Streamlined Consumer Experience for a Mortgage Lender
How Tavant boosted conversions and enabled Day 1 Certainty with integrated LOS.
B2C Platform to Boost CX for U.S. Mortgage Lender
How Tavant improved CX with real-time decisioning, app portal & lead gen engine.
Building a Successful Customer Experience in Today’s Banking
Delivering similar experiences to Neobanks and Fintechs is not as challenging for traditional banks as some in the industry believe. The race is intensifying between Banks, Neos, and Fintechs vying for the customer’s attention and wallet! I’ve always been passionate about leveraging technology in building better products and witnessing how more and more financial brands are using technology today to carve their own digital journeys and enrich their customers’ experiences. Conducting Financial Transactions with Unprecedented Ease and Speed My enterprise sales career in Fintech and Digital Banking is mainly fueled by a desire to impact both consumers’ and businesses’ approach to banking and how so many of us in this industry are making it safer, clearer, faster, and easier to conduct financial transactions today. Selling across the financial verticals, I’ve had both the pleasure and honor to interact with some of the most fascinating and bold decision-makers who are shaping tomorrow’s financial services industry as we know it. Meeting the Expectation of the Digital Customer: Now And in the Future Recently, while reading through what some of our favorite Neobanks are up to these days, I came across a phrase that I often hear but sometimes don’t really attribute the focus and truth that stands behind that simple statement… “The priority is to build a successful customer service brand that offers banking and financial services, then the other way around.” I couldn’t agree more. And the current pandemic, still surging amongst so many of us only strengthens the notion where we must accelerate within our digital transformation process to achieve those journeys that our customers so much rely on. As many of us in the financial services sector are focused on mapping our digital journeys, some believe that those who are “digital to the core” have been able to successfully carve their own winning strategies and steadily acquire an increasing market share. And then there are the non-digital at the core. The overwhelming majority, from community-focused to household brands, most of these banks and credit unions share one commonality between them. Being around for much longer and focusing on both their physical and digital consumer experiences, they all gained, over time, the ultimate trust and confidence of the customer. But if we break it down, being “digital to the core” simply means having access to all the building blocks that help create offerings that are fundamentally digital, faster to market, and provide an engaging, yet the simplified journey to our customers. Breaking it down even further, it is not extremely challenging for a traditional bank to create digital products and journeys. An example where banks of all sizes and budgets can launch new products and experiences would be to implement the following strategy. 1. Launch a DAO (digital account opening) process through automation, where new accounts can be launched within minutes without manual review. 2. But don’t stop there. The next natural step is the implementation of DLO (digital lending origination) process, allowing banks to digitize current lending programs and launch profitable products such as instant, unsecured small personal, and SME loans. 3. Third-party integration – the essential plugin that most Neobanks rely on to extend third-party Fintechs into their own platform as part of their digital value proposition. It is a lot less cumbersome than many believe for traditional banks to emulate a similar experience. 4. Integration with the core of choice and existing third-party service providers who providing essential banking services to-date. Choosing an off-the-shelf tech stack will not deliver the transformation banks expect, may delay launch deadlines, and increase the initially forecasted budget. What Next? To make this work, banks should consider choosing those technology partners who can add professional services to their product stack offerings. A consultative approach combining product stacks with the outsourced talent to digital transformation is a must for any bank when considering a cost-conscious approach and time to market. At Tavant, we focus on helping traditional banks carve their own digital journeys and enrich the experiences offered to their consumer-facing channels by implementing the technology mentioned above stacks while adding a consultative approach strategy. Our partners at Tavant happen to be some of the most renowned brands in financial services and small banks who are quietly enabling their digital transformation. We take pride in being a mid-size and super-focused technology provider by approaching transformation projects; we have in-depth knowledge, passion, and proven industry results. To learn more, reach out to us at [email protected] or visit us at www.tavant.com. FAQs – Tavant Solutions How does Tavant help banks build successful customer experiences?Tavant provides customer experience platforms with omnichannel integration, personalization engines, real-time analytics, and customer journey optimization tools. Their solutions enable banks to deliver consistent, personalized experiences across all touchpoints while gathering insights to continuously improve customer satisfaction and engagement. What customer experience technologies does Tavant offer for modern banking?Tavant offers AI-powered chatbots, predictive customer service, personalized product recommendations, mobile-first interfaces, real-time notification systems, and comprehensive analytics dashboards. These technologies help banks understand customer behavior, anticipate needs, and deliver proactive, personalized service. What makes a successful customer experience in banking?Successful banking customer experience includes seamless omnichannel interactions, personalized service, fast problem resolution, transparent communication, intuitive digital interfaces, proactive support, and consistent service quality across all touchpoints and channels. How has customer experience changed in modern banking?Modern banking customer experience has shifted toward digital-first interactions, real-time services, personalized offerings, mobile accessibility, self-service options, and proactive communication. Customers expect instant access, transparent processes, and personalized financial guidance. What technologies improve banking customer experience?Technologies improving banking customer experience include AI-powered chatbots, mobile banking apps, predictive analytics, personalization engines, biometric authentication, real-time notifications, video banking, and integrated omnichannel platforms that provide consistent service across all channels.
Decoding the CX Paradox in the Mortgage Industry
The Journey So Far The clock is ticking as more and more customers have started expecting the mortgage companies to offer advanced digital capabilities. Customer expectations for speed, agility, transparency, convenience, and personalization are getting elevated by their delightful digital experiences outside lending. Customer expectations are at an all-time high in every other area of their lives, whether listening to Pandora or hailing an Uber or watching Netflix on their smart TVs. Digital mortgage players have been on the rise, and direct-to-consumer (DTC) originations account for a growing share (more than 25 percent) of the market. While the mortgage loan process continues to be a time-consuming and expensive endeavor for mortgage companies, which are not just witnessing the challenges of meeting escalating regulatory requirements but also increased demand from their customers for a quick, painless process. Most mortgage companies have also been striving to compete profitably in a rapidly transforming competitive landscape. FinTech has also greatly improved the mortgage process; however, traditional lenders are still dominating the industry. A look at the challenges that lenders need to overcome Firstly, buying a home mortgage is the largest financial transaction of most people’s lives. For many, it is also the most cumbersome financial transaction to endure. What adds to it is ‘not so digital’ borrower engagement approach of today’s lenders. Most lenders continue to provide fragmented collaboration solutions that are heavily call-center-based. They still prefer to follow the traditional methods where document collection and borrower information is obtained via channels such as call contact, e-mail, portal connections, etc. Suffice to say; there is massive room for improvement. The mortgage companies need to embrace next-gen technologies to revamp their loan application process and, subsequently, the CX. Secondly, mortgage lending is a collaborative venture. Lenders partner with an array of service providers, including credit, flood protection, fraud prevention, compliance, appraisal, title, and insurance providers, along with income, employment, and asset verification providers. Each delivers a vital element to create a loan that can be closed and sold into the secondary market. This has been paper-based work with information passed between partners in documents and forms before, which created significant time delays and errors that led to inaccurate and inconsistent data resulting in poor quality data and higher loan origination costs. Thirdly, disparate systems are often poorly connected, impacting data quality negatively while increasing the risk of security breaches. Lending companies consider system integrations a pretty daunting, expensive, and time-consuming process to implement and maintain. Lenders need a road map to success that will guide them through the process of digital transformation while remodeling the lending process. When lenders partner with third-party providers to complete the loan process, the data moving through third-party systems must flow into the lender’s LOS. To sum up, lenders must connect the blocks and retrospect their current redundant processes, system integrations issues, and borrower satisfaction. Solving the mortgage riddle Ask any prospective or recent borrower what matters most in choosing a lender, the answer will be ‘loan-to-value’ while the other important element consistently remains as ‘Customer Experience’. These are the twin pillars for most borrowers that drive their decision to go with one lender instead of others. But how do prospective borrowers figure out which lender has the best prices or provides superior CX or the speediest approval or the most reliable closing? The 3 Secret Ingredients for the Ultimate Mortgage Customer Experience Borrowers are consistently looking for connected digital customer experiences that can be accessed wherever they are, whenever they want. Lenders must leverage digital technologies to tap into new business opportunities to streamline processes and exceed borrower expectations and create a holistic ecosystem around the lending experience. 