Achieve Sales Objectives with a Comprehensive CRM

CRM, also known as Customer Relationship Management plays an important role in the increment of your business sales. Although CRM is defined as the process of maintaining good relationships with your clients, there are still various factors that are essential to keep in mind. If you want to get the most out of Customer Relationship Management, you must first define your CRM objectives and goals clearly. Good customer relationship management can provide various benefits to both your company and your customers.

Introduction to CRM

CRM (customer relationship management) is a collection of methods, strategies, and technology that businesses employ to manage and analyze customer interactions, data, and interactions with other clients over their entire customer lifecycle. The goal is to strengthen customer service connections while also assisting in customer retention and driving sales growth, among other things.

Challenges faced by businesses

Without adequate administration, a customer relationship management system (CRM) can be reduced to little more than a glorified database where client information is maintained. Data sets must be linked together, disseminated, and arranged in a way that allows users to quickly find the information they want. If a company's data sets are not integrated and structured in a single dashboard or interface, it may have difficulty achieving a single view of the customer.

Problems might also develop when systems include duplicate client data or information that is out of current or inaccurate. Customers' perceptions of service quality may be negatively impacted because of excessive wait times on phone calls, incorrect handling of technical support cases, and other concerns

What does a CRM system do?

CRM systems collect customer information from a variety of channels, or points of contact, between the customer and the company. These channels and points of contact include the company's website, telephone, live chat, direct mail, marketing materials, and social media platforms, among other things.

CRM systems also provide precise information to customer-facing staff employees about their clients' personal information, purchase history, purchasing preferences, and other concerns.

How CRM helps in increasing of sales

The usage of customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help organizations ranging from small businesses to huge corporations in increasing their sales in the following ways:

·       Through Enhancing customer satisfaction: Customers who are pleased with their purchases are more likely to return, and they provide positive word-of-mouth advertising, which can be extremely lucrative. Making customer experience the primary goal of your CRM strategy is the most effective method to increase your sales. This can be accomplished by encouraging higher customer participation with social networking sites and different mobile platforms. Consider integrating surveys or developing an interactive blog to get feedback. By actively requesting feedback from your clients, you will be able to discover which actions and activities will result in them being more satisfied with the services or products that they have purchased.

 

·       Expansion of Customer Base: It is crucial to realize that customer relationship management (CRM) is not limited to managing existing clients. A customer relationship management system (CRM) that is integrated with a high-quality knowledge management platform will allow you to keep in touch with prospects with who you have not yet gotten in touch. It will also enable you to uncover commonalities and links among the clients that you already have, allowing you to fine-tune and strengthen your future outreach efforts. Even in a seasonal sector, a broader client base will allow for more consistency in profit margins over time.

 

·       Boost team productivity: Centralize your multi-channel sales platform, fully automate lead creation, assignment, and nurturing process. Make it easy for team members to collaborate seamlessly to ensure quick conversions.

·       Capture leads effortlessly: Capture leads and sales inquiries from websites, emails, social channels, phone calls, and trade fairs. Assign leads to the right sales rep, faster. Automatically assign leads to agents based on location, deal size, availability, language, or other preferences.

·       Gain actionable insights - Use CRM insights to get real-time visibility into your team’s performance and make data-driven decisions. Visualize the most important metrics such as case resolution time, team workload, customer satisfaction ratings, and more to quickly identify bottlenecks and respond to them faster. Schedule reports to convert raw data into actionable insights and find quick solutions to common help desk issues.

·       Go after the best leads: Leverage Lead Scoring to identify the best leads you can pursue and prioritize follow-ups.

·       Never let a deal slip through the cracks - Smart alerts ensure that you are notified about tasks and updates associated with a deal. You can pick up a conversation right from where it was left off, regardless of the channel, it was started on.

·       Respond instantly to generate more conversations: Nurture leads with automated email and SMS campaigns. Analyze campaign performance, open rates, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes to tweak your messaging and targeting.

