Excellent customer experience requires insight

Behaviour can change quickly. ‘Customer intelligent’ organisations use data and insights in order to respond to the current and future needs of their customers. To be successful, these are the four areas companies need to invest in:

• Real time customer data and insights.
• Multi-channel experiences and customer service.
• Channels that deliver customer intelligence.
• Engaging entertaining or useful content and interactive marketing.

Real time customer data and insights

Most organisations measure and monitor marketing campaigns and ‘owned media’ performance on their own websites, social platforms, forums and customer service channels. What sets innovative brands like Gatorade, Dell and Intel apart is that they have developed customer monitoring hubs that constantly listen and track customer conversations from social sources such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and within blogs.

Excellent multi-channel customer experiences and customer service

To deliver excellent customer experiences, companies need to create engaging and intuitive shopper journeys. Organisations need to understand the customer goals along the customer journey and how they behave, what content they consume and how the brand behaves on this journey and at each touch point and channel.

Channels that deliver customer intelligence

Delivering a great customer experience was a challenge when digital was limited to traditional owned media such as websites, e-mail and interactive voice systems. The explosion of social and mobile channels has made understanding multi-channel consumer behaviour even more complicated. Customers see these multi channels as a holistic service and not a collection of separate channels. They expect the experience, level of personalisation and integration of data to be seamless and consistent. Unfortunately for many organisations they are structured in separate brand and channel silos which can lead to inconsistent, confusing and frustrating user experiences.

Engaging, entertaining or useful content and interactive marketing

Smart brands understand that content is king and, if they give customers useful interactive experiences, it will significantly enhance their relationships. That content must be tailored for customers based on their preferences. And it’s through combining insights from IT and marketing teams, with on-going social listening programmes that businesses will be able to develop winning multi-channel digital solutions.