interrelate.

This will allow them to shift (and better target) budgets as needed, effectively directing funds to Touchpoints so that all are contributing more equally, and not a single of them are eroding my Brand persona.

Diligent tracking and churning of Social Media Customer Insights will always add to this picture -

• Who is engaging with your brand? (Social media influencers)
• What are they saying about you? (Top themes, emerging issues)
• Why are they interacting with your company? (Value propositions from the customer’s point of view)

To know more, continue reading the conclusive part of this seven-part series here

Touchpoint Marketing Chapter 5: First Listen to your Customer, before even claiming to Delight him

Touchpoint Marketing: First Listen to your Customer, before even claiming to Delight him

This is the fifth part of a seven-part series on Touchpoint Marketing. Catch-up on the first, second, third and fourth parts to know more about the thought process that has led to this ELATE Framework

Engage

Through your unique Brand Personality

Link

One Brand, One Customer, One Experience

Address

Improve retention by understanding and providing actionable insights about service breaks as they occur

It takes just one tenth of a marketing spend efforts to retain an existing company, right? So it’s time that organizations start growing this ‘easier to market’ share of current customers by understanding how to optimally increase customer engagement across Touchpoints. Be it via social media, direct mailers or one-to-one conversations, customer engagement needs to essentially start with “Your Issues first!” approach.

No customer wants to be sold ‘personalized equity advices’ when he is losing his cool on a mis-sold plan. It’s a marketing faux pas to be selling ULIPs to a customer who is well researched and is insisting on Traditional Life Plans.

One of the most important pieces of the customer ecosystem jigsaw is listening to the Voice of the Customer. You attract him, get him in the door, Engage him, Link-up with him, sign him on….and then move on to acquiring another customer?  Close of sale is not the end of it. It’s infact the beginning of a new relationship and that’s precisely where most of our marketing muscle should be focused on. Yes, in strict functional terms, customer concerns should sit under Operations, under Quality. However, it’s essential for Marketing to participate in these initiatives. If Marketing is the biggest stakeholder of costly Market Research exercises (studying attitudes and preferences of potential customers), why shouldn’t they be keen to hear the voices from their home turf as well? The attitudes, preferences and concerns of existing customers in their own backyard? As it goes, Get your House in order First!

 Listen to your heartbeat (existing customers) and Address them with a sense of urgency -

• Improve the experience across the customer lifecycle and all touch points including online, in-store, mobile, social, and phone
• Enhance product and service positioning with actionable insights from both surveys and unstructured feedback
• Make loyalty and rewards programs more effective using customer preferences
• Act on customer feedback to increase first-time sales, repeat business, and brand advocacy
• Improve customer satisfaction and barriers to sales at key points across the customer lifecycle
• PR and the public social media universe will play a big role in addressing existing customers. Companies should be prepared to manage consumer response, both on other social media sites and channels outside of social media.
• Get head-on into Customer experience management. Build a Voice of the Customer strategy aligned with your key business goals.

Collect

• Document customer interactions across segments and lifecycle stages (customer journey mapping).
• Gain early insights on service breaks, emerging issues, customer sentiments and needs through all traditional and social Touchpoints.
• Try to understand local, regional, and national feedback about your competition
• Adapt to Text analytics and go about uncovering valuable insights. Create an infrastructure to analyze surveys, transactions, customer feedback, and other VOC data.

Analyze

• Analyze customer data by product, life cycle stage, line of business, and channel. Classify customer comments with strategic business context to increase relevance.
• Analyze root causes to identify pain points that dissatisfy customers. Prioritize the factors that impact customer retention and loyalty.
• Text analytics can be deployed to solve complex business challenges. Text mining enables you to unlock the value from surveys, call center notes, email, social media feedback, help desk tickets, and other sources of unstructured text data. Natural Language Processing (NLP) based analytic tools automatically capture the main ideas from customer comments. To identify key issues, a classification engine can sift through millions of documents to track the main ideas.

Action

• Showcase findings by exploring emerging issues, top themes, customer sentiment, and more.
• Provide channels for brand advocates to recommend your services.
• Deliver consistent and improved customer communications.
• Train your team to interpret VOC results and take action.

To know more, continue reading the sixth part of this seven-part series here

Touchpoint Marketing Chapter 4: Introducing the Touchpoint Marketing ELATE Framework

Introducing the Touchpoint Marketing ELATE Framework

This is the fourth part of a seven-part series on Touchpoint Marketing. Catch-up on the first, second and third parts to know more about the thought process that has led to this ELATE Framework

Touchpoint Marketing is all about having a disciplined, focused and passionate 5-point strategy abbreviated as the E.L.A.T.E. strategy. And what better abbreviation? Eventually, beyond all the 4Ps and 5Cs of Marketing, isn’t it all about ELATE-ing the only C that really matters? – the Customer!