·       Scheduling meetings with ease - Schedule meetings in a single click without the hassle of back-and-forth emails. Pre-meeting reminders minimize the chances of a no-show.

·       Visualise your pipeline and discover insights - Gain deeper insights into your pipeline, open deals, territory performance, and much more with sales insights and custom reports. Schedule reports getting them delivered right into your email inbox

Typical Features of CRMs, which help:

·       Contact Management - Know Your Contacts Better - With an actionable 360-degree historical view into every engagement they've ever had with you

·       Get up to speed in seconds: Sales CRM shows you a complete history of your relationship with leads and customers. In their contact record, you will find their personal information, notes you have written, and emails and calls you have exchanged with them. In addition, if you have attached a file, sent them a quote, or engaged with them in any other way, you will find it there too, so that you can learn about them faster and take action sooner.

·       Know when to act with idle contact, activity, and other notifications: Sales CRM ensures that you are always in the know with on-screen, SMS, or email alerts that notify you if a contact becomes active, idle, or meets various other conditions. Do this for contacts assigned to you or your team or select individual contacts to receive notifications for.

·       Calendar Management - Events, Meetings, and Calls - Stay on top of your commitments with detailed tasks and calendar events. Not yet ready to reach out to a contact? Create a task to follow up with them later. Or if you’ve already scheduled a meeting, create a calendar event. Tasks and events are linked to the contact’s record so that their information is just a click away.

·       Lead & Opportunity Management - Sales CRM helps you focus on the right deals, automate repetitive tasks, forecast accurately, and crush your sales targets. Stay on top of all deals with a visual pipeline - Visualize, organize, & manage deals with customized views & filters. If your CRM provides, then Leverage Kanban to get a snapshot of your deals and the stages they are in. You can drag and drop as deals progress. Create your own Views and choose the data you want to see with advanced filters. Save customized Views and share it with your team. Follow a deal you are interested in for priority updates.

·       Deep dive into each deal, effortlessly: Everything you want to know about a deal in a single place - deal size, decision-makers, touchpoints, expected close date, and more. Gives a unified view of the Activities done by all the collaborating partners, documents related to the opportunity, comments posted by team members, etc. required by the sales personnel as handy information and be effective.

·       Quote, Sale Order & Invoice Management -   Sales CRM allows the creation of quotes, sales orders, and invoices directly from the opportunity screen. While it provides a seamless flow of the process of creation of quotes, subsequently a sales order based on the quote, and finally an invoice from the sales order, it is flexible and allows the creation of invoice directly without generation of quote or sales order.

·       Knowledge Base - Fast Answers to Previously Asked Queries - Provide prospects and employees with fast answers to common questions by building a private and public knowledge base by converting common sales queries to FAQs. If a question resolved in a case may come up in the future, convert the case to a knowledge base solution for quick access by employees and customers

·       Workflow Automation - Automate your team's repetitive tasks, enabling them to spend more time helping customers.

·       Trigger actions based on changes to a Lead – You close a Lead when you think the lead has matured to be passed on to a sales representative.  Sales CRM can automatically create contact and organization records for the first-time lead. Rules can be configured to auto-assign leads and opportunities to specific teams based on attributes such as domain, territory, etc.

·       Documents & Files - Centralize, share, collaborate on, track, and optimize marketing and sales documents. Help sales and marketing get important information to prospects and customers faster by uploading often-used presentations and whitepapers to CRM. From there, salespeople can search for them using any document metadata, or share them with customers in one click at email attachments.

Customer relationship management systems (CRM) perform best when organizations invest time cleaning up their current customer data to reduce duplicate and incomplete records before supplementing CRM data with other sources of information.

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Smarter Business Decisions powered by Transformative technologies

Every company needs to make key decisions to both conduct and grow their business and in this digital era, the need to make decisions faster has never been more important than in all the history of humankind.

