Creating exceptional customer experiences is a priority for many businesses as they look to revolutionize their operations around the customer. But it’s often easier said than done. It’s not just about having a great idea; it’s about having the systems, processes, and people in place to make it happen.
Let’s look at how FiO can make the customer experience a reality!
For some time, we at the FiO Group have talked extensively about the critical connections between an organization’s content and the eventual customer experience. They are halves of the whole. Yet, for many content professionals, this is one of their biggest obstacles.
Organizations that excel in customer experience understand the business’s customer-centric priorities and the importance of consistently organizing around customer needs. As with any strategy in an organization, employees must believe that every action they take directly impacts the business outcome. Instilling this kind of belief system throughout the business is what executing your strategy is all about.
The Retail industry has come a long way in redefining how to engage and communicate with customers. Many have made great strides in incorporating data-driven decision-making and improved multi-channel campaigns, while many others are beginning to look to artificial intelligence (AI) technology to understand the context and intent of the customer for each interaction.
Innovations such as AI, the Internet of Things, and robotic process automation (RPA) have certainly advanced digital transformation efforts in organizations. Still, many need to pay more attention to back-office functions and align these efforts with operational processes. This gap is one of the reasons why so many organizations fail at the implementation stage.
“It is impossible to understand customer needs and improve their experience without the right decision-making information systems,” says Ravi Srinivasan, CEO of FiO.“Driving true enterprise-wide transformation will require disentangling disparate systems, breaking down information silos, and freeing data from its shackles to deliver practical value to the business. We remain committed to this vision, and I hope we can begin to show you the steps necessary for this journey. The fundamental connections between strategic vision, information, organizational structure, governance, and culture are the foundation of this transformation.”
FiO believes that all the different lines of business in the organization need to come together in one place to realize their dreams.
Know your customers better because only they can help you get more revenue. Understanding your customers is the key to exemplary service, resulting in solid customer relationships and new sales through positive word-of-mouth referrals. However, understanding the psyche of customers takes work. It requires thoughtful analysis to identify their preferences or buying patterns to anticipate their needs and exceed expectations.
Below is FiO’s list of 5 easy ways to better understand your customers. Please read, understand, and absorb them into your working approach to better reach customers and ultimately sell more.
1. Identify the Different Categories of your Customers
Lumping customers together in the same group leads to generic cross-selling campaigns that don’t generate fruitful results. It is essential to understand the different parameters by which you can segment your customers. Like– the type of products/services they buy, frequency of purchase, geographical location of customers, and so on.
Once categories are created and customers are segregated, it is easier to make precise marketing and cross-selling campaigns with targeted messaging. These campaigns bring more value to both your business and your customers.
2. Track Customer Behavior in Real-Time
Today’s customers demand a seamless experience across traditional and digital touchpoints. Businesses must be quick and proactive in their approach. It needs to anticipate customer needs to serve them across all platforms before making the request.
And all this can only happen when you have a tool that gives you real-time insight into customer behavior. Experts recommend investing in a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that analyzes customer activity in-depth. One of the best examples is confirming this is FIO’s iCRM with analytics and email marketing functionality.
With the FiO Platform, you can:
- Track the performance of your email marketing campaigns
- Track each campaign result using fields such as Total Sent / Attempts; Opened / Viewed; Clicking on a link; Unsubscribed; Bounce / Invalid.
- Understand your target audience better by listing their likes and dislikes. Present your preferences with highly visual, context-rich bar, pie, and line charts for quick analysis
- FiO’s iCRM easy-to-use technology provides the power to extract, mix and analyze customer data in real-time to identify customer preferences and buying patterns and predict customer needs.
3. Take advantage of Customer Service interactions
Customer Service Interactions are excellent moments to investigate the psyche of customers. So, create a questionnaire and give it to the customer service representatives.
Whenever your customers contact your service representatives, they can ask about customer likes/dislikes about using the product or service.
Examples:
- How do they use the product or service?
- Are they satisfied using the product/service?
- What changes would they like to see in the product/service?
Putting this into practice will help you gather a database of valuable customer insights to use when crafting targeted messages.
4. Focus on customers’ tastes and preferences
Nurturing your customers with informative content about your product/service is good, but don’t stop there. Sometimes it also serves a great purpose in supporting the general interests of customers. It gives the impression that you are attentive to your customers and brings them closer.
Follow this policy of using consumer data in the iCRM database to create materials/resources that resonate with other customer interests. For example, sharing articles about the latest trends in some other industries is not necessarily related to the company’s product/service.
The idea is that instead of constantly posting content related to a product/service (which often becomes monotonous), conversations about other universal topics generate many opportunities to create a thread of chat with customers.
5. Invest in Customer Engagement on Social Media
The main reason to engage via social media is that consumers are active on social media channels for at least 6 hours a day. Social media plays a key in shaping and influencing consumer opinion.
Every business must invest in social media engagement. Reach your audience by creating strategies to engage your target audience and customers on all social media channels.
FiO Tip: Do not push advertising on social networks. Unlike other traditional platforms where old marketing tactics can work, social media requires compelling, authentic campaigns that include natural and informative elements. We recommend using Social CRM tools to launch social campaigns. It will allow you to run different campaigns on all the leading social channels and collect user data across all streams.
Not only that, integrating your customers’ social profiles into FiO’s iCRM Enterprise Real Time will give you a live feed of all the updates made by your customers. Treat this as an added resource where you can better understand your customers, such as the type of discussions your customers usually engage.
There you have it. FiO’s list of 5 easy ways to better understand your customers.