Digital transformation is driving enterprises to deliver enriched customer experiences based on three pillars – listening, personalizing, and engaging.
Marketing firms have made incredible strides in experience personalization, with highly focused content, dynamic delivery on their websites, and lots of incredibly engaging visual content. But, still, the experience is still very one-dimensional, and can be dissolved into generic product packaging and offerings that may, or may not, match customer needs and expectations. One big reason is also that such expectations are highly dynamic and fast-changing.
Business buyers want fast, simple, and personalized experiences. Yet delivering that experience has become elusive for many organizations. Digital transformation promises to harness the power of technology to resolve legacy business challenges, drive business growth, and transform the overall business operations.
Transformation energies should be focused on delivering a better customer experience initially, starting where the business meets its customers, and extending the functioning of the marketing team, delivering increasingly personalized experiences into the entire end-to-end sales process. Doing so offers a better buying experience for the customers, driving revenue growth, offering a more effective defense against disruptive fresh entrants, and delivering the measurable results demanded by the C-suite.
Read More: Defining One Customer Journey per Customer is now Business-Critical
Below listed are the pillars to assure customer engagement:
Listen: Comprehending What Drives Customers Interest
The most critical pre-requisite is to really understand the customers and what they expect. Evaluating and revisiting their expectation in real-time is crucial. This listening process enables businesses to learn from the customers to solve problems using the right approach.
Analyzing marketing intent, sales transactions, and then folding in third-party data, including market dynamics – ensures a far more in-depth understanding of what customers need, why they need it, and a significant predictive analytics level that feeds directly into product creation, definition, and packaging.
Personalize: Optimize Offers for Maximized Interaction
Merely listening to the customers is never enough if one doesn’t appropriately act on it. And that is where personalization matters. The process should involve taking insights gleaned from the listening process to feed it directly to the product, pricing, and sales teams to compile the right set of offerings for those customers.
Engage: Meet Customers Where They Are
The insight gained from listening to the customers is critical for building out the perfect packaged and priced offering to match today’s specific needs. This stresses on the need to engage with them when, how, and where they want.
During the engagement process, personalizing and listening continue. So every interaction, successful or not, provides more significant insights into how to serve the customer needs better. There’s a positive feedback loop which builds trust, adds value to buyer or vendor alike, and streamlines the sales process. This is what is genuinely transformative.
Read More: Leveraging AI to enhance Customer Experience and Engagement
Marketing plays a central role in helping drive such a change, of course, as marketing teams have been analyzing and gathering data for years now. However, for such a process to really deliver on the promise, the simple mantra of “listen, personalize, engage” must echo throughout the entire sales process, reaching back into the product, packaging, and pricing functions.
It is also likely that technologies such as AI will become an integral part of the core business functions, only because of the need to comprehend, gather, process, understand, and finally extract insight from vast volumes of data that mandate ML as a supporting mechanism. While the convergence of insights might enable marketers to engage on a more human level with the customers, AI will likely provide the initial round of analysis at scale and agility to respond in real-time to evolving customer needs.
The power to transform and advance the end-to-end sales process finally reduces customer churn, delivers revenue growth, and actively allows the business to become the disruptor rather than merely responding to disruption. However, it also has an impactful and equally powerful side effect.
Now industries are turning their focus to combining sales, product, and marketing teams, in order to achieve a common perspective on customers and their needs. Strangely, the impartial arbiter’s presence and relevance doing the analysis can align the teams on a standard holistic view, a singular vision of the buyer in their world. And this carries enormous implications. A company in which everyone Is fully aligned and focused on every customer’s real needs and expectations, as a place in which from the boardroom to the shipping department, everyone had access to a consistent, clear view of customer needs and demands – is the most successful one.
It’s power. And it’s attainable but requires a little time and effort.