Here’s finally unlocking the manuscript of this tightly inter-locked Touchpoint Marketing strategy of ELATE.

Engage

Through your unique Brand Personality

Ensure that all the customer Touchpoints right from your service kiosks, bank counters, relationship managers, showroom sales staff, delivery staff to your helpdesks, website, ATMs, after sales, customer service execs and complaint & grievance cells  are talking to same language.  All your brand imagery and messaging needs to be deeply entrenched across your Touchpoints. It needs to come across strongly in not just your communication, but more importantly in the customer interactions. Imagery is not just a wish or attitude of how you want your brand to be perceived by a customer. Imagery, Brand personality, Positioning are essentially more based out of your Touchpoint interactions. In simple words, your Brand personification is not a wonderfully woven Outside-In concept from your media agencies. It is infact, a steadily built Inside-Out effort reflecting the DNA and culture of your organization.

In India, MCdonalds is practicing it very consistently. Run across any of their stores and you’ll come across very similar standards of service. Cheery interiors, further enhanced by a happy, helpful and peppy staff. Others like Domino’s and Pizza Hut too are achieving this with a good degree of success. These food joints have realized the power of such Touchpoints and are certainly investing a lot in training and ingraining the Organization culture to these multiple ‘faces of the company’.

To add, over and beyond the traditional Touchpoints, companies need a distinct strategy to keep the Social Media Touchpoints pretty engaging as well. With its unique features, social media offers new opportunities for increasing transactions and gaining new customers through promotions and rewards programs. Infact, the level of engagement and dynamism generated from this media could be a key differentiator for many businesses –

• Design your marketing programs to exploit features unique to social media. Social media provides cost efficient, highly leveraged, and unique engagement opportunities (e.g., social networks, viral advocacy, one-click transactions, check-in/location services, scalability, etc.).
• Make it more engaging through platform strategy, content strategy, marketing and promotions, social  and mobile apps
• Identify and engage social media influencers. Convert them to brand advocates. Increase engagement to boost customer acquisition. Figure out innovative strategies to monetize your Social Media pull. Strategies to convert cute Likes to committed Love!

Link

One Brand, One Customer, One Experience

As indicated earlier, how often have you been pushed around by multiple departments in a company? How often have you felt lost in the complex web of organization structure? How often have you felt dealing with two completely different companies before sales and after sales (Mahindra Holidays, ICICI)? or during Business development pitches and final outcomes (various Outsourcing consulting firms with BD-transitions-Operations/delivery structures)?

Ask any existing Maruti car owner and he’ll vouch for its after sales service (ASS).  Yes, the company makes great value cars – aggressively priced, packed with features and fuel-efficient. But at the same time, a major component of Maruti’s success is its wide ASS. It’s not just an attitude reflected in its advertising (finding a Maruti service station in the nowhere of Ladakh mountains). It is a well-established fact that its customers feel delighted about. The wide ASS network and easy availability of cheap spares completes the One Experience picture for Maruti. All the afore-mentioned factors providing good resale value for Maruti cars and thus further enhancing its appeal. It’s a wonderful way of providing value right from Sales to After Sales to Resale (Maruti True Value) to Upgrade. The complete journey of a Maruti customer from his Alto to SX4 to Grand Vitara. Wonder why they haven’t used such a convincing script in their advertising? Zindagi ka Paiyyah, Meri Maruti! (driving the wheels of life, My Maruti!)

Touchpoint Marketing is about Linking up all your brand Touchpoints to a uniformly satisfying Customer Experience story. Needless to say, it’s essential to Link-in your social media strategy as well by creating a seamless user experience that drives conversion. Capturing, analyzing, and acting upon customer input in the various stages of the “conversion funnel” is key to reaching your objectives. Allow a good amount of tailoring of your social media promotions for various target segments. Allow them to create their own communities thus further enhancing the appeal of such programs.

To know more, continue reading the fifth part of this seven-part series here

Dhoom 2: Magic Recreated...well almost!

Dhoom 2: Magic Recreated...well almost!

Here’s reproducing a review earlier published in November 2006 when Dhoom 2 released to packed houses and shattered many opening day, opening weekend and global collection (worldwide Rs. 150 crores) records.

Do read about Dhoom 2’s predecessor or the prequel that kick-started the Dhoom franchise here. Couldn’t restrain from adding a dash of nostalgia to this sequel review. The review published for the original Dhoom, around 27 months ago in a pleasant Delhi weather. 

Return from the dead.

A movie review after ages. But then that’s the kind of effect Dhoom has on you. One is compelled to go back to the keyboard and type out his thoughts. 

