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.