Resources

Intelligent Customer Engagement began from a simple premise: content is the best way to have meaningful engagements with your target audience but most content marketing lacks strategy. Why is that though? The answer is really quite simple: companies are creating lots of content in lots of different channels but failing to join that together into a structured journey for their target audience. If you look further you can include the fact that lots of different functions within a company are communicating with their customers in a disjointed way. To put that into context, take a look at your [...]

Building a business case to break down the communications silos within a business does not only require a clear understanding of the business benefits that will be achieved but a considerable amount of internal alignment of different functions. While both are obvious points, they also pose significant challenges. To a degree, it is the challenging nature of building the business case and attempting to align differing functions that explains why these internal communications silos exist in the first place. Regardless of the nature of the organisation, the principal communications silos that need to be addressed are whichever functions [...]

When was the last time you thought about the way in which your business communicates with your customers? Not what you are saying or how you are saying it, or even the KPIs of your call-handling; such considerations are commonplace because they, fundamentally, involve looking at individual communications. Rather, the totality of the communications you have with any single customer. The reality is that very few businesses give this any consideration at all. Instead what businesses do is continue to communicate with their customers based on the specific requirements of individual parts of the business. So the marketing [...]

As you start to investigate where your customer contact/communications are causing problems with your customers you will quickly realise that what you need is a contact strategy. Your next question will be “What is a contact strategy?” if you have not come across this before. At a most basic level it should be rules that can be implemented organisation wide that define what customers should receive, how often, timing and channel that they get the message on. That is generally a lot harder to do than it would seem on the surface. The worst experiences that the customer [...]

In the article “Houston we have contact!” we talked about the first three steps to take in designing and implementing your contact strategy. Whilst these are all necessary steps, they are still “tactical”. What we mean by this is that these steps are required to stop you hemorrhaging, but at the same time they are just the first aid not the cure. In order to implement the right contact strategy you need to stand back and understand where you are headed. What is the ideal experience that you are aiming to create for your customers? What is your [...]

Why do you need to do anything differently when it comes to the way you contact your customers? Because change is inevitable and your customers have already changed and in many ways. When things change and new information comes into existence, it is no longer possible to solve current problems with yesterday’s solutions. The Hippocratic Oath has as one of its tenets: “First, do no harm”. This is an excellent place to start when considering your contact strategy. If you are looking to deal with negative customer feedback but also deal with missed opportunities and loss of revenue [...]

Better customer communications can be worth millions in annual revenues. This is because there is a strong correlation between the customers’ experience and loyalty [Forrester Report: Customer Experience Index]. So, companies that manage their communications with a strong contact strategy can create better experiences for their customers and tend to have more customers who will buy from them again, who will not take their business elsewhere, and who will recommend them to a friend. This is why it is so essential to understand that what you communicate and how you communicate has a major impact on all your [...]

Picture yourself sitting in the senior management meeting where you are seeking buy-in to a contact strategy change management programme. You have spent several weeks developing the proposed approach and building the watertight business case to the point where you believe you have tacit approval from many people around the table for what you are proposing. Presentation finished, the questions start flying around and you detect both scepticism and resistance in the tone and nature of the questioning. How did this happen? To answer that question and to avoid that situation, it is important to take a step [...]

Have you bought your competitors product? This might sound like madness, you probably do competitor analysis if not regularly at least once in a while to keep your positioning fresh, why would you need to go further than that? The answer to that question is that you need to experience their whole journey, from how they treat their prospective customers end–to-end and then to learn what they do well. You cannot do this as desktop research, for example, what does the billing process feel like, how does it work? Everyday use of competitors’ products and services will reveal [...]

Customer journeys. That age old process adopted by marketers to define the behaviour of their target audience when they are trying to persuade them to buy their product or service. Most commonly visualised as a marketing funnel, customer journeys aim to cover customer touchpoints across multiple channels and with different customer segments that all lead to the desired business goal. But there is a problem. These journeys are more often than not viewed from the business’s perspective and not the customers. This is why response rates are so low as the actual customer behaviour observed simply does not [...]