Effective Customer Communications
As the always-connected customer’s expectations continue to rise and shopping around becomes easier, building customer loyalty is both more important and more difficult. The connected customer expects a company to know them and anticipate their needs. The connected customer expects to communicate with an organisation on their own terms: when they want and on the channel or device of their choice.
Businesses can overcome the challenges of communicating effectively with prospects and customers by consolidating their interaction systems and data and moving to a company-wide communications capability. This is a key plank in an organisation’s customer engagement strategy.
Businesses striving to build long-term relationships with their customers and enhance the customer experience at every touch point are inundated with potential customer data and potential communication channels but all too often find current practice siloed and disconnected.
Andy Moy, Director, Customer Engagement Management at Pitney Bowes Software said:
“The rise of the connected customer is forcing customer engagement to be foremost in every senior executive’s mind. This is forcing a communication paradigm shift across an organisation from information-overloaded monologues to rich interactive dialogues between parties.
"Having the right data, handled in the right way, can help drive improved communications, better customer service and increase revenue. In an increasingly data-rich environment businesses must not only make sure information is accurate but also that their systems are able to provide them with a new 360° view of their customer, across all channels and parts of their business. This next generation 360° view draws on past, present and predictive data, to provide a unique insight of a customer to anticipate their needs – essential to convert a customer engagement strategy into sustainable competitive advantage.”
Your Data Determines Communication Relevance
Most companies have multiple systems and databases that hold pieces of customer data. This can make updating data and keeping up with changing compliance regulations challenging. The key is to match, de-duplicate and enrich these customer data siloes and generate a customer data hub. Fragmented and incomplete data distorts the perspective you can draw of your customers. This data hub understands the connections between its sources but more importantly provides invaluable fuel for relevant customer communications– a cornerstone of effective customer engagement.
With a new 360° view of your customer, which draws on the past, present and predictive views forged through advanced customer analytics, companies can get be very targeted with messages and offers. This focus enhances marketing message relevance and the value for each customer engagement – effectively resulting in uplift in return on marketing investment.
Empower Customers to Choose Their Own Adventure
Customers’ communication needs are all different. Some like to receive correspondence via SMS, others like email or even postal mail. More often than not many customers wish to mix and match based on type or content of the correspondence. Today’s technology lets you make decisions on what channel and what messages to use, based on customer preferences and pre-programmed rules. To match customer expectations, it is essential to have a flexible platform that can help you communicate with your customers through their preferred channel and ensure each customer receives personalised, timely, relevant communications.
Improve best next action marketing
With a new 360 degree view of the customer, fuelled with an ever-current data hub and advanced customer analytics, you can achieve ‘always-on’ marketing and customer engagement initiatives.
Andy said: “Happy and loyal customers mean more revenue and better margins for a business. Having a well-managed collaborative engagement platform will cement customer relationships by making it simple to engage across every channel with timely, relevant, cost-effective, relationship-building communications.”
About Pitney Bowes
Pitney Bowes provides technology solutions for small, mid-size and large firms that help them connect with customers to build loyalty and grow revenue. Many of the company’s solutions are delivered on open platforms to best organize, analyze and apply both public and proprietary data to two-way customer communications. Pitney Bowes includes direct mail, transactional mail and call centre communications in its solution mix along with digital channel messaging for the Web, email and mobile applications. Pitney Bowes has approximately USD$5 billion in annual revenues and 27,000 employees worldwide. Pitney Bowes: Every connection is a new opportunity™. www.pitneybowes.com.au
