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 1: Do Companies Really Know You?

Do Companies Really Know You?

Starting today and through this week a seven-part series on Touchpoint Marketing. This is the first part of a seven-part series.

Organizations evolve. Steadily over a period of time. And as it goes in Organization Theory, they start getting more institutionalized through structures, levels, hierarchies, culture, values, policies and processes. Most of these aren’t really ‘etched in stone’ fundamentals that organizations begin with. But most of these keep getting formalized as organizations acquire client base, gather some momentum, expand their tentacles, carve their distinct identities, positioning, the mindspace amidst their customers. Both existing and potential.

The entire idea of Organization theory is a beautiful concept that allows companies to be much more efficient and effective in their chosen goal of serving their customers. Structures that allow the companies to get closer to their customers and serve them better.

Now, look around and try to think of all the companies you’ve ever dealt with. Right from your mobile service provider to banks to retailers. Right from big-ticket items like cars, consumer durables and holiday packages to everyday FMCG goods. How often have you been (allow me the cliché) ‘delighted’ as a customer? You think ‘delighted’ is too passé a word. Well there are a multitude of others doing the rounds – customer ecstasy, the ‘Wow’, the ‘Aha!’….an entire battery of such customer-isms depicting your satisfaction levels.

Moving beyond the world of Organization theory, let’s talk about the more glam sounding concepts of Research and Analytics. Insights, Marketing effectiveness, Marketing ROI, data, Big data, Predictability, Certainty, Measurements, CRM, Dashboards, Customer Scorecards, Business Intelligence, Measuring the intangibles, Smart Analytics. Phew!

Analytics (and its various avatars) are the biggest thing to have happened to Management since Lean and Six Sigma. It’s in, it’s cool, it’s intelligent and more of an imperative for your corporate existence to be talking about it. To discuss the magic of Analytics and how it has the potential to ‘Unravel’ (pardon the cliché once again) layers of customer insights, never known before! 

Companies are processing data, Big data by terabytes. You habits, spending patterns, ‘likes’ (it’s no longer a cute word preceding love. It means big business in today’s overtly ‘social’ times), your lifestyle is under constant surveillance. You are under constant, microscopic observations. As a customer, every day, every moment you are being studied, processed, segmented, clustered, regressed and character-sketched. You, the customer, are the subject, with multitude of subject matter experts knowing more about you than your father-in-law!

Wonderful times to live in, right? With so much customer-centric, infact customer-obsessed practices, you the customer, must be amidst the best of times, right? Yes? No!

Once again, think about all the Brands that are serving you right now. How many of these, do you think have really ‘delighted’ you off late?

My existing Bank sold me a Demat brokerage plan and I have since then been running from pillar to post to get it resolved. My multiple well-wishers in this bank right from Equity advisor, Relationship manager, Customer care Execs, Helpdesks, Head Service Quality, etc. have all suddenly vanished in thin air. What a wonderful Organization structure to be swimming in? Amidst all these glorified roles, everybody knows everything about everything. But no single body, knows that one single thing that it takes to (forget delight) Retain an irate customer.

The point being, amidst all this customer relationship and analytics jargon, how many companies are actually reaching out to their Existing customers? Note the word ‘Existing’. We’re not even including ‘potential’ customers in this debate.  Somewhere in our B-schools, we were entrenched with this wonderful insight –

‘It costs ten times to get a new customer as it takes to retain an existing customer.’

Now with companies going out all guns blazing to acquire newer customers, expand footprints, grab footfalls, eyeballs and all the works, is anyone even looking at this huge set of existing customers? 

“Yes, ofcourse” will be an emphatic response from the marketing and technology heads of most firms. “Why else do you think we’ve invested millions in super data-crunching machines and Apps?” We are generating existing customer spend and lifestyle patterns by the minute.

Fair enough. And that precisely, brings us back to the discussion. Think again. How often have we have seen the magic of all this Analytics actually ‘Touching’ us? In today’s age of multiple Touchpoints, are brands and companies actually ‘Touching’ us at all?

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

Is the Advanced Analytics Course from IIT-Bombay effective enough?

Hello Friends,

I keep coming across this question from a lot of Analytics aspirants – “Is the Advanced Analytics Course from IIT-Bombay effective enough?”

Infact, I have lost count of the number of mailers and phone calls I must have responded to for this key question. These aspirants have probably been reaching out to me through my LinkedIn credentials. To standardize my response (and thus make it easier for myself and all the aspirants), allow me to share my detailed thoughts and feedback. Allow me to discuss about all the pros and cons, which'll allow all ye' Analytic dreamers make an informed and well-thought of decision. Well, it's a significant investment in terms of time, money and committment. So why not take the plunge with a deeper analysis - your key objectives, setting the precise expectations from the course...and net-net the all essential, "How will it benefit me?"

