Amazing Customer Experience

In every management discourse “amazing customer experience” spins off more questions on the customer engagement program. Earlier companies hardly care about what customers think about their products or services because the marketing function was busy transforming the negative experiences of customer through various marketing gimmicks and tactics. But today the emergence of social media has altered the game. The customers are more empowered to express freely their honest opinions and views about a product or service offered by a company on any social media platform. If any customer’s negative opinion is supported by similar views of other customers, this becomes a major concern for the company. Once the discussion transforms into a more participatory forum, it not only impacts the future business of the organization, but also it destroys the brand.

The role of social media has been predominant in empowering both businesses and customers. The marketing team can explore new avenues in the digital ecosystem to boost their marketing strategy. While earlier customers had little choice for selecting a channel to interact with a company, today the upsurge social media has brought in a plethora of options to reach out to the company representative. It’s not only a unidirectional communication that hides behind the carpet; rather a more participatory discussion that attracts many stakeholders to engage with customers.

An amazing customer experience doesn’t come out of blue. The company needs to understand the customers’ needs, engage with them, and deliver exceptional value in whatever form of offering. But the primary task is how to understand their actual needs. According to a survey conducted by IBM, just 35% CXOs really understand their customers well. This indicates that maximum CXOs don’t understand the customer needs.

In a customer-centric business environment, companies need to engage with customers through various communication channels and must endeavor to deliver value in concrete terms. Today, a number of companies send a survey form to customers and expect them to provide exciting feedback. That’s the inherent problem in customer engagement. You can’t dictate customers to be servile and expect good reciprocation. There are many players in the market and it won’t be too harsh to say that customer has always a choice.

The tricky part of customer engagement is how effectively companies can drive the customers to act as per their strategy. It’s not a marketing gimmick at all; rather it’s a cohesive customer engagement program. For example, a company’s sales representative can even gather precious information in an informal way while attending to a customer. It’s not a one-off incident. Companies should build up an engagement strategy in an implicit manner. A better way of doing this would be building the trust among customers and employees. Human relations can deliver amazing business value.

If you want your customers should respond to certain questions, then don’t send a formal survey link or questionnaire to millions of customers. In fact, train your employees to build an environment in which customers could be tempted to respond to many open-ended discussions. During those discussions employees can keep exploring the opportunities or help driving the customers to a point where the discussion points can provide huge insights.

The best customer engagement policy should hinge on the fact that a good listener is the most successful achiever. Try not to intimidate the customer by repeatedly intervening in the discussion. Give the customer free hand to open up and come out with as many points, which in turn will provide a gigantic customer datasets to explore the treasure. But the company representative shouldn’t forget the role of moderator; else the customer will drive his or her own agenda and the information collected will have no use.

Let’s consider the efficacies of social media engagement. Today, all young customers have a social media account and they are quite active in social media discussions. Anything and everything is discussed threadbare on social media. But the crux of the problem is that companies are not equipped with the right technology solution to decipher the discussion points. With millions of customers posting their views on a specific issue, it’s a gigantic task for the company to get the desired insights.

What’s required to analyze these engaging discussions is a technology solution, which would enable companies to derive powerful insights. However, to achieve the optimal outcome the companies should integrate all customer-facing applications – be it customer portal, corporate website, social media sites, CRM, or business analytics tool. The synergy among the tools will manifold the power of analytics.

As mobility is taking the lead in disruptive technologies, the companies can leverage its capability to boost the customer engagement program. With millions of smart apps readily available, companies can move their CRM and other customer applications into cloud and build a mobile strategy for business workflows. This will improve the quality of 24x7 operations. As customers will be exposed to a response mechanism round the clock, it will drive more customer engagement. But here is a caveat! The employees responsible for customer engagement should be distributed across various time zones and they must internalize the local culture to be more customer-friendly.

Remember, cohesive communication can only resolve 40% of the problem, but it requires the support team to accomplish the rest 60% task in a responsive manner. Although the companies have a mandate like SLA to take care of issue resolution process, there is no harm in building a smart system wherein support staff can reduce the resolution turnaround time in a proactive manner. When a customer issue is resolved with due diligence within the SLA, there is no substitute to the customer satisfaction level achieved in that process. A satisfied customer can be a reference point for many customers down the line.

Moreover, a satisfied customer can be open to share his or her views without a second thought. So, it’s a tactic for customer support representatives to collect the feedback of customers when they are really satisfied with the service of company. A unified system can enable the company to collate customer data from various geographies and eventually help derive generate meaningful customer insights. A data-driven company can bring in customer service excellence and deliver amazing customer experience in every customer engagement.