1. Digital Innovation- A bridge to the future To provide a truly delightful borrower experience and take a customer-centric approach, which drives revenue growth, lenders should evaluate what the primary focus of digital technology is. Besides empowering borrowers with next-gen customer-facing technologies, lenders must also consider measuring the sensitive points in each borrower’s loan journey that end up making or breaking their delightful experience. Reassurance, simplicity, transparency, as well as speed, are extremely critical during the entire mortgage journey. 2. Borrower Data- A Secret Sauce to the Customer Journey Delightful CX begins with understanding what customers want, which is only possible by analyzing borrower data. Leveraging data helps them understand the customer and build the proper customer journey view. Needless to say, the power of data insight is undeniable, and with a data visualization platform that can provide a 360-degree view of all data—no matter where it resides—lenders should create scalable and relevant omnichannel experiences for their customers. Understanding customer behavior, as well as their preferences, can help lenders prioritize investments in CX. It is crucial to gather feedback across all channels to explore opportunities for improvement. Lending companies should map out their customer’s journeys to identify all touchpoints across all channels and then leverage it to engage effectively with them. Data analytics can subsequently help lenders deliver superior customer experience at a fraction of the cost. 3. AI, Automation and Analytics – 3A Solution The right lending solution should emphasize on UX and delivers an unparalleled digital experience for consumers. It should provide a seamless and superior user experience across the value chain of the loan origination process for everyone involved, including the borrower, MLO, and the operations staff. Providing an optimized user experience from the initial borrower portal interaction until the loan is closed and funded not only delights customers but also assists in hiring and retaining key talent within the organization. This can be done using: Real-time expert assistance from experienced live loan originators, chatbots, and self-service tools. Data aggregation and workflow automation to quickly qualify and complete the application accurately to ensure the loan is approved and closed faster once submitted; Robust, rule-driven loan scenario loan calculators to play out different loan scenarios and for accurate decision making Looking Ahead: The use of technology in the mortgage industry will always be at a vital inflection point. Technology capabilities
Retaining your Customers with Seamless Warranty Resolution
In this era, companies are trying to stray away from the term of one-time customers. Competition has become immense, and organizations are pulling every string possible to ensure they can retain and satisfy their customers. Would providing the best product or having the best sales team solve the problem? They are all the fundamental part of the product’s sale, but the customers must have a healthy relationship with the organization even after the first sale. Here is when the warranty comes into the picture. Warranty is a written contract issued to the customer by the company, promising to repair or replace a product, if necessary. But providing a warranty alone is not enough. The company should follow a seamless warranty management practice that gives resolution with the best outcome and in the best possible timeframe. How does a seamless warranty resolution satisfy the customer? Customers are satisfied when they see a quick turnaround time for their warranty claims. Every touchpoint with the customer will be satisfactory if the warranty system is in place to give all the required information. The system should help the dealer/company make quick decisions regarding the customers’ warranty claims. How can a company achieve a quick turnaround time? Turnaround time is the time taken to resolve an issue. It is based on various variables, such as: Online questionnaire Parts availability Human resources Streamlined approval flows Failure identification Fraudulent detection Consistent systems Fast processing Configurable system When a company achieves this, it would be able to process a customer’s warranty claim with the fastest and best resolution. The company can do all this with their allocated budget if they can streamline the process. Warranty systems give all essential data about the defects and can predict the possible future failures from the past data. The failure information captured in the system can provide valuable information to set up future field actions or campaigns. These field actions, when set up efficiently, can make a huge difference to customer satisfaction. A robust warranty system can address the following in providing a seamless customer experience: Providing timely update; the vehicle warranty status Ensuring quick claim processing time Providing notification to the customers on any scheduled maintenance or field action which may be due Having a telematics connection with the vehicle to record the machine activities Enabling customer feedback through an online portal Reducing wait time for claim approval Providing access to required information for the team to engage the customer’s issues Wrapping up When an organization has a seamless warranty management in place, it has an added advantage over the competitors. So, it is clear to say, a seamless warranty system not only helps manufacturers in streamlining their internal processes but also helps in increasing customer retention and satisfaction. Reach out to at [email protected] in case you wish to gain more insights.
Embrace CX Equivalent to AI & UX to Reinvent the Future of Fintech
Making Transformation Real The pace of digital transformation has intensified dramatically and empowered customers to engage at their convenience with organizations with whom they interact and transact across multiple channels. Amidst this, there is an unstoppable rise of automation, analytics, and AI, and with that comes unprecedented levels of speed – the speed of accelerating business, generating ROI, making intelligent decisions, meeting evolving customer expectations, and bringing new products and services faster to market. AI, AI Everywhere Today, even the most advanced digital technologies are usually reactive rather than proactive. Think of intelligent digital assistants such as Alexa, Siri, or Cortana, you just need to give them a command, and they’ll respond to it instantly—ordering a product you’ve requested, say, or placing a call. However, when powered by transformational technology, these virtual assistants can become more intelligent and proactive. Soon, your virtual assistant might observe that you’re running low on a particular product and suggest that it place an order for you—or tell you how you can find the best value by adjusting your purchase habits. Or imagine that you enter a retail store, browse shelves aided by an intelligent digital assistant, and once a purchase decision has been made, you simply walk out of the door with the product. Across the BOARD With more and more modern consumers expecting a response to their queries in less than an hour, the digital technologies will prove game-changing. Organizations must unlock digital transformation — and leverage the advantage of AI and machine learning. As more and more organizations are pushing for differentiation, AI-driven CX is a pivotal area. Needless to say, AI and ML will exponentially improve CX through intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants. It will help push margins regardless of industry or sector type. Given the current experimental status, early adopters will have a clear mover advantage. For FinTech companies, this indicates a new way to attract eyeballs, emotionally connect with customers, and build an everlasting relationship. How is AI causing a seismic shift for CX? Beat fraudsters before they strike with Predictive Insights and Real-time Analysis Analytics tools collect evidence and analyze data necessary for conviction. Subsequently, AI tools learn and monitor user’s behavioral patterns to identify rarity and warning signs of fraud attempts and incidences. Claims management can be built up using Machine Learning (ML) techniques in different stages of the claim handling mechanism. By leveraging Enhancing CX with Predictive Analysis Predictive analytics in financial services can directly impact overall business strategy, revenue generation, sales nurturing, and resource optimization. It can undeniably act as a game-changer by enhancing business operations, improving internal processes, and outperforming competitors. Predictive analysis gathers and arranges the data, analyzes it using our leading-edge algorithms and technology, and briskly deploy customized, prescriptive solutions unique for each customer. It can help calculate credit scores and help organizations prevent bad loans as it uses a massive amount of data to find patterns and predict insights. These insights and results can reveal what is going to happen next: what the customers are willing to buy, how long your employee might last, and so on. Delightful CX through UI/ UX Creating intuitive experiences with the help of smart UI and UX designs to enable your business to render excellent customer experience. If you engage with users through seamless navigation, layouts, directions, etc. it will help you enable superior customer experience. UI and all kinds of assistants stand at the forefront of all Fintech as a service. No matter how complex the formulae are, how bizarre the analysis is, or how advanced technologies used — the customer still needs to navigate it and utilize everything properly. Regardless of the industry, the business will perform better only if the customer feels valued. And that value can only be brought by delivering unique CX. All over Déjà vu again! Companies – fearful of straggling behind – scrambled to build online footprints back in the 1990s, when the WWW was the digital frontier. In today’s digital era, AI is causing a similar seismic shift. When keeping customers happy has never been tougher. They’ve more of everything: devices, information, channels, and choice. They also have more power. They can switch brands on a whim – and if they don’t like something, they will broadcast the fact over social channels. What’s more, customers’ expectations are ascending ever higher. They have witnessed how digital disruptors deliver frictionless, connected, automated, and personalized Customer Experiences (CX) – and they expect you to do the same. Such is today’s CX challenge. But as with any challenge, it’s perfectly surmountable. Indeed, if organizations embrace AI + UX and act fast and transform their enterprise to a data-driven, connected and adaptive CX infrastructure, not only will they secure the customers they have, but also win the new ones.