Dhoom 2 – A wonderful concept to begin with. A well-deserved sequel for the refreshing sleeper hit of 2004. And the drool casting itself makes up for a Paisa vasool venture. Literally speaking. The 35 crore biggie is already in the Green with the advance bookings (domestic and overseas) already throwing up a 40 crore figure. Guys, think about the new Bollywood model in place. Much before a single show has been screened. Much before a single review is out. Much before Hrithik has committed a single heist, the movie has already got the thumbs-up. Declared a Hit!! 

Coming to the movie itself. Whatta fantastic opening sequence! Be there to witness the hysteria. The shouts, the hoots, the whistles…The superhero has arrived! Hrithik-Mania is back AGAIN! And this time much bigger than both Kaho Na Pyar Hai and Krrish put together. 

Infact I had gone in with a snickometer kinda device. A tool to measure ‘Which star entry caused the maximum uproar in the audience?’. The results –  

Hrithik:             120 decibels

Ash:                 90 decibels

Bips:                 80 decibels

Abhi:                70 decibels

Uday:               65 decibels 

Guess you got the clue. The superhero simply dwarfs the rest of the cast.  

The movie Infact leverages perfectly on the high energy start and proceeds like a dream. The Uday Chopra ‘Mummy’ act works. Abhishek is at his brooding best. And the screamin n screechin Rimmi Sen takes you back to the original enterprise. Wow! We’re already feelin’ at home.  

The babes make a dazzling entry. Crazy kiya re. They perform, we lap it up.  

The heists continue. The crown from the Namibian desert. The diamond from the Mumbai museum. The sword from the Jodhpur palace. Each sequence is an adrenaline pumping act. Wonderfully executed (both on and off the screen). Kudos!

A slight twist in the tale. The cops and the thieves take positions. The perfect set-up for a heavy duty, high octave showdown. Voila! INTERMISSION!  

For those aroused to read further, folks, here’s a caveat – That’s all about Dhoom 2!! 

The movie nosedives rapidly in the second half. The Uday Chopra buffoonery starts getting monotonous. The track itself departs towards an Ash-Hrithik sweet nothingness. The music drags (bet you remember any other number apart from the Dhoom signature and Crazy stuff once you’re out of the audi).  

And to top it all, the tame climax is infact the biggest dampener of ‘em all. 

Leave our Anti-heroes the way they are. Rugged. Unreformed. No regrets, right till the end. John ridding off the cliff with a chiseled grin was what defined Dhoom I. A cinematic moment of excellence. However, in the sequel, Mr. A serving beer and dressing salad, leading a monk who forgot his Chori-chakari kinda existence cuts a very sorry figure. No way!  

Pre-release, the director (Sanjay Gadhvi) had ensured some action-packed stuff every 6 minutes. However, the second half of the movie literally begs for some action. Here’s a little analysis on the way the movie drags post intermission – 3 grand heists in the first 75 minutes. While a mere 1 in the closing 75! 

And no Tata Young to offset the Thanda ending either. Sad.  

To sum it up, Dhoom 2  works, fortunately for more than two thirds of its running length.

The franchise like most others in 2006 (Koi Mil Gaya, Hera Pheri, Munnabhai) certainly lives on. But a word of advice to the makers before embarking on the D:3 journey  

• Retain the original characters (Jai, Ali, Sweety), but do not go overboard in rehashing the old props over and over again (Ali’s mandatory song, his marital visions, the cop versus thief direct 1-0-1s)
• Concentrate on the music. D:2 is infact one of the biggest musical disappointments of the year.
• Please do not kill the spunk out of your Cool Chor. Let him remain jet black.
• And last, but not the least, please spare us the ham-of-an-actor i.e. SRK in D:3*. Ain’t the entire concept about chilled out, no frills, alpha males. So why not try an Akki instead? Fits the bill perfectly. What say? 

In the meanwhile, do they offer some discounts for watching just half-a-movie? Need to revisit the Dhoom of a first half once again….

*Please note that this review was published way back in November 2006 when a solid grapevine of SRK playing the anti-hero in the Dhoom 3 installment was doing the rounds. Fortunately, looks like better sense prevailed on the makers and finally it’s the maverick Aamir Khan playing the antagonist in Dhoom 3

Touchpoint Marketing Chapter 3: The Moments of Truth that define Great Brands, Great Companies

The Moments of Truth that define Great Brands, Great Companies

This is the third part of a seven-part series on Touchpoint Marketing. Do catch up on the first and the second part of this series to build more context about this piece.

