 |
 |
|||||
 |
 |
 |
|
Customer Relationship-building Tools Branding
|
Customer Experience and Brand Touch-PointsCustomers experience a business (or brand) in many different ways, both directly and indirectly. Some organisations gain a reputation as being "hard to do business with". Others constantly delight their customers (or at least build strong loyalty). Sometimes this is based on the performance of the product or service that a customer has bought. Usually it is a result of the many other ways in which a customer comes into contact with the business - its "touchpoints" with customers. Brand Touch-points:
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
Managers need to plan and manage this, and not leave it to
chance. While delivering good customer experience
is a goal of every business, those which rely on
strong brand differentiation for competitive advantage
need to implement their business models around the
delivery of their brand promise. Delivery of the
brand promise must be the driver around which all
decisions are taken, and not a haphazard outcome. |
 |
In this context, outsourcing of elements of the customer experience (such as installation of pay-TV service, telemarketing of an insurance product, or management of websites) must be done with extreme care. Only so much can be achieved through the legal contracts with suppliers. Ideally, all the outsourcer's staff who will be involved with the brand should be trained in the brand values and encouraged to feel involved with delivering the brand promises.
Care should be taken that the outsourcer does not manage these people with targets that will conflict with delivering the desired customer experience. To help de-risk outsourcing key elements of the customer experience, brand managers need to invest time and effort into designing performance standards into outsourcing agreements, and must maintain appropriately close watch over actual results (perhaps more so than internally provided elements).
Customer Experience and Scale
One of the more challenging aspects of delivering customer experience relates to scale. Generally speaking, the more customers a business is trying to serve, the more complex the challenge becomes.
|
Business systems, staff training, customer service arrangements, pricing and contracts, and sales methods, all have to match the greater volumes. One challenge is to "scale-up" without having costs skyrocket. Another challenge can be simply coping with all the customer interactions. For example, handling customer service enquiries when sales of a software product suddenly takes off (a problem which caused Microsoft great difficulty in the 1980s). |
Sometimes a degree of trade-off is necessary. One way to manage the complexity of increased scale is to standardise processes and interactions - i.e. to remove some flexibility from customer experience. When was the last time a supermarket offered to call you when they get delivery of an out of stock item? Could you call the experience of going through Heathrow or LAX airport friendly or pleasant, compared with an Australian domestic terminal? Can you remember ever speaking to a real live person when you couldn't get a $179 software program to work? The scale of all of these businesses has forced them to restrict some elements of the customer experience - a need driven by cost management and sheer practicality.
One way of keeping customers happy is to "manage customer expectations" as they scale up. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It is usually done by refining the nature of the value proposition: supermarkets delivering low prices, a broad product range, and convenient parking; Los Angeles airport providing connections to a huge range of destinations, passenger safety, and never ceasing to function despite massive passenger volumes; software coming with very thorough self-install programs, online help, and intuitive user interfaces.
The challenges of large-scale operations are the same as those faced by all growing businesses: the need to design and implement business processes, which support customer interactions that deliver a satisfactory customer experience (as a minimum) in a dependable, cost-effective manner.
Customer Experience Starts Early
In it's most basic form, sales and marketing is about providing sufficient information to prospective customers to (a) make them aware of a potential solution to their needs, (b) inform them about the nature of the product or service, (c) establish a preference for a particular make or brand, and (d) trigger the purchase.
This exchange of information occurs in the context of a range of customer experiences that are as varied as looking at a magazine advert or visiting a company's, website, all the way through to reviewing a formal business proposal at a meeting with a supplier's bid team.
One of the complications from a business viewpoint is that for every interaction which leads to a sale, a great many other interactions will not do so (at least immediately). Usually it is difficult to say whether an interaction will ever lead to anything. Also, the more targeted the sales effort the more likely it is that people who do not purchase immediately will do so in the future.
As a result of all this, everyone coming into contact with the business should experience a satisfactory, appropriate interaction. All should feel valued. Interactions should be as hassle-free and productive as possible. The challenge is how to provide this universally positive customer experience as economically as possible.
Managing Cost of Sales with Structured Interactions
One of the greatest challenges in a broadly-based business is engineering sales contacts with customers such that everyone feels as though they are getting attentive service - without involving huge costs of sale or customer service.
Organisations that are traditionally structured to sell high margin items to a small number of customers can be very challenged when adding lower cost products and selling to a broader customer base.
|
The answer lies in developing a structure of interaction points with customers that provide positive experiences, without necessarily involving one-one discussions with expensive sales people. Well-managed businesses will structure their customer interactions to drive down the cost of sales (as a percentage of revenue) as customer numbers grow. |
 |
In practice, most growing businesses will quickly reach the conclusion that they are limited in the number of high cost interactions that they can manage anyway - restrained by their access to resources (for example, perhaps because they can obtain only a few highly skilled staff). Most organisations therefore develop multiple channels for interacting with customers.
Consistent Customer Experience
There are two approaches to delivering positive customer experience, while reducing the cost of sale. One is to assume that all interactions are unconnected, essentially "first contact" encounters between an individual and the business. The other, harder approach, is to place interactions in a context, such as the individual is a high-value client, works for a major business customer, or is a person who regularly uses, say, a particular payment method.
A certain amount of self-selection can be built into some interactions. Examples are the use of cookies on websites to identify links to previous online interactions, and call centre interactive voice recognition (IVR) systems asking if the caller is a regular user of the service - and feeding them in to a truncated interaction flow if they say they are.
With first-contact inbound interactions, strategies include:
- Selectively publicising different touchpoints for different customer segments
- Incorporating a filter system into initial touchpoints, to direct customers to appropriate interaction channels
- Limiting all interactions to highly automated methods
- Greeting all callers with real-life call centre staff, who qualify callers and determine the most appropriate way to provide information to them.
Contextual interactions include:
- Providing premium service numbers and other loyalty program privileges to valued clients.
- Using calling number identification to pull up account details as call centre staff answer phone call.
- Hotels remembering your newspaper and pillow-softness preferences and confirming these on check in.
- Online stores customising welcome pages to feature items you might be interested in, based on previous purchases.
- Customer service operators having access to previous interaction history when a customer provides their account number.
- Accounts receivable staff knowing the long-term value of a particular customer is high, even though they have fallen behind in their current payment.
- Credit card authorisation programs detecting unusual card usage and requesting additional identification of customers.
Virtual Relationships and Customer Retention
Virtual relationships offer a powerful approach to generating positive customer experience while managing costs. When the full breadth of options are considered, many businesses will find that very few interactions with customers need to be face to face in order to deliver a valued, quality experience.
This is particularly important in customer retention activity. Businesses need to ensure they do not erode the profitability of valuable customers in their efforts to retain them and strengthen customer franchise.
From the customer's viewpoint, a business can generate positive experience and a feeling of membership or belonging through many channels. These include direct interactions the customer has with the business as well as the "halo effect" of encounters with the brand in their daily lives.
There are many ways in which in which virtual relationships can be built.
|
|
||
|