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