Empower your Sales, Marketing and Service reps with a Single Customer View to boost
Published by: Pritee Verma
We are living in times of multi-channel….
Gone are the days when a customer would either need to show up at your store or keep waiting on a phone call to get in touch. With the rise of the digital era, a customer will communicate anytime and through any medium that he pleases via email, Twitter, live chat, telephone, online form, etc.
No matter what sector you are in customers and prospects come knocking your door from everywhere. Consumers hop across various channels in order to carry out even the simplest of tasks, whether it’s buying stuff from an ecommerce site or checking the opening hours of its retail shop.
The best multichannel service provides a seamless and consistent experience to customers at every touch point. This means that no matter what channel a customer chooses to make an enquiry or bellow a complaint down, the response (in terms of speed, tone of voice and outcome) should be the same.
This has increased challenges for organisations…
No wonder this has made lives of customers easier but at the same time increased complications for customer service teams.
In an organisation it is necessary that the all marketing, sales and service reps speak the same language to a customer. They should be updated about his orders, contracts and complaints, be aware of his association with the company and its products, when did the last communications happen, what did he say and expect, what he likes and dislikes about your products and service. It’s not ideal when a customer has billing issues with your company and one of your sales reps tries to sell him a product completely unaware of the situation. Or if the customer had a complaint and had to repeat the same story to three different people in three different departments.
There is chance of losing customers to competitors..
But this is an entirely unpleasant situation, creates frustration in customers and eventually they just move to your competitor. In the eyes of a customer, although they use different communication channels they believe they are interacting with a single entity, a brand. Inconsistency leads to mistrust and spoils customer relationship.
As an organisation grows, along with it grows the number of departments ( sales, marketing, service , etc. ) and the number of teams within the departments. Its highly possible that each team has a preferred mode of communication with customers or internally. And also each might be having completely different systems. It becomes very difficult to keep track of a customer’s or prospects journey in the entire sales or service cycle. But do organisations have scope to go wrong here. NO!
Times have changed. Customers need much more attention and with one thing provider going wrong they have at least two other offering them the same product or service at a competitive price and perhaps better quality.
Adopt Customer Analytics to succeed…
But let’s not be so gloomy. If customer have more buying power today, so have increased the resources for companies to serve them.
It is of prime importance to build a single customer that has a complete, consistent and updated information about customers. This information empowers every department of your organisation to make better business decisions and also improve customer interaction. It improve efficiency and productivity at all levels.
Capturing information from various sources requires special skills and advanced technologies. It is usually recommended that organisations start planning on these lines and engage with experts in the filed who can help them. Slowly they can build and internal capability and reap long term gains.