Top 5 Salesforce Trends that Will Shape 2020
Salesforce has become a business-critical application in an age of digital transformation, where once 24/7 management for Salesforce was uncommon, it’s now becoming a new expectation–impacting the broader ecosystem, as well as the teams, partners, and companies that surround it. Why does Salesforce continue to astound reviewers across the board? What is it exactly about? Ease of use, Customized CRM, Automation, or Analytics? All the answers are resounding yes, but there’s something more than that. No doubt, Salesforce is an important part of business success and strategies with over 150,000 customers and their success stories and positive reviews. But the other side of this success can be explained as- Salesforce = Industry + Innovation. Here are the top 5 Salesforce trends, which are revolutionizing businesses today to support the above equation. Enabling AI with Salesforce Einstein – Vision, Prediction & Voice Do you know, how quickly AI-powered apps can be built for employees, partners, and customers on an incredible artificial intelligence platform? From machine learning and natural language processing to computer vision and automatic speech recognition – with Salesforce Einstein brings you the power to think, see, and act to success. Three methodologies, which are nailing the entire innovation are: 1. Einstein is a key catalyst for Salesforce: o Einstein Prediction Builder and next best action What if someone could predict the future? Yes, Salesforce Einstein leverages past data through machine learning to predict future activities with minimal programming. It helps predict business outcomes, create custom AI models on any Salesforce field or object with just clicks and not to code. With a guided approach, it works with yes/no types of questions and predicts numerical data. It provides a scorecard of the expected accuracy of the prediction and provides key insights from the results. o Einstein Vision See from the far! This methodology is beneficial to keep track of the entire conversation about your brand on social media and more. Image recognition in your apps by training deep learning models is another plus. This is to recognize your brand, products, and more. We can apply in our application workflows like visual product search, identifying the product, and automated planogram analysis. Einstein Image Classification leverages pre-trained and customizable models to recognize and classify images specific to your business, at scale. While Einstein Object Detection leverages customizable models to recognize and count distinct objects within images, providing granular details like size, count, and location of each object. o Einstein Voice Talk to an AI assistant is just like experiencing a real conversation. Talk to Einstein Voice Assistant to get daily briefings, make updates, and drive dashboards. It also helps create and launch your own custom, branded Voice Assistants with Einstein Voice Bots. With Service Cloud Voice, Voice assistant, and Voice skills, it will serve the customer in a whole new way. Needless to say, Einstein Voice is a game-changer with the power of the voice and the intelligence of Einstein. 2. Accelerating transformation with Salesforce – A digital reinvention Today’s business world is undergoing the process of transition. With newer technologies evolving, industries across the globe are determining new processes as older ones may no longer be enough. Customer expectations are constantly evolving. They are more connected, informed, and unprecedentedly technologically savvy that they expect the organizations to be likewise up to date. Digital transformation starts with customers. Digital transformation is as much a cultural shift as a technological shift. Leveraging the industry-leading Salesforce solutions and its innovative applications is one of the best ways to achieve quality, efficiency, and scalability faster. Salesforce helps you make it easier for businesses to sell more and grow with the help of CRM solutions. It helps you focus on individual relationships with customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers. It even helps in finding new customers, winning their business, and providing support and additional services, and much more. 3. Designing Seamless Customer Experiences – Customer 360 Journey This is a customer-driven era where customers expect connected experiences across channels and departments, and no matter what, you want to fulfill that. Being a #1 CRM, Salesforce enables your organization to meet these expectations by building online customer communities for clients to share their ideas and resolve a problem. These communities allow agents as well to connect more easily with customers through a variety of channels and resolve even the most critical problems of customers in just a few clicks. Design experiences across channels to help your business drive customer delight and deliver the seamless experiences they expect. 4. Unifying the Customer Experience – MuleSoft Capabilities with Salesforce As we discussed, customers expect connected experiences. They want to avoid experiencing the layers where your systems and departments meet. MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform and Salesforce Integration Cloud help connect every experience by making it easy to connect any application, data, and device with APIs — Application Programming Interfaces. APIs take requests and tell a system about the user’s needs and requirements, conveys system response to that user as well. This process helps optimize a reusable process and enables organizations to accelerate IT delivery, increase organizational agility, and deliver innovation scalability. MuleSoft works as a Salesforce Connector. It can connect any system, application, data, and device to unleash the power of the Customer 360. The integrated capabilities of MuleSoft and Salesforce enable companies to unlock data across systems, develop scalable integration framework, and ultimately create differentiated, connected experiences at a rapid pace. 5. Data Virtualization: Multi-Org Strategies with Salesforce and Heroku Multi-Org Strategy enables a customer to own multiple Salesforce Org. Data and applications are split in different Orgs based on various factors like business units or product lines. Salesforce Multi-Org. The strategy helps you with data separation, reduces the risk of exceeding Org limits, improves time to market, gives freedom to innovate, simplifies Org-wide setting management, reduces the risk of teams to be impacted by shared updates, reduces complexity within a single Org and more. Here comes Heroku Connect to make a difference. It helps Salesforce to share data with your Salesforce
Redefining the Customer Journey in the Digital Age
Are you optimizing your customer’s journey? Customers don’t need to be wowed. They’re super busy. They just desire a streamlined experience, at any given moment with quick and seamless resolution. Needless to say, they are looking for an easy, personalized, connected, and consistent experience. The value of focusing on your customers’ journey can’t be understated. Done right, it helps make your marketing feel more like matchmaking and builds a lasting relationship between your customers and your product. As the old adage goes that if you don’t understand the customer journey and evaluate how, why, when, and where customers are interacting with your brand; you cannot influence them. This holds true with today’s digital customers; ultimately, you will fail miserably to meet their evolving needs. Thanks to digital and social media, the customer’s intolerance to brands that get their engagement strategies wrong is growing significantly. Isolated Conversation- A thing of the Past; the connected customer wants hyper-personalized Digital age customers expect hyper-personalized user experiences when they interact with a particular brand, including high-value communication across multiple channels and devices. Customers are now much more savvy, more agile, more independent, more complex in terms of what they look for to help make their purchasing decisions and their behaviors are increasingly inconsistent and harder to predict – in contrast, the marketer’s traditional approach to defining their target audience, planning and executing campaigns is struggling to keep up. A consumer’s real, personal journey of self-improvement is constant throughout that individual’s life. The need to understand the customer journey through your product and service experience has been widely heralded as a fundamental component of marketing for years. Those companies who fail to unravel the mystery behind the customer journey cannot strengthen their bond with their customers. However, the term “customer journey” is broken. This sounds cliché, but the complexity of customer journeys coupled with multiple broken, disconnected channel partner networks is impeding organizations from delivering personalized customer experiences. In today’s data-rich world, the term ‘customer journey’ is undeniably too high level, too generic, and too prescriptive. It’s incomplete, rarely actionable and therefore it is said to be ‘broken.’ The focus of tomorrow’s marketer, therefore, needs to be less linear, segment focused, and personal. Delivering a seamless experience at every phase of the customer lifecycle can bolster a brand’s relationship with its audience and it requires an ample amount of data and a thorough understanding of the customer journey. However, customer journeys don’t work that way, because customers don’t behave this mechanically. They are human and should be respected as individuals. Taking this account, Offline or CRM data on its own is no longer enough to drive this approach. Despite the high sophistication, the truth is, the ‘real’ customer journey is something far more complex, variable, and volatile than it is challenging to cope up with this effectively. Challenges that businesses face with the customer journey: Extremely difficult to harness the information on customers and audiences from social networks. The growth of online conversations and metrics, which require a robust platform to manage the enormous amount of content. Conversations between business and customers are scattered across various channels. All the data that is available on a customer is somewhere in silos and is not utilized fully. Companies are struggling to find ROI across multiple channels. To solve these challenges, Salesforce has come up with a powerful platform, ‘Salesforce Marketing Cloud’ to integrate all disparate data. Why your business should Choose Salesforce Marketing Cloud? Salesforce marketing cloud is one of the market leaders in the marketing cloud domain along with other clouds like IBM marketing cloud, Adobe marketing cloud, and Oracle marketing cloud. It is the platform for delivering relevant, personalized journeys across channels and devices. It helps marketers to deliver the right messages at the right time to the right people using the right channel. It provides your organization – journey builder, contact management tools, content management tools, analytics builder, and various channels such as email and mobile. To gain more insights, email us at [email protected] or visit Tavant.com/Salesforce.
