Business Tip
"A personal touch"
Posted September 26, 2011 by Amy Guillotte
We’ve heard it often enough – it costs more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. If a business has a 20% customer attrition rate on average, it must acquire 20% net new clients each year just to remain in the black.
So it’s easy to see why using marketing dollars effectively to maintain customer loyalty is essential to revenue stability and growth. Not only this, customer experience will be a key competitive battleground; customers will join for a superior experience and customers will leave over a poor one.
These tips can help you to make the most of customer communications:
1. Strike early: Most cross-selling opportunities occur during the first few months of a customer relationship. Research shows that businesses that communicate with customers early and often in the relationship improve cross-selling results and lower attrition rates. Welcome kits are a common means of building on the initial relationship, they need to be crafted carefully and tailored to the customer and product needs.
2. Be responsive: By scanning and electronically storing documents you can provide a faster, more efficient service, obtain information for more personalised communications, ensure greater data accuracy and increase compliance.
Looking through paper records or shunting them off to storage facilities will not be deemed adequate in the future. Start thinking now about back file conversions, information repositories and comprehensive workflow capabilities to make servicing the customer a natural and seamless act for your customer service agents.
3. Take inventory: Any communication with a customer,( by phone, Web or face-to-face ) is an opportunity to acquire data about their life stages, attitudes, needs and preferences. The information can then be centralised and integrated into the business’s inventory of brochures, catalogues, fulfilment literature, direct mail and statements so that details about individual customers or targeted segments can be placed in your document templates to deliver greater impact.
Analytics will be crucial; you can take a page from what retailers do in this regard, in order to know your customers well enough to both sell and service them.
4. Get personal: You are likely to generate sales if you personalise every document, email and so on. Incorporating variables in documents such as the customer’s name, product type or life event is the key to generating response rates that far outstrip the typical 0.5% – 2.0% expected from direct-mail campaigns. Of course you also need to know if your customer will welcome personalised communication or if it will be considered an invasion of privacy.
For example, getting personal can go high-tech with quick response codes (QR codes), modules that marketers print on communications for customers to scan with SmartPhones, directing them to a personalised landing page with tailored information about products and services, case studies, helpful tools and so on.
In order for QR codes to be effective, marketers should stay true to the basic principles of marketing. People will only engage and interact with the content if it is relevant to them. The content on the initial communications piece must be relevant in order for the person to be interested in navigating to the landing page, and the content on the site must be relevant in order for the person to spend a meaningful amount of time there.
5. Keep it simple: Keep product information as simple as possible so your staff can explain them and customers can understand them.
6. Be creative: Customers say they would be more responsive to more informal and creative communications; if your business requires it get the marketing and legal departments to work together to produce understandable and compliant communication.
7. Change the channel: Different customers prefer different communications channels (direct mail, e-mail, online or text messages), so ask early in the relationship which method the customer prefers and stick with it. Communicate offers in terms that customers or prospects will readily understand, through the channel they prefer, and at a time when they are open to receiving it.
8. Embrace social media: Don’t be afraid. In the modern communications landscape, customers are increasingly expecting their service providers to communicate with them via social media. Businesses must ask themselves: what are our consumers’ expectations and requirements around social media? What information do they want shared via social media, and what conversations do they want to participate in?
To address these questions, businesses have begun to create social media teams charged with transforming traditional methods of doing business. Beyond social channels, however, you must decide whether to build the infrastructure and processes to manage the social media communications, or to “borrow” the infrastructure and process instead (meaning: outsource it). Social media channels are fabulous opportunities to learn what your customers are thinking about.
Knowing when to engage a third party solution provider who specialises in optimising business processes is becoming more important. Suppliers can bring innovation – leveraging technology and process enhancements in customer care, transaction processing and document and digital asset management capabilities to improve efficiencies. A strong business process outsourcing partner can automate workflow, consolidate vendors and improve touch points with your customers.
Power is changing hands in the industry, slowly but inexorably. Power is moving to the customer. Customers will insist on dealing with you when and where they choose, with their preferred channel and on their terms.
Customers will want to be in control and know that you consciously put them in control with their needs first. Improving the customer communications process is a vital step for attracting and retaining the right customers.
About:
Dan Smith is Head of Integrated Marketing for the Middle East and Africa region of Xerox’s Developing Markets Operations. He was appointed to this position in August 2008 and is based in the UK.
He manages all facets of marketing – including channel communications, product marketing support, demand generation programs, electronic and e-marketing initiatives – for the Xerox lines of business in more than 70 countries comprising the Middle East and Africa region.
Dan joined Xerox’s UK. operations straight from university in July 1997. His first role with the company was as a systems analyst for color solutions and pre-sales technical support. In August 2000 he joined a team tasked with establishing a channels business model for Xerox U.K. At the start of 2003, he began working with partner development in the UK. and a Xerox sales team for enterprise-size organisations.
In October 2004 Dan joined DMO to drive the Xerox Office strategy in the Middle East and Africa and in 2007 he became Head of Marketing for the Xerox DMO Office business, overseeing a drive to maximise channel communication and demand generation in emerging markets.
Dan is a law graduate from Hertfordshire University in the UK.
