For the modern consumer, personalized services are more important than ever. According to Epsilon research, on a panel of 1,000 respondents aged 18 to 64, 80 percent said they are more willing to buy when they receive an offer customized to their needs. When a customer contacts Customer Care, he wants to find someone on the other end who will call him by name, know exactly what his problem is, and be able to solve it immediately. When Customer Service offers him something that fully reflects his needs of the moment, that phone call is no longer seen as a sale but as a solution to a need.
Tutto questo non è fantascienza: è già possibile e dovrebbe diventare una priorità per le aziende, B2C e B2B, che vogliono riuscire ad avere un vantaggio competitivo nei confronti della concorrenza dando un risalto autentico alla propria offerta. Utilizzando software di qualità, che siano capaci di leggere e analizzare i dati, è possibile conoscere a fondo il nostro interlocutore, arrivando a capire qual è il messaggio giusto da comunicare alla persona giusta, nel momento giusto.
Customer Service and Hot Leads: All starts with Data
The first thing to understand is that to get to this level of Customer Service, you have to change the way data is handled. There needs to be a smarter, faster approach, not only to put together the right information but to leverage it to its full potential. One thing has become increasingly clear over time: the success of this process is tied to the quality of the technology and the skills of the people working to achieve it. People who know our business and are just waiting for enough resources to best sell it.
Customer Service must be put at the forefront because it is the business sector that has a direct line to the consumer most of all: it can realize recurring problems, gather feedback, and get to really understand what the customer wants.
Marketing Customisation
Getting the right message to the right customer is part of personalized marketing, which allows us to use data to send targeted messages to prospects. Unlike traditional auctions, this is dedicated to a specific number of consumers who we know in some way are already interested in our offer. They are already “Hot Leads,” potentially ready to buy.
Strategies to start such a campaign require a few simple steps:
1- Know the users’ needs: every customer expects us to be recognized. When he or she makes contact, visits our site, or calls Customer Care, he or she must find someone on the other end who is constantly asking one simple thing: What brought him or her here? What is he looking for?
2- Remember who they are: if a person returns to our channels, it is only fair that they expect to be remembered. This is true in so many situations, but just give a simple example: a customer who receives assistance on our product trial demo and, the next day, finds an email in his inbox inviting him to give the demo a try. Something went wrong, of course, and the customer experience with our brand pays the price. In this day and age, this can be costly. Understanding what prospects do is the key step to getting warm leads even ahead of time.
3- Anticipate needs: by learning how to handle data, we also discover other interesting things. We gain the potential to read what comes “next.” Doing analysis, and hazarding – but not too much either – predictions. If they’ve already bought the product, it’s a good time to propose upgrades, and new features, communicate bug fixes and share tricks for using it to its best advantage.
When we use data analysis and management platforms, intelligent CRMs capable of selecting for us the right time to send communication and the right message to include, the information flow that is created between us and people acquires a quality that alone is enough to convert our efforts into sales.
The tools of personalized marketing
The biggest of the challenges of personalization is trying to apply it on a large scale. It is not possible to write a personal email to each of our customers. But the point is not to call as many people by name as possible; the point is that at the moment contact occurs, we can have everything we need to offer value at our fingertips.
Technology comes, of course, to our rescue:
– Analytics platforms: from data collection to personalized campaigns. Because it’s not just about collecting first and last name and email address, it’s about keeping track of the individual’s behaviors, needs, and wants based on their situation. To get to understand not only who is on the other side, but what baggage of needs they carry with them.
– Data Enrichment: a place to collect data from campaigns, existing customers, and prospects. This is an irreplaceable resource capable of giving insight into the people we care about: age, income, browsing habits, demographics, locations, devices, and so much more.
– Smart CRMs: everything we care about and that can make a difference in sales is found in a good CRM. A good CRM is made up of good infrastructure and the constant updating of the data within it, capable of turning information into a rich resource ready to offer the right pretexts for targeted selling.
– Artificial Intelligence: BigProfiles succeeds in adding data to those in your CRM, drawing from authoritative external sources and creating clusters to predict each contact’s propensity to buy, even before they are called.
Talking to the customer, for the customer
Customer Service has changed a lot over the years, and today more and more contact centers are leveraging their connections with the existing user base to find upselling opportunities.
When we invest resources to send a message to the right people, instead of targeting everyone at scale with generic offers, we gain in so many ways.
First, we make our investment pay off more: according to Monetate research, irrelevant content in marketing campaigns has 83 percent lower than average responses. Second, but no less important, we create a service that is less invasive and more targeted to the individual consumer’s needs, enabling a better experience, customized to real needs, and ultimately creating a valuable relationship that can last.