In today’s new age economy, more and more businesses are driven by digital commerce, as traditional and new businesses are leveraging the web as a channel to sell their products & services. Most businesses, small or big, whether they like it or not, has witnessed the rise of the new digital consumer, especially the ones that have tried to harness technology and leverage on the power of digital consumer web or e commerce.
Online marketing still seems to be largely disconnected from the customer, in spite of the fact that social web, mobile web and other web apps have become an ever-bigger part of the online experience. However, many have not recognized its importance or are still trying to figure it out or just trying to avoid or bypass them altogether in the context of their short term priorities.
Being Customer Centric:
Being “customer centric” emerges with its own distinct set of challenges and problems; these challenges vary in size & scale and emerge at different stages of the business.However in the context of digital world, there are three distinct challenges that one needs to solve to become a truly customer centric organization.
The challenges for becoming customer centric organization are:
- Unified View of customers
- Real-time Segmentation
- Real-time Engagement & Personalization
Unified view of customers:
One of the most important yet ignored aspect of a customer-centric organization, is about enabling an Omni-channel customer profile to enable a complete view of a customer. In the absence of Omni-channel customer view, most marketing decisions are based on incomplete view of customer / visitor behaviour, the reason being that marketer relies on multiple tools and systems. For e.g. a digital manager today works on at least 5-6 tools viz. An Analytics tool, a social media tool, a CRM tool, A transaction platform, a customer support tool, a campaign management tool, a loyalty management tool et. al.
While all these tools / platforms are individually great in their respective functionality, but it provides data and insights in isolation thereby creating silos. This leads to data of each customer/visitor residing in different systems, which in most cases, do not communicate with each other. The user can behave differently in different channels, for e.g. a customer may behave differently while on site and behave differently offline, social media or when we makes a call. So if an organization is using 10 different systems, one needs to combine the behaviour data of these 10 systems to really understand the customer. Essentially at any given point in time a marketer actually has only 1/10th the view or insight of a customer rather than a complete view. These incomplete views lead to redundancy and inappropriate segmentation, thereby leading to inefficiency in engagement, retention, product or pricing strategies.
Agile Segmentation: Most segmentation strategies are based on known behaviour of a visitor/ customer. This segmentation is done, basis web analytics data and not necessarily the unified behaviour (Social, Mail, Transaction, offline behaviour). By doing so, many marketers commit two deadly sins of segmentation viz.
1) Ignoring the majority: Marketers ignore the fact that anonymous / unknown visitors on site constitute a large majority than known customers and their behaviour would supersede the behaviour of the known customers.
2) In complete Listening: It is important to listen to customer / visitor needs and behaviours across all channels uniformly before embarking on a segmentation journey. Since most of the tracking and monitoring tools work for a specific channel, a marketer is often unable to combine the insights from other important channels.
Agile Segmentation would be defined as the ability to know and understand the visitor/ customer, by tracking their behaviour across channels while they are active on your site or a channel and then segment them based on their behaviour or intent. It is based on this understanding that; one can approach or engage with them in real time, irrespective of the fact that the visitor is known customer or an anonymous visitor.
Agile segmentation requires radically new implementation approaches and that involve the the following processes:
1) N=1 web Analytics: One of the first steps involves starting with the right analytics tools that track visitors at n=1 or individual level. Using these metrics, one can analyse the click stream behaviour that tag every visit of the user. Unlike the commonly available web analytics that provide tops down view or a count level data, it is important to have a bottoms up analytics approach, wherein one starts from the individual user and that can be rolled up to provide overview dash board data.
2) Behaviour scoring: Quantifying user behaviour provides insights on visitor intent, which is meaningful and actionable. The behaviour quantification can be enabled through visitor scoring that can be based on key behaviour parameters for e.g. source, time spend, page depth, frequency, recency, on page events etc.
Enabling behaviour scoring for anonymous visitors brightens up the scenario, as marketers can now view the opportunity associated with anonymous visitors as well.
3) Omni channel Integrations: Integration of customer data across channels (web, social, mobile, transaction, mail etc) based on the unique customer identifiers enables a broad behaviour profile of the visitors/ customers, which can be used for effective segmentation.
Agile Engagement: Most businesses realize that all visitors/ customers coming to a website are different from each other, and have different needs. In the wake of such realization, one must understand that, a specific type of customer experience path may satisfy only a few audience sets.
A great customer experience, irrespective of the products or economy price points, defines the success and loyalty of your campaigns. A great customer experience would mean converting an anonymous visitor into a customer and also making them a repeat/ valuable customer. This implies that the customer experience should be personalized to every individual user to ensure success, and that would mean a dynamic website that recognizes the visitor / customer and adapts to their needs.
Such agile engagement & personalization can be enabled with few guiding principles viz.
1) Speed of Engagement: A website being marketing touch-point, it is important to engage the visitor or a customer, while they are on your site. Till the time a visitor is on site, it is an opportunity. There will be no opportunity left once he/ she has goes away from site to a competitor’s site. Needless to say that, every real time engagement and conversation adds onto the customer experience and enthuses confidence and trust among users. It is based on this customer understanding, one can approach them at the right time. Anything before the right time would be intrusive and anything after that is no use, because they might have already left the site
2) Engagement & Communication: Today Most of visitors/ shoppers drop out of site primarily because they find difficulty in finding the products, or have doubts, queries, and concerns or are simply not sure of their choice. It is this crucial time that one needs to engage with the visitors in real time in alignment with the visitor/ customer preferences and affinities.
Real time Engagement can be invoked through specific content channels like real time forms, banner/ widgets or chat. These channels can be creatively utilized as surveys, feedbacks, reviews, questions, offers, coupons or even customized one-to- one communication. A profitable engagement with visitors can be enabled with engagement, suggestions, recommendations, and support in real time, to provide an experience similar to an offline store.
3) Real Time Engagement Automation: Real time engagement automations require individual user behaviour parameters, which can be used as triggers to push customized & engaging content to users. Once the unified customer profile is enabled, engagements and personalization can be triggered to visiting users in real time. Such engagements & personalization techniques go a long way in creating great user experience. It is this customer experience that drives not just the conversions but also enables high ROI on retention, loyalty and transaction value, which in turn goes a long way in effectively managing the customer life cycle value.
In the background of such transformation, a successful marketer’s world has to revolve around “the customers”. The truth is that the customer has always been central to every business and economic growth. An even bigger truth is that the customers are evolving faster than the businesses and their marketers; and the key to success lies in being “customer centric” rather than being process or technology centric. Smart businesses that foresee and solve these challenges from a long term perspective with simplicity, innovation and agility tend to win in a long run.
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