Social Media Trends

Every netizen has his or her bit of experience with social media. Some two years back when people were increasingly emphasizing on real-time search and information distribution, the marketing agencies and brand builders pitched in to optimize the benefits of social space and then started a much calibrated social media monitoring which proved that social media is not just a fad, rather it's a social technology revolution to understand the marketplace and consumers in an effective way. Time has changed. The same cynics who argued that social media is all fun and and no business have now taken a u-turn and are diehard proponents of social media integration with every business.

Well, social media dynamics are as nimble as social changes in a consumer world. Finally, the physical and virtual world of people have converged. The people who are more active in social space have turned to social media technologies to manifold the results. It's not too far from today when every democratic debate could emerge from aggressive social media discussions. With every new trend in social media, the community influence on businesses will be paramount. And the winners are certainly the ones who stay relevant to the social media trends. Well, let's have a look at some of those trends.

1. Privacy is a word of the past
With younger generations taking on to a non-hypocritical stand on personal choices, social media will enable this trend in a much bigger way. Increasingly people will accept personal exposes on social media. Beyond sharing likes, dislikes, wishes, opinions, and personal information, people will be tempted to share their most secret episode of their life. What it eventually would produce complex personal information that would help businesses personalize their products and services. For example, a survey on the length of a condom, which of course has a direct relationship with manhood, is still considered hush-hush in our society; however through social media the personal revelations would pour in, which in turn would help condom manufacturing companies to innovate better and more effective products.

2. Information portability
It will be a thing of past to view just Facebook trends on Facebook. What's more interesting would be to experience a composite trends across all social media. An OpenID would act as a passport to import all relevant information from various social media spaces and throw up to the expectations of viewers.

3. Real-time search
Gone are the days when we depended heavily on webcrawller logic to get stale search results indexed few days before. Today, Google's social search capability provides real-time information. With advance algorithms, Google can enable users to avail relevant yet timely information to enhance search experience.

4. Content aggregation
Content is king and still this statement is relevant today. Will upsurging social networks and exponentially increasing online profiles, the amount of online content is being generated at huge speed. Like content syndicates, the content aggregation will see a paradigm shift. And the most important fact is that how the content will be aggregated and how will it be presented to the end users will make or break the business.

5. Virtual reality
With platforms marrying each other at a breakneck speed, the end users will experience a more powerful applicability of social networking sites. Thanks to innovative technologies like 3-G, GPS mapping, mobile integration, all these will bring in an altogether new dimension not only to social relations but also to business relationships in long run. And the sad part is that your privacy is gone and you are exposed to million scrutiny.

6. Market influencer
TRP and ABC reports are a thing of the past. When advertising agencies claimed the number of eye balls directly influence the spend pattern of consumers, the social media has gone further to prove that viewership per se has really anything to do with sales, it's now the niche segmentation of viewership that really makes a significant differentiator. In fact, if we go by the market influential tactics, the feasibility of a sale only happens when the right customer receives the information. Advertising through TV or newspapers maybe as relevant today as was in past, but what really matters is that how the consumers internalize the facts propagated through advertising. The social media in turn has bring in breakthrough techniques to influence consumers in a larger way. The peer reviews, Google analytics, social trends, and various monitoring mechanisms have developed a sense of trust in consumers' mind.

7. Consumers' verdict
What's relevant today is how your peers perceive it. That has been a trend written on rock. Consumers now before buying any product take a deliberate preview of the product and its user ratings. If a product doesn't ferry well in user ratings, it's perceived that either the product is not worth purchasing or it's a sub-standard product. Imagine the verdict of consumers which will drive the business of tomorrow.

8. Social media as a service
So. what's next after SaaS, PaaS, and CaaS? Certainly, it's SmaaS or social media as a service that will define how SMEs which can't afford to full-range SM services of their own bank upon this new trend. Beyond fad, SmaaS will bring in new opportunity for businesses to expand their reach and brand positioning. And the SmaaS providers will see a complete new business opportunity along the evolution of social media technologies.

9. Crystal gazing
Everyone likes a bit of predictable future. What's relevant today might be hugely irrelevant tomorrow. Be it social trends, spending patterns, consumer behaviors, or marketing shenanigans, the future of social media largely depends on every aspect of consumer acceptance to change. Behind this lies innovative technologies to understand the implications of consumer reactions and bring about necessary logical changes in the usability of social technologies. That said, the gamut of social media will notice an array of visible changes on consumer usability and technology facilitation. Thus, the future will evolve from how consumers look at social media today and what they expect from the providers.

10. A marriage of social convenience
Social media and digital media will soon converge to open a newer platform for consumers. Digital divide will be dissolved sooner than latter. The elite technologies that specific sections of our society normally use will be available to all and sundry. Because social media will help reduce the class structure and evolve a paradigm shift in digital experiences that once was exclusive to top echelons of society. Thanks to the evolution of social media technologies that have brought people from all ranks and files to the same platform on a reasonably similar involvement.