Knowing the characteristics of your customers can help to clarify and identify potential leads. Yes, it’s right that 20% of your existing customers are bringing in 80% of your revenues. But choose to ignore the other 80% at your own risk. Customers change. Their incomes, attitudes, preferences, life stages evolve at a much faster pace than our ability to garner insights. We could be sitting on potential blockbuster, currently dormant customers. It would be naïve and myopic to not acknowledge the unique, niche segments within your customer clusters. All it takes is a bit of a nudge and push to activate them. They may be too miniscule in terms of their segment size, but may still have the potential to emerge as your most entrenched customers. But yes, it definitely takes some deep-dive understanding about these customers to make them an offer they can’t refuse.

It’s time that companies wake up to the power of these niches and start looking at these smaller segments for their unique characteristics. It’s time to stop looking at customers as one large mass that’ll react similarly to mass marketing ‘pulls’. Somewhere, we need to go beyond the existing lazy segmentation of key accounts, high net worth (HNWs) and the rest.  Marketing to this ‘Rest’ could be a real game-changer! If marketers put concentrated marketing efforts toward knowing about these high-potential niche customer segments, they're going to do a whole lot better than if they go after everybody in a similar manner.

Now is the time to use the knowledge of your CRM systems and Data Warehouses for clarity and better decisions. For quicker, agile and more targeted offers/mailers. If there is newly discovered information that you should be capturing in your CRM system, now is the time to add the additional fields into your adaptable CRM system.  

Going ahead with a multi-media campaign that claims “Hum Rishtey samajhte hain” and not caring for your existing ‘Rishteys’ doesn’t really add up. It’s great to be gloating about your social media success through the sheer no. of ‘likes’ on your Facebook page. But is there any metric that tracks the sheer no. of ‘dislikes’ for your customer service? High-pitched above-the-line media campaigns bring immediate, far-reaching success (or so you think), but it are consistent below-the-line, Touchpoint-based, one-to-one efforts, the make you the revered organization you always wanted to be.

Multiple customer service roles were introduced to bring your product/service closer to the customer. To help him, to advise him, to guide him, hand-hold him and lead him to this best interests. Excellent, ideal concepts to begin with. But somewhere along the way, all these additional roles are simply adding to your brand clutter. These numerous ‘faces’ of your brand (with no real brand ownership) could be steadily eroding into and diluting your core proposition.

It’s time Organizations de-clutter themselves and get out of the complex web of Organizational structures. It’s time customer-centric finally places the customer at the centre (rather than pushing him across the organization centers). Your customers are not just a part of a fancily-labeled segment (Young achievers, late bloomers, mid-life identity seekers), each one is a distinct individual. Each one is interacting with multiple Touchpoints of your company on a regular basis. It’s time each such Touchpoint starts being the essence of your brand characteristics. The features and attributes that you’ve been so aggressively marketing through your ATL campaigns, finally boil down to a few moments of truth. The moment a potential customer finally comes face to face with your brand.

Touchpoint Marketing is all about leveraging the potential of these moments. By no way is this revolutionary concept. CRM, Net Promoter Score (NPS), Point of Sale (POS), merchandising…companies have been practicing these concepts for a long time. It’s just that we need a consolidated fresh-look at all these initiatives from a ‘One Customer’ perspective. We need a strong culture that enforces the belief of ‘One Customer’ who deals with multiple Touchpoints in our organization. Rather than multiple Touchpoints catering to multiple customer segments, with no dialogue between each of such Touchpoints.

The idea of Touchpoint Marketing may infact find much resonance in John Carlzon’s definitive work in ‘Moments of Truth’ way back in 1987.

As famously emphasized by John Carlzon - A company is defined in the minds of its customers as the composite total of every moment of truth -- those short periods when the customer interacts with the company or one of its employees. The best approach to delivering consistently high-quality moments of truth lie in building a customer-driven company. The essential characteristics of such a company being –  

• The employees who interact with customers have the authority to make decisions on behalf of the company.
• Middle managers who work to manage resources so the frontline employees can be more effective.
• Corporate leaders who develop a vision of where the company should be heading and provide inspiration.
• A flat organizational structure where real-world experience from frontline employees is learned from and built upon.
• A willingness to look at everything solely and exclusively from the same perspective a customer uses.
• A commitment to narrowing the focus of the company to the delivery of exceptional service.

 

Bring all of those elements together and a customer-driven company can achieve some very significant business success, regardless of external financial conditions, competitive challenges or any other factors.

About 2 and half decades down the line, Moments of Truth still continues to be a truthful, profound ethos of everything that customer-centric companies should aspire to be. Today, Touchpoint Marketing simply tries to build upon these ideas through the twin lenses of Analytics and Social Media. Some impossibly powerful tools that were yet to be discovered way back in 1987.

To know more, continue reading the fourth part of this seven-part series here