Change Your Channels

Convert Your Knowledge Base to Customer Value

The ancient marketing adage proffers, "The easiest sale is to an existing customer." Yet, are you making every possible sale to your existing customer base? Chances are, over the years, your enterprise has developed and nurtured products, processes, improvements and customer relationships. Your customer database is priceless, but it may be divided across the enterprise in many repositories, based on the information's original use.

The original "big three" communications channels—contact centers, direct mail and in-person contact—are now a fraction of today's enterprise communications picture. In some business segments, companies use over 30 different communications methods to present new offerings to prospects and customers. In addition, many enterprises store data from each of the three legacy channels in separate information repositories—choking your cross-marketing potential. By using valuable customer data in limited scenarios, you may also be overlooking the increased value and sales potential available through support and service channels, including call centers.

Creating the 360-degree customer profile
How do you coordinate all of these support and service channels? Begin by putting your best assets—your customer relationship information—in the hands of those best able to reach your customers. Many enterprises are purchasing or subscribing to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software but only implement it in isolated areas within the enterprise. By unifying access to this information, business managers can create cross-selling and up-selling scenarios relevant to your customers today. This unification of information is also crucial in providing exceptional service and support.

When employees can combine and share customer information from multiple repositories, a much more effective customer profile emerges including these customer views:

• Customer purchase history
• All customer communications with your company
• Billing and transactional information
• Channel or product preferences
• Responsiveness to sales and marketing efforts

For example, during a support call, your call center representative accesses the customer's complete profile, determines the customer's service contract expires in 45 days and notifies the customer of your updated service and support offerings. Your company adds the support revenue to this month's bookings; your customer receives exceptional support. By unifying information for your customers and making it available in real time across your enterprise, your opportunities expand across all channels.

Refocusing the message
Successful business propositions today integrate customer needs within a customer-oriented, context-sensitive message. This means that instead of touting your product's features and values across all outbound channels, the successful message speaks to the specific needs of your customer, describing how the product meets those needs.

Moreover, you deliver the message in the customer's preferred delivery method, made available by accessing transaction history. This way of doing business is not about you, it's about your customer. If customer profiles reveal zero percent response to direct mail, it's easy to remove customers from the direct-mail channel, approaching them in the way they're most likely to respond.

Back to basics: the right channel, the right message, the right customer
Successful customer retention includes exceptional service, during every contact. Customers who experience high satisfaction are profitable and loyal customers. By reviewing each segment of your customer's transactions, a "true view" of the customer emerges.

Make sales and marketing initiatives relevant within this true view to each customer. For example, marketing messages for cell phones must be shorter than similar messages intended for delivery to a personal computer. Because you know your customer, you know best how to reach them.

Each outbound message should also have the appropriate return channel; don't just add "call your salesperson or our 800 number" to your tailored, targeted message. The best communications are two-way communications. If you understand your customer's preference, you also know the most effective way to solicit communications from your customers.

By developing this personalized selling environment, you can offer the right message to the right customer, using the right channel. If you know customer X has a high first-offer purchase rate, target that person for value-added services. If a customer's preferred communication method is the mobile phone, deliver your message appropriately.

Using channel rules for maximum impact and efficiency
As you extend messaging according to your customer profiles, you must also develop appropriate business rules. These rules not only put the right message in front of the right customer, they also help define, automate and deliver effective and cost-efficient cross-channel messaging.

Develop and continuously update these rules using expertise gained from reviewing each part of the customer profile. Enable channel communications to flow easily inbound and outbound. Incorporating the latest intelligence from the customer is a critical component for success. Connecting your knowledge base, business rules and intelligence from channel communications helps keep each customer experiencing a one-on-one relationship with your company.

Extending the call center
With cross-channel marketing occurring consistently via outbound sales and marketing, extend this capability to the call center to further enhance the customer experience. When the call center has access to the complete picture of the customer, every call center communication becomes a marketing opportunity. When call center agents have access to customer preferences, likes and dislikes, they have an increased opportunity to respond with excellence—further promoting the product and enhancing the product image. This means equipping call center reps with the ability to access customer history, profile, preference and any collateral material that may help the customer receive exceptional service and support.

Transaction history is also an integral component of the well-connected call center. By accessing customer transaction histories, agents are aware immediately of customer-specific configurations. Previous troubleshooting sessions often illuminate a reoccurring issue, which you can address proactively.

Agents that can determine customer configurations before receiving a call transfer are in a superior support position, and this customer awareness translates to a better customer experience. In this way, call center agents evangelize as well as support.

Becoming your customer's one-stop shop
Acquiring essential customer data is often the biggest problem when developing personalized products and services. The payoff is that many customers are eager to consolidate services with one provider, given a high level of service, support and relationship management.

After unifying your internal data sources and making them available to all channels, what's the next step?

Convince customers to provide additional information about themselves.

When customers offer additional information because they perceive it to be in their best interest, they're rewarded with more personalized products and services, and you gain additional business from an existing customer. You have the opportunity with each customer contact—sales inquiry, call center contact or warranty service—to create the appropriate customer inquiry based on the communication context. When customers feel like they receive superior products, services and support from you, doing more business with you is cost-effective as well as more rewarding.

Multiple channels, multiple rewards
The science of customer relationship management is becoming more defined with each customer transaction, marketing communication and call center contact. Providing business channels with real-time, consistent, relevant customer information is the mission. Your knowledge base isn't a giant data warehouse that requires business processes to conform to information access. It's a collection of customer profiles that enable multiple channel access. Having this access makes your business more effective, your customers more loyal and confident and helps you realize your goals.

Courtesy -  Jay McKeever, Expert Access

About Expert Access

Expert Access is a business e-zine for senior-level corporate executives, IT and operations managers and technology buyer committees.

Each issue comprises about 16 articles, the most popular of which are the feature articles (on a variety of topics) and the 'Ask the Expert' section where readers' questions are answered by an expert in the particular subject area.

Because Expert Access spans a range of job titles and industries, it must deliver value by presenting the business benefits of the latest technology advances to corporate and operations managers while at the same time getting under the covers of the latest business and production applications for the IT managers and users.