Personalizing CX with Intelligent Marketing Solution
Marketing is witnessing an unprecedented transformation in the recent years as customer expectations are continually changing due to the proliferation of smart devices, ubiquitous presence of technology, the emergence of the digital native, 24/7 connectivity, and the deep penetration of social media. They dictate what they want, how they want, and where they want. They have become both creators as well as critics demanding a more personalized service. These factors are causing traditional brand and marketing strategies to lose effect where marketers lump audiences into broad groups, typically based on attributes such as location or industry. Because marketers don’t know enough about each person or even if they do, it’s too labor-intensive to engage people specifically with the customized message, content, or offer. It is good news for organizations as they have the chance to discover new ways to engage and think beyond channels and consider how customers are engaging with things like connected homes, connected products, and artificial intelligence-driven interfaces. A new level of personalization and precision, brought about by intelligent machines using data more smartly, applies to marketing as well. An AI-enabled marketer can reach out to every customer at the right time, identifies the best audience for every campaign, and delivers the perfect content for every customer. Today’s organizations have a wealth of data and insight at their disposal — but still, they are unable to translate that into intelligent customer and prospect interactions. Embrace the intelligent marketing solution ‘Salesforce Marketing Cloud™’ to enhance CX Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps you know your customer, personalize it with intelligence, and engage at every touchpoint. It offers you a 360-degree view of your customers, by giving you a personalized experience and flexible service, customized to your business. It helps you chalk out the interactions with your customers, carve predictive journeys; subsequently, cultivates customers into deeply engaged users while giving your marketers the right insights. Let’s delve deeper into how Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help you create a consistent and smooth customer experience Engage current customers — and find new ones Capture data from any source or device. Unify customer data no matter where it was collected. Use it to segment and activate audiences to deliver better advertising, content, and commerce experiences. Reporting and tracking at every step of your customer journey is made possible by communicating with them in a consistent brand voice via email, mobile, social media, targeted ads, web, predictive intelligence, and customer data platform. It forges a much stronger, significant relationship with your customers as you rely on a robust intelligence mechanism, which helps you connect the dots across all your customer touch points. Discover new audiences with AI Use Salesforce’s AI engine, Einstein, to identify new high-value segments. Understand your entire existing customer and new prospects base across clusters of personas and devices. Target cross-channel experiences on any device Drive more relevant and valuable customer engagement — and business results for consistent customer experience across channels. Capture, unify, and activate customer data without limits with Data Studio Know your customer through data, personalize every experience with intelligence across the entire customer journey — including marketing, sales, service, and commerce touchpoints. Get the best of both worlds with personalized email marketing Experian reports that not only is personalization proven to lift transaction rates and revenue; but also, personalized promotional mailings have a 29% higher unique open rates and 41% higher unique click rate. Easily send and organize emails based on data and insights with personalized email marketing and fuel your customer journey by developing personalized, relationships with them. Deliver better CX with Contact Builder Put together customer data from multiple sources for having a better grasp of their behavior and other attributes and deliver exceptional brand experiences across channels through a unique digital marketing platform. Optimize every journey with Journey Builder Uncover the optimal sequence of events to optimize every journey and help marketers customize their interactions with customers according to their real-time behaviors. Map, execute and track social media campaigns with Social Studio Monitor audience discussions while leveraging machine-learning sentiment analysis and image recognition to extract meaningful insights. Create compelling content with Content Builder Create engaging and smart content via mobile-optimized templates and drag-and-drop functionality and host the images in the content builder for best performance. Import the content that you need rather than importing everything together. Wrapping up The age of intelligent marketing is here, and you need an experienced Salesforce partner like Tavant. Drive your marketing across every interaction with the world’s number one marketing platform. Collect and analyze data to understand the customer. Create personalized experiences at every interaction with AI. Engage across the entire customer journey and deliver experiences that each person will love. Consequently, you can align your marketing strategy to your business objectives and drive customer loyalty, which ultimately leads to business growth. Wish to explore further? Reach out to us at [email protected] in case you wish to gain more insights into Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Unlocking the Secrets of Digital Transformation with Salesforce
Today’s consumers expect hyper-personalized and seamless user experiences when they interact with brands that include high-value communication across multiple channels and devices. Delivering that at every phase of the consumer lifecycle can undeniably strengthen a brand’s relationship with its audience; however, it requires data insights and a deep understanding of the customer journey. Companies of all sizes must consider deploying Salesforce to automate and manage their marketing, sales, and customer service functions, and to drive digital transformation and innovation. By integrating Salesforce with other leading digital technology platforms (i.e., AI/cognitive computing, IoT, mobile, live video, image recognition, etc.) business can transform the way they engage, retain, and grow their customer base. Why is Salesforce a critical component for driving a successful digital transformation strategy? 3. It gives the ultimate customer experience: CRM + UX + CX Amidst the fourth industrial revolution, many businesses have joined the race to deliver connected customer experiences. However, providing these experiences requires more than just providing products and services on time. It requires creating organic connections with real people at every touchpoint of their journey The element of customer experience will soon exceed price and product as the key influence on customers’ purchasing decisions, and 86% of buyers will be happy to pay significantly more for better customer experience, according to Walker’s Customers 2020: A Progress Report. This is in line with Gartner’s prediction that by 2022, two-thirds of all customer experience projects will make use of IT, up from 50% in 2018. Customers don’t just seek products or services in and of themselves; they also at the same time demand more convenient processes throughout the entire engagement lifecycle. It is vital for organizations to live up to these demands and offer customers the ultimate experience. These stats clearly indicate that an organization’s customer relationship management (CRM) software should provide a richer, faster, and more efficient user experience, and help bring new, innovative applications to the market for a more significant competitive advantage. Salesforce platform helps companies achieve the necessary customer experience excellence by delivering a modern user experience that bridges the gap between customers and businesses. Specifically, Salesforce Lightning helps companies provide a smarter and faster experience for customers and allow IT and business users to bring new applications to market faster to meet customer demands. 2. It helps in unleashing the power of data According to IDC, business across the globe will expect 175 zettabytes of data worldwide by 2025. The growth of this data will be the result of the amalgamation of intelligent agents that leverage ML and AI to evaluate the growing amount of data generated by the digital things in our lives. According to Salesforce.com’s latest market studies, enterprise sales professionals spend only about a third of their time interacting with prospects. The rest of their workday mostly comprises of administrative tasks such as gathering lead data, time that the cloud company is working to free up. To make Salesforce recently released new features for its flagship Sales Cloud aimed at helping workers find the information they need to be productive faster. Interestingly, most of the capabilities use Einstein, the company’s artificial intelligence system, under the hood that organizations can leverage to unravel the power of data and improve the pipeline. 1. It empowers your customer with information to increase loyalty, retention, size and average order size Technological advancement has enabled and given customers control over the experience of purchasing products and services. Organizations have thus shifted their paradigm from a focus on mere products and services to overall experience during the entire engagement lifecycle. Organizations must improve each touchpoint of their user experience (UX) to successfully adapt to this trend, which coincides with growing user expectations. Being a customer can often be frustrating; system inefficiencies create a gap between delivering the products and ongoing services desired. Because customer loyalty is so important to business success, and because that loyalty is so hard to win, being aware of customers’ experience over time is incredibly important. It is helpful to think of the totality of this experience the customer journey. ` Historically, absent infrastructure and information, together with rapidly scaling business growth have made tracking customer journey quite tricky. With the advent of new technologies such as IoT and cloud services, businesses now have access to this information—if they want it, and if they are willing to take steps to extract it. Making the right decisions about which technologies to implement is going to be the difference that makes the difference. Simplify by putting intelligence into your Salesforce CRM & create exceptional CX with Tavant The future of every CRM software is anchored to the fluid architecture of the overall system, including its flexibility to accommodate rapid changes in the market and deliver on ever-evolving customer expectations. Salesforce powerful capabilities are massive steps in this direction, as the entire framework puts Salesforce in a strong position to conquer the all-important “disrupt or be disrupted” philosophy that has taken hold of the modern-day business environment. Tavant’s Salesforce services modernize CRM applications and processes using automation and cognitive intelligence. The result is an increase in conversions, a surge in sales volumes, and increased customer retention. Tavant has been enabling successful Salesforce implementations and integrations over the years. Reach out to us at [email protected] or visit here to explore our Salesforce offerings.
