A new article published by Wiles (Gartner, 2023) focuses on how executives can drive business resilience, growth, and profits in 2023. Overall, the article emphasizes that executives must be proactive and agile in their approach. One of the recommendations in the article is to optimize operations. To increase profits, executives must focus on maximizing efficiency and reducing costs. This can involve streamlining processes, leveraging automation and analytics, and outsourcing non-core functions.
In another article Mckinsey (Mckinsey & company, 2022) discusses the current state of the inflation economy and how this has given unexpected winners and losers across industries, shifts in consumer behavior, and changes in the global trade landscape. The article provides recommendations for businesses to capitalize on the opportunities presented by the inflation economy. These include adopting a more dynamic pricing strategy, investing in digital technologies and automation to increase efficiency, and exploring new growth opportunities in emerging markets.
3 different customer experience challenges in the customer lifecycle
Engaging existing customers and focusing on customer loyalty will be two essential parts for companies going forward. As mentioned in the article from Mckinsey, “The need to reassure consumers is paramount so they know they’re making smart purchases. Clear, personalized messages like “here’s something we think you’ll like” delivered when and where consumers want to buy at the right price will be powerful for consumers”.
Call-centers and marketing automation are two options that companies are choosing to communicate with their customer segments. However, our experience when discussing challenges around customer experience through the customer lifecycle with companies has narrowed down to one common denominator. There are moments in the customer lifecycle that these two channels aren’t optimized for, but where a great experience will make a huge difference on the bottom line. We have identified three different customer experience challenges in the customer lifecycle.
Customer experience in Standard moments
Standard moments are those that tend to require very little personalization, for instance, sending a generic welcome email to confirm a new subscription or signing up. While sending the same generic notification to many customers at once makes it easy to scale thanks to marketing automation, it can be challenging, in the long run, to establish a personalized relationship with your customer and keep them engaged.
Customer experience in Personal moments
Personal moments are those that require one-to-one conversations with your customers so you can address their specific needs, wants, or challenges. These moments must have a customized, person-to-person approach whether it is renewing an insurance or service booking. Although it is personalized as seen with telemarketing, it can be extremely challenging to scale to the amount desired as it is very costly and time consuming.
Customer experience in Critical moments
There’s another, critical class of moments that brands haven’t carefully looked at, that neither of these solutions are optimized for. Critical moments are those that many of your customers experience, but that are best managed with a more personalized approach. For instance, this involves sending payment reminders for unpaid invoices. Sending a message is usually not enough while telemarketing can be too intrusive.
5 steps on how you can improve your level of customer experience:
- Identify and analyze all your critical moments
- Using your customer data to build smart, detailed profiles for each of your customers
- Identifying the right channel activation mix to deliver communications: at the right time and in the right ways and at the right tonality to each individual customer
- Deploying bespoke content that will convert the customer (a journey featuring an optimal blend of personalized voice call, texts, and landing pages too)
- Learning from these interactions in real time to improve customer lifetime value and loyalty, and updating communications
Developing a seamless customer experience for your clients is important, as solving the challenges in these different moments. A personalized but automated communication is less expensive and time consuming. By using the right scalable, data-driven way to inform, activate, and steer each of your customers in the moments that make or break experiences.
This is how DNB Finance increased their customer engagement by 77%
DNB Finance was facing a high number of unpaid invoices and difficulty in getting customers to engage with their communications. To overcome these challenges DNB Finance needed to provide personalized and interactive communications to their customers. By using their data and automating their communication they were able to send targeted messages to customers based on their specific needs and preferences, resulting in increased engagement and particularly a reduction in the number of unpaid invoices.
The payment reminder communication reached over 90% of the target audience on the mobile phone. 54% responded to the communication and 46% of them chose to act directly in the call. To DNB’s delight, 77% more customers decided to pay their invoice within one week compared to the control group which consisted of customers who only received a traditional postal reminder. And 77% more customers engaging and getting help solving an issue for them – means 77% more happy customers.
Read more about how DNB increased their paid invoices by 77%, here.