The Immense Positives:

1. Most importantly, the IIT Bombay brand, which will be a big boost to your resume. Recruiters will take your Analytics 'aspirations' much more seriously.
2. An elite, diversified and enthusiastic bunch of 'like-minded' professionals as your peer group. It does wonders for your network within the industry. Also the fact that most of them are very gung-ho about analytics makes it an exciting and eclectic batch to interact with. Infact, I can confidently say that you'll learn much more from your peers than the curriculum or the IIT Profs.
3. The course content is pretty wide in terms of all the relevant topics that it covers. Very comprehensive indeed!
4. The IIT profs are most helpful (and needless to say, knowledgeable) and will do all that they can to resolve your doubts/queries. The chat option during the virtual classrooms/webinars makes it a very interactive education mode - where you’re continuously raising queries and brainstorming with your peers.
5.  The IIT campus session of 3 full days at the fag-end of the course is the most exciting part of the deal! There are live training sessions on analytic tools, guest lectures from industry experts and ofcourse, live interaction with the IIT profs. Nothing to beat the aura of being on the esteemed IIT campus.

And now, here are the inherent negatives, which all of us felt right throughout our course -

1. The Hughes service and communication. Be it in terms of lecture coordination, material distribution/circulation or a lot of instances of technical glitches (during the webinars/virtual classrooms).
2. While the course content is wide and comprehensive, it tends to be a bit too technical. The focus is more on the derivation of formulae and the alpha, beta and gama bit of it, rather than the real-world business applications. For e.g. I would be more interested in the application of the Gini co-efficient, ARIMA model  and Bootstrapping methodology, rather than knowing minute technical details about these.
3. So after the course, you’ll definitely feel a vacuum in terms of “Ok, so now I know it all. But how do I apply it in my job/career?” The content is too theoretical, very ineffective in terms of real-world business case studies and applications.
4. For all non-statistic based students, the going was pretty tough. So if you haven’t heard of regression before, never dealt with Standard deviation earlier, the proceedings may sound Latin. IIT believes that all students who have enrolled are there for ‘Advanced’ analytics. Don’t expect them to hand-hold you through the basics of Analytics.
5. Net-net: In terms of intangible professional gains (the impact on your resume), the course will continue to benefit you in the long run. However, don’t expect immediate gains in your current job or your value in the ‘Analytics’ job market. However, it’ll definitely improve your credibility and the probability of your CV getting short-listed by analytic firms.

However, if you are more keen on Learning, Knowledge and Application, you may find this course a bit shallow. In fact, please visit the following site www.jigsawacademy.com/ for a much more well-structured and actionable course content. It teaches you the tricks of the trade, how and when to use the tools and how to interpret your results. It is led by business folks who have actually practiced analytics in reputed organizations. It has dedicated modules of sectors like BFSI and retail.

To simplify the comparison: While IIT will give you that halo of being an IITian, the theoretical history of various concepts; Jigsaw Academy will straightaway get down to business and tell how to build, analyze and apply analytical models in various situations/industries. IIT will make you knowledgeable, Jigsaw will increase your ability to execute. IIT could increase your job prospects, Jigsaw will increase your ability to succeed in analytic-based assignments. IIT is much easy-paced and spread out (3 hours every Sunday for a year) and won’t demand much in terms of beyond-classroom assignments. Jigsaw promises to be much compact in duration, but much rigorous and intensive (6 hours every week, Sat and Sun, for 3 months). It’ll also take a lot from you in terms of weekly assignments. As they say, IIT is typical ‘Mile wide, Inch deep’ and Jigsaw is ‘Half a mile wide, 2 Miles deep’.  IIT will cost you 1.25 lacs, Jigsaw starts at about 40 thousand. Take your pick!

Just to caution: Hope you understand, both the courses are not your sure-shot entry ticket to a successful analytic career. Both will demand immense commitment, involvement and passion from you. If you ain’t supporting these courses through immense reading and practice, it’ll end up being a glorious affiliation on your CV.

And now, before you ask, Why on earth am I endorsing Jigsaw so much? Have I been a Jigsaw student as well?

Well, unfortunately not. Despite my deep respect for Jigsaw, I haven’t been able to bring myself to commit 3 months of intensive Jigsaw training. However, quite a few of my batchmates from IIT, who were not satiated with the learning at IIT, went ahead and pursued Jigsaw as well. While you’ll find their detailed testimonials on the Jigsaw site, the feedback they had for this course was simply superlative! They could now understand, practice and implement complex analytic models, which were no more the intimidating theories they were at IIT. I too am very keen on pursuing Jigsaw, to put my IIT knowledge to good use, avoid rapid evaporation of the knowledge gained and most importantly, learn to solve the Smart Analytics 'Jigsaw'!

To sum it up, IIT will make you feel good, earn some adulation. Jigsaw will make you more effective, entrench your reputation and earn some real Respect!