Top 5 Sales Challenges that Salesforce Can Resolve Effectively
Impeccable customer service isn’t just a way of building customer loyalty; it’s also what sets you apart from your competitors and reflects your digital readiness. Salesforce® has been the game changer in achieving this. Today, customers expect you to deliver the right answer the first time, every time, on whichever channel they choose. Keeping up your customers’ expectation means more than just providing the right answer at the right time. It indicates delivering a personalized experience for every customer and efficiently collaborate internally. Gathering customer’s data at this stage is important to be able to qualify your lead effectively. Businesses must boost their sales process and invest in the right tools and intelligent technology to stay ahead in the digital world. Organizations not well-equipped for this face regular challenges like: No single unified view– One of the main challenges lies in integrating data from various disparate sources and create a single unified view. For example, a customer’s data might be stored in a CRM, or their order history information might be in a custom legacy system, their purchase data might be lying in some POS system such as Shopify during their social media data on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and the like. Lead qualification is a crucial part of the sales process. Long customer decision time frames-Long sales cycles are a nightmare for all sales staff, which means delayed ROI and uncertainty about winning the deal. If the existing systems can’t provide complete visibility at each stage, the customer acquisition cycle prolongs. Disjointed sales processes- It results from the fact that every sales team member without unified software for streamlining sales management, applies different methods to handle the sales process. Bringing transparency to the sales process- Managing nitty gritty about deals, the accounts they are dealing, and the number of potential sales scattered can be quite a challenge for sales managers. The communication gap between sales and marketing- Sales and marketing being two different worlds existing in parallel with each other is the status quo. The lack of communication between these two important teams eventually leads to their poor performance. According to the [i]E-consulting study, four out of five US customers don’t believe that the common brand understands them as an individual. Personalization depends on your customer and in many cases, that’s where small and large companies fall short. Another report by a major analyst indicates that organizations that deploy CRM strategies such as Salesforce will return at least 25 percent better ROI than those that don’t. The Salesforce solution has the capabilities to enable you to successfully manage your sales process throughout the stages of qualifying to closing and follow-up. Understand your potential on Salesforce A robust 360-degree view helps businesses to reduce costs by providing a single source of clean, integrated customer data. Successful organizations understand the potential of Salesforce goes beyond it and know ways to integrate & enhance their existing system’s capabilities. It undeniably enables organizations to drive better marketing, increase sales growth, understand their customers’ behavior deeply and, most importantly, deliver unique personalized customer experience. In conclusion Investing in reliable automation software such as Salesforce undeniably pays off in the long run while providing employees with the right tools. Applications developed and integrated on Salesforce enable organizations to achieve shorter sales cycles, create efficient proposals, and improve sales and marketing collaboration. Tavant’s FinLeads product does all of this and goes beyond it. It’s a Salesforce-based customer engagement and aggregation platform that acts as one-stop-shop for Sales & Marketing teams to quickly convert your leads to customers. To gain more insights, visit our Salesforce partnership and FinLeads pages or just say [email protected] to schedule a meeting. [i] https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insi…
Want to Accelerate your Sales Funnel? Ignite the Core!
Long lead conversion cycles are the biggest impediments to the sales and marketing professionals in the fast-paced technology-driven financial services industry. In the digital age, your customers are more capable, smarter and better informed than ever before. This modern breed of consumer needs a superior kind of marketing engagements and quick sales cycles. According to a research done by [i]Harvard University, over the past five years, the average sales cycle length has gone up by 22% due to more decision makers being involved in the buying process coupled with sluggish economic growth. Furthermore, over 25% of sales cycles take approximately seven months or sometimes longer to close. That’s why it’s important for salespeople and marketers to start thinking about the health of their sales cycle. However, an efficient lead management system can undeniably improve sales and marketing alignment and positively impacts the pace of the sales cycle. Is Your Sales Funnel Management Platform Really Customer-Centric? There are all the twists and turns that the average customer takes on his or her journey with your brand—various touchpoints including social marketing, call center, mobile apps, traditional advertising, and website interactions. While introspecting the current system, ask these questions: Do you have an efficient funnel management system? Does it help you in shortening the sales cycle and sell better? Does it provide a consolidated 360° view of operations and customer transactions? Is your sales process in sync with all other customer messaging across channels such as email, mobile, social, etc.? Top 3 critical Customer Engagement & Acquisition challenges to focus: Disparate Data – The customer information is often siloed in multiple systems, including data within the organization as well as from second and third parties. It may include e-mail messages, interactions from social forums, data from weblogs, and much more, making it extremely difficult to systematically collect, centralize, and share with other groups internally. Lack of control– Organizations often lack a practical means to analyze large amounts of structured and unstructured data resulting from customer interactions to surface customer sentiments, rising trends, competitive advantages/disadvantages, and other information for timely decision making. There is a scarcity of data scientists who could wrangle that data for you and already engaged with other requests from across the company. And the analytics tools that you have at your fingertips don’t have the comprehensive and up-to-date understanding of your customers that you need. That makes it too difficult to engage and acquire right people at the right time. Inconsistent customer experience– The rise of technology, the empowered customer, and legacy strategies and solutions have caused the customer experience to become fragmented and disparate. And we should face it that there are many fragile and often broken moments in the customer journey. Additionally, the change in the channel typically adds complexity and threatens to derail purchases and sometimes even hurts loyalty. How to Address Such Challenges? A single, unified view of all the disparate customer data can streamline your sales and marketing process and help you to build relationships throughout the length of your sales cycle with lead nurturing and automated follow-up. Needless to say, companies must apply advanced analytics to gain a 360-degree view of their customers and engage with them in the early stages of the cycle. They must act fast to streamline their prospect funnel management and have a complete integrated view that could help them to efficiently navigate while maintaining a strategic focus on maximizing sales performance. The Final Thoughts As the old adage goes, a leaky ship sinks an empire. It holds true in today’s competitive market as having a leaking sales funnel can be depicted as the difference between putting money in your pocket or handing it straight to your competitor. So, if you’re committing these blunders, it’s time to fill the gap now. Consider making use of the right blend of data strategy and technology to acquire, convert, grow, retain, and win back customers in one seamless omnichannel journey. Identify the “gray areas” in your processes and how they are they affecting your business. Dig deeply into the customer list, re-tune it through an easy filtering step to pair tactics to the specific customer cluster and ensure to bring at-risk customers back into the fold. How Tavant helped New Penn Financial to bridge the gap between legacy and digital Recently, FinLeads was selected by New Penn Financial to transform its digital lead engagement processes together. FinLeads helped their sales and marketing teams and loan officers to manage sales funnels more effectively. It also elevated their business performance with real-time analytics, enable a faster loan process, and digitally enhance their overall customer experience. Want to explore more: Tavant is committed to helping clients deliver next-gen customer experience. To gain more insights, visit our FinLeads page or just say [email protected] to schedule a meeting.
