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Customer Experiences are critical for success :

Poor customer experiences can account for major losses in revenue for brands that neglect to satisfy consumers. In fact, recent research shows that, on average, companies lose over $83 billion dollars every year because people, on some level, simply did not have a positive customer experience. It is important to understand that successful marketing is more than only analyzing a few key metrics and then running a program on autopilot.

Today many customer experiences are fragmented and this can lead to frustration. This often includes many different departmental silos attempting to engage in disparate outbound communications to customers that are already using multiple channels. It can all become overly complex and confusing very quickly. And this frustration can lead to more than just the loss of an immediate sale. Poor word of mouth, lost future sales, and even diminished credibility are all potential dangers.if one customer has had a bad customer experience it is likely that others are going to as well.”

Great customer experiences are the new standard that marketers must meet. In the past, most brands used price, product, and customer experience to differentiate a brand. However, by next year, almost 90% of brands plan to remain competitive primarily based on customer experience. They also plan to focus more on the personalized customer journey, which has been proven to result in an almost 20% increase in revenue and customer satisfaction levels. But how is this to be achieved?

1) Preference Management and Personalization

Half of US consumers actually spend more money when cross-channel personalization is in effect. To bring increased levels of personalization, they recommend capturing opt-in and offer choices for channel frequency, and then relying on these preferences during campaigns. Modifications and adjustments to these campaigns can then be made as the marketing campaigns progress.

2) Contact Center Customer Experience

This includes a range of best practices to build positive customer experiences for when consumers call into a brand’s call center after a marketing campaign. It also includes reviewing IVR experiences and closing the feedback loop.

3) Tailored Web and Mobile Experiences

Leveraging multi-channel customer experiences is now crucial . This not only includes websites, mobile sites, smartphone apps, but also in physical store locations and contact centers.

4) Mobile for Location and Care

89% of consumers that receive mobile location-based brand marketing are very likely to respond at some level. This means that mobile engaged customers are often the brand’s highest value customers. Therefore, it is imperative that brands use all available tactics to personalize marketing based on location by using services such as Push, Passbook, and Beacon. Orchestrating an effortless and seamlessly personalized customer journey across all channels should be the goal for brands today. This can create the great customer experiences that consumers now demand. And once brands deliver, this can ultimately result in improved sales conversions, increased customer loyalty, and more business for you.

Earning Customer Loyalty through Data-driven Solutions:

Data Conundrum:

The Challenge of Intelligence is a “derailing issue” for marketers, due to the following key points:

Volume: Data generation from millions of customers
Velocity: Real-time, non-stop data generation
Variety: Independent, fragmented data sources
Veracity: Lack of data synthesis creates distrust

Identify Your Best Customers:

Most brands can name their best performing location or product/SKU, but few can identify their Loyal Customers, who can drive upward of 80% of a brand’s sales. An inability to identify a brand’s Loyal customers prohibits the brand from effectively engaging these individuals on personalized levels to deliver value, build evangelism and even replicate. Loyal customers aren’t just transactional customers. Analyzing the resulting intelligence from your synthesized customer data help you to understand customers based on:

1. Robust customer personas based on Customer Life Time Value.

2. Advanced customer segments

3. Customer tendencies and trends

Retail Marketing: The new era

In a retail store, be it online or physical, we deal thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people every day. To a retailer, it is almost impossible to note or remember every individual – their choices, preferences, likes & dislikes. But again with the changing market trends, it becomes essential for a retailer to reach to the customers personally and individually. The task is to invade the personal domain of the customers without making them annoyed. The question is – how to?

Traditional way – Email marketing:

As mentioned earlier, remembering every customer is an immense task and assumed as “humanly not possible”. However retailers are experienced enough to track the trend of the likings for a rather larger group. They are thus noted and promotional offers are sent to the customers as group mail, e-mails, mobile messages or push messages by other means. The trend based e-marketing has been possible only because the retailers are now cautious enough to keep a good database of not only their customers but their product & brand wise items also. This approach is definitely beyond the old policy of the random batch & blast promotion campaigns and has a sharp edge over the retail promotional market. The success rate hike of e-mail marketing over the random batch & blast has been ranging from 60% to 200%.

However the email marketing also has some restrictions and challenges of its own like –

i) Content relevance to all individual
ii) Increase the count / percentage of loyal customer
iii) Setting a new trend
iv) In-store analytics

Keeping these challenges in mind, the direct marketing trend has entered to the new era of promotion known as Personalization or 1:1 Marketing aided by Omnichannel Marketing Analytics process.

1) Preference Management and Personalization

2) Contact Center Customer Experience

3) Tailored Web and Mobile Experiences

Leveraging multi-channel customer experiences is now crucial . This not only includes websites, mobile sites, smartphone apps, but also in physical store locations and contact centers.

4) Mobile for Location and Care

Personalization:

Each customer is a separate identity. They have their own demographics, ethnicity, culture, taste & hobbies. Each one of these and many more things play a vital factor for the choice of every single purchase. To predict a customer’s choice is thus difficult for a retailer unless the customer is known to them personally which is a rare case. But all the same they feel it good when their choices are remembered by the retailers. Most people who are getting an offer just fitting to his or her own requirements and preferences are almost certain to response and thereby increase the loyalty index to a significant height. And here comes in Persona.

To personalize a promotion for an individual the promoter must have as many data of the person as possible. There had been standard practices of gathering data from the customers in different ways like offering a membership, involving in a survey, running area based door to door survey campaign etc. However the participation of maximum can never be guaranteed with all these means. To overcome this limitation the market has come out with a new era solution called the Omnichannel Marketing Analytics. In this process the data is gathered from all possible resources like a customer’s membership form, Survey outcomes, purchase history, social media footprints, Feedbacks, ethnicity, location & demography, cultural background etc. Thus the data collected in this way for every individual is huge and the software ensures that none of the data are wasted. The data is processed with advanced analytical engines like SQL, or SPARC. These engines enable the program to predict the customer’s buying choice at individual level with more than 90% precision hence enabling the retailer to rich his customers with an enhanced knowledge of their personal preferences. The resultant hike in loyalty base for the retailer is predicted up to a growth of 900% even.

The future lies here:

In today’s rapidly changing market scenario it is evident that 1:1 Marketing or Persona is the best possible weapon to make a difference. Retail is considered to be the final end of any business at the selling side and it is directly connected to customer’s choice – or customer’s individual choice rather. There is thus no doubt that a solution like personalized marketing is going to be the future for the retailers and the most powerful tool to gain advantage over the competitors. Hence welcome to the era of Omnichannel Marketing Analytics – the new market trend for retailing.