There’s nothing better than going into your local coffee shop, and the barista greets you by name, with an already completed order based on your usual at the same time every day. This experience drives you back every single day because the customer experience is tailored to your preference.
To scale this practice of customer relationships, it traditionally required hiring more individuals for your sales and business development staff functions, or the often errored mail merge in the greeting of a mass email. Over the last decade, newsletter platforms for small businesses popped up all over the place, such as MailChimp or the more complex & costly platform, Infusionsoft. The design of the emails and the automation of lead generation became more simplistic and straightforward due to platforms leading the way.
Beyond the beautiful designs and automation campaigns, companies must begin to tailor their communications to customers based on prior interactions no matter where they’ve happened. It should be inclusive of every touchpoint, whether it’s the mass emails, 1:1 emails, phone calls, or social media. At this level, it proves that our customers aren’t a “collective”; they are each an individual with their own “profile” of needs and experiences. Honestly, when factoring it in, depending on whether you’re B2C or B2B, it may be a single individual or a group of individuals within a company you have to communicate with.
This belief grounds the foundation of an idea always front of mind leading as the managing director of Flare Partners, and that is that “generic and mass it out, but bespoke and tailored is in.” That is the customer experience that I look for offline and online, an experience that is focused on establishing a relationship with me as a VIP customer.
When we think about “automating” the customer experience, it’s essential to understand that it isn’t to replace your team with technology. The goal is to utilize the technology to automate and create dynamic mass communications that are tailored, then providing insights and data with triggered “starts” for your team to have strategic personal customer interactions. It maximizes your team’s efficiency and capabilities, ultimately driving more new & recurring revenues for the organization.
Accenture reports that US companies lose an estimated $1.6B in revenue due to bad customer experience. It is an area of opportunity for those companies losing their customers; however, it’s an even more prime opportunity for those to pick up those customers in transition by leading with impeccable customer experience.
If we’re able to understand the content a lead or customer is consuming on our website, let’s say a Thought Leadership piece on Diversity & Inclusion in the Workplace. We can present similar thought leadership pieces in real-time or guarantee they receive future articles on D&I directly in their inbox. Leaving the “automated” experience, we can trigger communication to an internal business development executive about this customer’s consumption for s(he) to reach-out with a more specific and focused goal on D&I versus generically just “Human Capital Management”
McKinsey’s research shows that a relevant recommendation leads to conversion 50% more likely than a low-impact generic recommendation.
With the proper tools, you can also commit to tracking and understanding the customer’s actual perception of experience and being proactive in preventing a customer’s churn when certain levels and triggers are met.
Customer Experience Automated, a real Seamless Experience, should be inclusive of your companies touchpoints with your customers at every stage, whether it’s marketing, sales, or customer support. This 360 approach would provide critical insights and analytics to make the right decisions in improving the experience your customers have. When it comes to our companies and our customers, I will give a limb if required to ensure that no customer left is behind, or falls through a crack.
As we’ve focused on cracking the Customer Experiences of many clients from 5 employees to 200,000 employees, we understand designing the tech stack and strategy for a prime experience. To continue to create those dynamic customer experiences, we’re packaging our skills and teams’ strategic capabilities with the technical foundation of ActiveCampaign to provide what we’re coining as Seamless Experience Automation. As discussed in this thought leadership piece, it is a system that’ll be fully inclusive of every communication channel business has with its’ customers to drive a prime experience for marketing, sales, and support.