Transforming Customer Experience with AI
Eighty-five percent of customer relationships will take place without human interaction by 2020 and AI-derived business value will more than triple to $3.9 trillion by 2022, according to Gartner. By 2019, 40 percent of digital transformation initiatives will be supported by some cognitive computing or AI effort as predicted by IDC. Furthermore, Servion has forecasted that AI will be able to power 95 percent of all customer interactions by 2025 and it will do it so effectively that customers will not be able to ‘spot the bot.’ Many organizations are at the center of this digital transformation and are turning to the emerging technologies such as chatbots, intelligent ad targeting, recommendation engines, personalized communications, and image recognition to gain business value, bolster their relationships, differentiate themselves from their competitors, and increase revenues. AI is quickly becoming a mainstream technology in consumer devices and services. In 2018, the business conversation in boardrooms on Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, print media, and conference keynotes about AI, machine learning, RPA, chatbots, and virtual assistants have reached the new pinnacle. Surprisingly, nearly two-thirds of consumers are already using AI without even realizing it with products such as Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Watson. Thanks to the adaption of AI into CX, we are witnessing how enterprises are attempting “true” personalization with predictive capabilities in real-time. This indicates better listening to your customers, understanding the context and providing them with a CX. Organizations are embracing AI to enhance the customer experience by: Intelligently augmented self-service technologies Collating data to enable price and feature comparisons Gathering data by smart assistants Using sentiment analysis to track customer emotions and respond accordingly Forecasting customer needs and then responding proactively Gaining more information about the customer based on data patterns Discovering user interaction on websites to determine if they need help Giving recommendations based on the behaviors of similar customers How can AI Enhance CX? Customer Insights Bring Important Findings for Businesses Leveraging AI can help unleash actionable customer insights that can help in driving impactful business decision-making. AI has also transformed how organizations get customer insights. Leveraging the vast amount of data that is available on customers today, AI can keep a track on trends and predict what customers’ need in the future. One of the best examples of this is Spotify, which used data from its more than 100 million customers to create a compelling ad campaign. The Use of Personalization Improves Customer Experience In customer experience, personalization is a significant advantage to AI. Modern customers expect offers to be tailored to their needs—a blast email with some general offer won’t appeal to nearly as many people as a targeted offer that directly addresses what precisely a customer wants. However, creating those personalized experiences is extremely difficult and tedious for humans. AI can quickly sift through millions of pieces of information to figure out exactly what matters to customers to create a personalized experience. Process Automation Increases Business Efficiency Streamlining repetitive tasks is a big change happening across industries. Deploying AI to automate the process efficiently and effectively can save time and increase efficiency. It provides a seamless experience for the customer by having a near 0% error rate. Additionally, it becomes easier for service representative relaying information and responding to the customer’s needs. This efficiency enables them to take care of more people in a much shorter amount of time. By automating processes and allowing for real-time data integration, communications are significantly improved. Looking ahead AI is undeniably a powerhouse when it comes to customer experience. This technology will not only allow organizations to create faster, more personalized experiences but will also help in gaining customer insights to deliver better customer experience in the future. Companies must unleash the potential of AI and act now to reap its possible rewards to gain a better competitive advantage in their business. Reach out to us at [email protected] to know how we can enable your business garner customer loyalty, improve experiences, and help you stay relevant in the business.
How Can Salesforce Magic Transform Digital Customer Experience?
Businesses are in a constant struggle to improve agility and reduce costs. Organizations are looking to unlock the power of data for better customer management and great customer experiences to improve efficiency and increase productivity. Companies that are reluctant to put the customer first will surely strive for relevance in an increasingly competitive market. Moreover, they will also be threatened by the growing number of businesses that are leveraging customer experience to drive loyalty and adoption of their products. Needless to say, organizations must reinvent the power of customer experience in the era of the connected customer and need to embrace the customer-obsessed culture and create a single view of their customer. They should be able to understand their customers, resolve their queries, and anticipate their future need and understand the paramount value of following their customer’s point of view. However, for an organization to gather information on its customers in order to facilitate better a working relationship can be a daunting task. Salesforce makes it easier for businesses to sell more and grow. Benefits of CRM A CRM solution helps you focus on your organization’s relationships with individual people — including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers — throughout your lifecycle with them, including finding new customers, winning their business, and providing support and additional services throughout the relationship. Here’s how a CRM system can help your business today. Make direct improvement to the bottom line Adding a CRM platform to the business has demonstrated real results – including direct improvements to the bottom line. CRM applications have a proven track record of boosting: Sales by up to 37% Sales Productivity by up to 44% Forecast accuracy by 48% Recognize and classify leads A CRM system can enable you to identify, add new leads quickly, efficiently and categorize them accurately. By focusing on the right leads, sales teams can formulate the opportunities that will close deals, and marketing can classify leads that require more nurturing and prepare them to become quality leads. Boost high-quality referrals from your existing customers Understand your customers better and drive cross-selling and upselling opportunities and win new business from existing customers. Provide Better Customer Support Customers expect real-time responses and interactions at every level. A CRM system helps you to offer the superior quality service that customers are searching. Improve Product & Services An efficient CRM system gathers information from multiple sources across your business and beyond. It gives you unprecedented insights into how your customers feel and what they are speaking about your organization — so you can revamp what you offer, recognize issues early, and identify gaps. Tavant will be showcasing Tavant Warranty On-Demand and FinLeads at the Dreamforce 18. FinLeads is the mortgage industry’s first customer engagement and acquisition platform. It drives and automates a streamlined prospect funnel management process that helps engage prospects, educates them, qualifies them, and accelerates their transition from lead to customer. It integrates the omnichannel engagement across digital assets owned, third-party sources, call centers, and field operations. It brings together the best sources of industry data and leverages an intelligent algorithm to inform how the acquisition journey should be personalized for customers and recommends and automates next best engagement actions. It supports multiple lines of business (Wholesale and Retail). TWOD– Tavant Warranty On-Demand, our enterprise warranty solution offered on the Salesforce Cloud, combines our warranty solution expertise with industry best practices. Tavant has experience of over a decade of working with leading customers to develop and implement enterprise-class warranty solutions. The On-Demand solution offers end-to-end warranty lifecycle management and is the only solution of its kind on Force.com platform. If you are looking to implement a world-class warranty solution without investing heavily in infrastructure or the resources required to deploy & maintain the solution at your own premises; our on-demand solution is tailor-made for you. Want to explore more? Meet our Tavant experts at Dreamforce 18 to learn how to unlock your sales and revenue potential, just say [email protected] to schedule a meeting.
Customer Experience (CX) – The Secret Sauce of Digital Transformation
The past few years have seen a tumultuous change in the mortgage industry as many servicers struggle to keep pace with stringent regulatory requirements, increasing per-loan servicing costs, operational challenges, fragmented view of the customer and rising consumer expectations. But what if this reaction could be less about just keeping up with the changes and more about a paradigm shift to a focus on what the borrower wants and needs? Recently, when Fannie Mae surveyed mortgage executives, one of the notable points of the survey was the use of next-gen technologies to improve the consumer experience across the loan life-cycle. However, most lenders agreed that there are many significant barriers including cost, implementation, and integration issues that are holding them back. 38% agreed high costs is the biggest challenge 23% said implementation of next-gen technologies is too difficult 20% found integration as a complex issue Two-thirds of lenders have not used next-gen technology vendors at all So, what are the ingredients of the ‘Secret Sauce’? Well! It’s the Customer Experience, which is a Journey of Expectations Personalization is more important than ever Customers expect personalized services, and it can be difficult for consumer lending organizations to deliver. Not because they do not have the desire, but because of legacy systems and regulations that restrict them to the traditions of the past. These constraints hold them back, even while they recognize that location and products alone are not enough to attract and keep empowered customers. A Good CX Means a Loyal Customer The customer is equipped with loads of information before even making the first contact; they are not that loyal as they look for the best deal and are likely to maintain a relationship with more than one financial institution. A recent report from Deloitte (Reshaping the retail banking experience for the customer of tomorrow) reveals the importance of positive customer experience: 90% of customers trust a recommendation entirely; they are seven times more likely to trust a reference than an advertisement. If a customer encounters poor customer service, he or she may never come back and will advise their friends as well to do the same. Transform Destination into a New Beginning Of course, integration of multiple systems is complex and one of the major challenges faced by lenders. But that should not impact the experience when it comes to quickly processing a loan. Think if your customers get an even better digital experience towards ending of processing cycle, the chances are bright when they are looking for next loan. The opportunity for change: How many loans originated this year? How much do you want to grow loan revenue? How many loans are processing on average? Do you want to raise this number? How long does it take to process a loan? Average wait time and processing cost? Are you expected to reduce these costs? If yes, then by how much? The answers to these questions can help you refine your vision for the future of your lending activities, and nurture discussions with your solution partner helping to pave the way to measurable improvement. LOOKING AHEAD The digital transformation underway in the mortgage industry is undeniably not a fad. Digital solutions address numerous industry challenges. The technology and process transformation will provide a single view of the customer and personalize the customer experience, spur innovation within services and products offerings, increase compliance and cut down origination costs. Lending companies and mortgage servicers must embrace digital solutions to stay relevant. Migrating from a legacy mortgage model to a digital-solutions-based model will require dedicated organizational alignment. Remember, digital is not just a box to be checked or leveraged only for pointed solutions to specific problems. Are you off late having a train of thought? How to modernize, measure and manage a mission-critical runtime environment and partner ecosystem that is high-performing, robust, efficient and responsive to change? Tavant’s AI-powered digital lending solution can help you: Reduce application processing time Reduce the cost of the overall process Better control over the process and reduced error rates High visibility on loan application status across the organization Increase customer satisfaction and business, and enhance employees’ efficiency Do you wish to explore further? E-mail us at [email protected] to schedule a meeting. Innovative Lenders have altered their way of doing business to not only roll with the industry changes but also thrive in – and even help drive – the transformation. We will discuss this in our next blog.
The Magic of Clubbing Customer Experience & Text Analytics
Analytics-driven customer experiences are redefining the Customer Journeys in the Digital 2.0 world now. According to Gartner, “By 2020, with the help of AI, customers will be able to manage 85% of their relationship with the brand without interacting with a human.” Today’s digital-savvy customers live in an omnichannel world and transact with businesses in many ways. When they set out to accomplish a task over time, they expect a seamless hand-off among devices and channels. The entire journey needs to be consistent, contextualized and connected to satisfy these increasingly demanding and fickle customers. Customer experience can drive superior revenue and is critical to growth and competitive differentiation for business. Data insight is one of the primary tools for CX enhancement. An enhanced CX clubbed with an in-depth data is an opportunity window for smooth customer journey. However, the practical challenge for organizations is to integrate all their digital and traditional channels to manage a friction-less experience. It is likely that data is trapped in siloed systems across marketing, sales, commerce, and service. Unlocking the potential of unstructured data hidden in the customer journey If structured data is so big, then unstructured data is enormous. It is known that organizations exploit only structured data that represents only 20% of the information available. That suggests that 80% of the data is lying mainly in unstructured form and there is a tremendous potential waiting to be leveraged in the analysis of unstructured data. Unstructured data usually includes comment boxes in feedback forms, is undoubtedly a significant way to gather consumer views on a brand or a service. Unstructured data is highly valuable when merged with structured feedback since it helps in visualizing the consumer’s journey with the brand. Making sense out of unstructured feedback is hugely complicated and organizations that decode this, gain a better grasp of the customer experience. Moreover, when monitoring customer feedback, the element that brings a couple of benefits is Text Analytics. This Text Analytics can help bridge the gap between customer expectations and the experience provided during entire customer journey. These days customer feedback data are coming from the emerging channels such as social media and mobile devices enabling companies to rely more on text analytics. Organizations that are quicker to identify emerging trends have drastically improved the survey experience with much shorter questionnaires where their questions are getting answered easily and are also realizing the potential of non-verbal expressions like emoticons in conveying customer’s sentiment in feedback. Business Value of Text Analytics Analyzing the overall sentiment of the conversation and ‘what, who, where, when, why’ transforms the unstructured data into structured data and enables organizations to pay attention to all of the conversations. An essential goal of analyzing unstructured data such as customer complaints, opinions or comments is to catch the pulse on what users perceive about an entity. It also helps organizations recognize what do the customers think of the various attributes of a company’s product such as quality, price durability, safety, ease of use. The key to digital transformation lies in combining the Text analytics pieces together with a well-thought customer journey at a strategic level. In conclusion The use of text analytics is burgeoning quickly, and organizations are unleashing the potential that is possible if textual data are analyzed and integrated with decision making. Given the exponential growth of unstructured data both outside and within the organizations, text analytics will continue to expand. Organizations need better insightful text analytics to understand the most relevant drivers to improve the customer experience, ultimately leading to ‘Delightful Customer Journeys’. Text analytics is undeniably actionable if it supports decision making optimally and if the results of the analytics can be shared in a way the business is empowered to act.
Digital Innovation FAQs Part II: Customers, Experience and Disruption in Consumer Lending
This is Part II of the Digital Innovation FAQs series. Part I talked about innovation, millennials and technology trends. You can find Part I here:Digital Innovation FAQs Part I. #4 So where do you start? How do we define the digital transformation strategy? Every company has its unique brand values and strengths. They also have some vision and strategy in place. In our Digital Experience (DEX) workshops, we work together with our clients to find the synergy and opportunities… by understanding their customers, their brand values, we go on the discovery, a journey, to see the opportunities where digital experiences can create the most value and impact. There is a fair bit of research and homework involved. In fact, some of our clients proactively do their own research and have figured out customer journeys and digital opportunities and pain points as well. The digital strategy is aligned with the overall strategy. We help with the strategy to account for any digital considerations and many companies already recognize this very well. Understand the customers, embrace the brand values and keep it simple. Strategies built around that can then focus on execution and give great results! #5 So give us an example of brand values. For example, take “trust” as a brand value. It’s still a very people-centric industry… real people dreaming about their own home and they trust lenders… real people who help them. The people in any company work a lot to get the trust of their consumers. Every channel, retail or digital, every interaction, every experience should build trust. Trust is precious… very hard to build but fundamental from a value perspective. Transparency is another. Most customers cannot understand the lending process and regulations. Lenders spend a lot of time educating customers when their time could be better spent helping them buy their dream home. By being honest, by being clear about steps, fees, regulations, you build more trust. #6 And, what is simplicity? Simplicity here can help by making information simple and clear. Lenders can then spend their time helping customers. Customers feel empowered because they understand and feel in control. You get operational efficiencies just by simplifying the information. Simplify the process, reduce the steps, make it easy to use, easy to apply, easy to approve… make it simple. You get more customers, more referrals, more business… lots of happy people. That is what digital experiences and transformation all about… happy customers! #6 That sounds simple… Why don’t we see more of that? That’s why you need to be strategic… have a clear digital strategy with priorities in place. It’s human to want more. The key is to focus on a few, experiment till you get it right and then scale it for your company. Listen to your customers. Look for business value and impact when evaluating projects and assessing where you are. #7 Can you show us more? Yeah, sure. Take a look at our Digital Practice @ Tavant for our offerings and case studies. We will be very happy to reach out and discuss… get it touch! ‘Customer journeys’ is one of the cornerstones of our Digital Experience offerings. We will be publishing a whitepaper on customer journeys soon.
Optimize Customer Satisfaction Using Analytics!
As per the Alteryx analytics, 69% organizations use customer analytics to support core sales and marketing. 63% use analytics toward enhancing customer satisfaction and 46% use it to increase customer loyalty. Today’s business success is mostly dependent on how customers are perceiving a product on offer along with the flexibility in making the product available to customers. It starts with products being viewed on display to how it met the customer’s expectations regarding its usability and services offered for it. Companies are working toward optimizing using ultra-cautious measures. A satisfied customer is the one who makes repeated purchases from a brand and also refers it to others, resulting in positive publicity. A satisfied customer is like an advocate who publicises the strong points of a brand to the world. As per Bath Empire survey 2014, 41% customers’ purchase products as they think the prices are great and 26% go for quality and choice. Analytics also show that 27% customers fall within the age of 45 to 54 years and 24% fall between 35 to 44 years. Earlier, when there were no tools or metrics used to measure the satisfaction, the companies were unable to get the ideal reports on what to produce or on how to optimize the operations and most importantly ‘What customers want?’ They could get the answers only when a customer switched brands. According to Tony Hsieh, “Customer service shouldn’t just be a department, it should be the entire company.” A lot of terms like customer retention, customer loyalty and customer delight has been coined, and reports are gaining more focus. Companies are investing heavily in getting analytics reports with insights on factors affecting end-customer satisfaction like the attentive / knowledgeable staff, respect for the customers, easily accessible, delivery service, post-sale service, return policy; pricing; as guidance to forecast future business requirements. These details, when expressed with the help of pictorial representation, provides meaningful insights into how an end-customer perceives a product and service of a company. The image below depicts the different types of satisfaction levels that can be identified using analytics to understand the customer’s behaviour toward an individual product or brand. E-commerce companies leverage analytics to track details of customers who add products to the cart but do not checkout. It also provides details like real-time view of the number of customers accessing a website, the type of customers and their geographic location. The focus of the analytical study is to gain insights like bounce rate, exit pages, In-page analytics, Site search; navigation summary. Now-a-days, with the increasing requirement for better and improved analytics report, lot of companies are coming up with different methods using which different analytical reports can be fetched to determine future course of actions. The methods of measurement are: As per the Qualtrics, below mentioned are some of the parameters used to measure customer satisfaction. (Source: Qualtrics Blog)
Achieve overarching customer satisfaction through Omnichannel approach implementation
“Whoever said money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to go shopping,”- Bo Derek. The modern-day purchase decision and shopping experience is much more complex with the shopper having multiple options to choose from online store to teleshopping sites. To address this challenge and provide shoppers a seamless shopping experience across the channels, retailers deploy Omnichannel retailing solution. A distinctive feature of Omnichannel retailing is the integration of various sales channels including retail stores, mobile stores, online stores, mobile app and telephonic sales. This provides a unified customer experience starting before the sale and continuing even after the sale is complete. However, it’s essential to differentiate from a multi-channel experience. Essentially, this differentiator is the depth of integration of all sales channels. Most companies in today’s business invest in different engagement platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, website, etc. but still the customer lacks the seamless experience due to lack of integration. So, businesses investing in Omnichannel approach should focusing on aligning the objective, goals and messaging of all the different channels and deliver a seamless experience to the customer. Companies considering to implement an Omnichannel approach should involve all the stakeholders of the organization such as front end executives, marketing, IT, sales, etc. in strategizing to ensure that transition to the new model happens smoothly. Ultimately, this translates to providing a superior customer experience and better satisfaction. One good example of Omnichannel approach providing a great experience for customers is the entertainment giant Disney. The approach begins with a very well designed website having a good user interface. It has a real experience not only on a desktop but also on mobile devices which lacks in many other cases. After booking the trip, the user can use My Disney Experience tool that allows the user to have a complete view of the future experience. The customer can plan the entire trip starting from picking the pass to identifying the rides and deciding what to eat at which eatery. Disney’s unique customer experience offerings don’t stop here. The company provides Magic Bands or cards that can be used to do a gamut of activities including unlocking the door of resort hotel room, enter the water park, check in at fast pass entrances, connect Disney photo pass images to the account and also charge food and merchandise purchases to the Disney resort hotel room. Such a seamless integration of multiple channels to provide a comprehensive user experience is the key to the success of Omnichannel retailing. This exercise might seem out of reach to companies of small sizes. But, technology has come a long way over the past few years helping reduce the cost involved in customer engagement. So, it can be said that commitment from the company’s management, predefined strategy and working with different organizational stakeholders in tandem will surely help organizations achieve a successful Omnichannel approach implementation and thus provide a significant customer satisfaction. Implementing one such strategy, in turn, leads to customer retention and contributes to better revenue prospects.
3 Step Program to Customer Targeting
Businesses, today, are turning to customer analytics to define and predict customer behavior. Most businesses represented by publishers and advertisers rely on demographic data to target consumers online. This is required to associate a product to a particular audience as defined by its demographics (age, gender, income) and interest data. Below is a three-step method for advertisers and publishers to reach their target audience: Collect User Behavior User behavioral data is usually collected through web browsers and video/audio players. Scripting languages such as JavaScript or Flash action script can be used to collect information related to browser, IP and content consumed by the user. This information can be categorized as strong or weak. For example, video player, tags or GPS-based location information can be categorized as strong and IP address, browser type, or login patterns as weak. Audience Segmentation The next step is the classification and identification of users by their interest or demographic characteristics. Users can be broadly classified by the following attributes. >Interest (media content) >Behavior (source, location, region) >Demographic (age, gender, income, company) This data can be used for machine learning model. Machine learning algorithm correlates user behavior to a specific interest. Users can then be targeted by using a combination of observed behavioral data. Interest and Behavior-Based Targeting Online behavior and the kind of media content consumed is required to predict user interest. The audience segmentation model identifies relationships between interest or content categories. The affinity rule increases the penetration of the ads campaign beyond the observed data. Interest-based advertisements, also sometimes known as personalized ads, are displayed based on information from online buying and browsing interacting patterns. Demographic-based Targeting The registration process can help to obtain demographic data such as age, gender, income or place of residence. The combination of behavior and demographics data is used as input to the Machine learning algorithm. By affinities rules regarding interest and demographics the machine learning algorithm increase number of users for ads targeting. Deliver Ads in Real Time When all this information is collated, then the next step is to deliver advertisements in real time. The trend in real time advertising is already visible and businesses can push dynamic content advertisements, across platforms and in a social environment. Thus, once the target audience has been defined and the ad content is formalized the power of the Net takes over. By doing this, advertisers and publishers will move away from creating perfect messages to creating perfect brands.
Understanding the Relationship between Warranties and Customer Satisfaction
Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), equipped with the latest and best product knowledge, help in enhancing customer value and product quality. Aberdeen Group, a well-recognized business-intelligence research organization, presented a study recently. It said one of the top priorities for organizations is to improve customer satisfaction, after which comes the objective of managing costs, improving product quality and increasing revenue. But how can manufacturers be equipped with the knowledge to meet these objectives? A warranty management approach can be the solution for these OEMs. If a warranty or service contract solution can generate a product record history, it becomes easy to track the product history throughout its service life-cycle. With this information, manufacturers can gain valuable insight into the product life-cycle, which in turn provides insight for service improvements. That is why manufacturers, nowadays, are looking at warranty solutions with a strategic perspective. To achieve these objectives, manufacturers need to upgrade their existing and isolated legacy systems to integrated warranty systems, which can use advanced analytics services to churn warranty data into meaningful information. Such information helps the OEM to improve its service offerings to the customers. With real-time analytics in place, manufacturers can gain substantial productivity, increase operational efficiency, and retain customer value. The Challenge A large automobile manufacturer was facing challenges with its equipment warranty services and parts logistics system. The customers were not satisfied with the quality of equipment and hence, there were frequent customer complaints. Additionally, the response time to service requests was high compared to competitors. The organization was unable to achieve the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for equipment warranty and service parts. The biggest blow was that both, internal and external customers were complaining about the process lapse. Some of them were turning to competitors. The Solution With immediate effect, the OEM incorporated a warranty system for the client. Streamlining of processes and communication channels ensured that the equipment warranty KPIs were met. Furthermore, the analytics system traced products throughout their life-cycles and provided key insights to assess supplier performance throughout the supply chain. Moreover, it helped the OEM capture the service time taken by each of the servicing dealers, thereby keeping a check on the service turnaround time. It generated an effective internal process and helped immensely in managing and engaging internal and external customers. The Benefits Customer management & engagement Comprehensive reporting & analytics Reduced costs & customer complaints Process enhancement Proactive response to customers Development of contingency plans Improved efficiency of onsite service requirements Lesser turnaround time Increased brand credibility