A study referenced in the popular magazine Psychology Today concluded that it takes an average of 66 days for a behavior to become automatic. The COVID-19 was a full-reboot on business as usual (at least for a lot of organizations) and a launching pad for them to become virtual, digital-centric, and agile—and to do it all at a lightning-fast speed.

As business leaders look forward to the coming year and beyond, they are pondering: How to keep this momentum going? How to take the best of what has been learned and put that into practice in the coming post-pandemic days and make sure it’s seamless and continues to be embedded into everything we do going forward?

According to McKinsey Leader Kate (https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/how-six-companies-are-using-technology-and-data-to-transform-themselves) - “Business leaders are saying that they’ve accomplished in 10 days what used to take them 10 months. That kind of speed is what’s unleashing a wave of innovation, unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

As with the availability of more and more data, we are also seeing the rise of AI which is now an integral part of an enterprise (already or strategy in place to get it there) to make it more frequent, more responsive, and more accurate business decisions. It has become evident, painfully so during the pandemic, that in a fast-evolving business environment, strategic objectives need to be paired with the ability to make more frequent, more responsive, and more accurate business decisions.

The description of services and the pace of evolution have shifted drastically in recent years and mastering the conventional facets of service delivery will no longer be enough. New digital upstarts are challenging the bottom lines, growth opportunities, and the business models of conventional service providers. It is time for the functionaries to innovate—or be left behind. Read more about this in my article published here…. https://etinsights.et-edge.com/how-transformative-technologies-can-drive-better-smarter-business-decisions/

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Empower your Field Agent to improve Sales Efficiency

 Sales teams, especially the ones spread across and operating in the field are an important link that connects potential customers' needs to the products or services that the organization provides that can meet those needs. It plays an important role in fostering customer loyalty and trust. Failure of the sales team to meet its objectives could indicate that the sales team is not properly set up or that the sales process is inefficient. There is always space for development and growth, even in the most successful sales teams with all of the sales processes in place.

What is sales performance? It’s the measurement of sales activity and corresponding results compared to the sales expectations and quota. Good sales performance is highly valued — but it can also be tough to achieve for many salespeople and organizations. But what happens when your sales performance has stagnated? A number of factors can affect whether or not your sales team can close deals. Using the tested tips below, you can assess your approach to sales — and ensure your team is set up for success

Sales team productivity is critical to revenue generation, which can be achieved by engaging and empowering them. One man does not hold all of the keys in today's world of distributed leadership. It is critical to empower each field sales agent in the team to make better judgments and develop on-spot decision-making capabilities.

Before you build any new tactics, you should evaluate the previous ones to see how much time your field agents spend on specific activities. This will help you see where you can streamline your process. This will assist you in developing a well-defined standardized procedure that will provide your field agents with a more consistent and time-effective process to guide their actions.

With a standardized procedure in place, you may use technology to automate the monotonous tasks, allowing your field agent to devote more time to genuine selling. This will enable your field agents to be tech-savvy and address even difficult situations that require technical knowledge. Sales performance is affected by your enablement efforts, such as sales training or content management; your customer experience; your cross-functional alignment; and your company culture. Together, these elements determine whether your reps have the training, context, and guidance they need to successfully engage customers. CRMs are also wonderful solutions for assisting your field agents in spotting details in the process and utilising automation.

It's crucial to find and hire the ideal field agents for your team if you want to be successful. But, equally crucial, you must have faith in your field agents. Field agents who are empowered by trust are more likely to freely share ideas and possible solutions, assist others, and trust you and your firm. This also aids in greater team building among your Field agents, as they share a sense of trust, transparency, and respect for one another, and are thus more driven to attain the same goals together.

However, in this age is technology driven productivity, virtual coaches, with periodic nudges, based on the data ranging in attributes as diverse as daily activities, time adherence, and neuro-economics algorithms are increasingly playing a very large contribution towards motivating and guiding field sales teams. This is achieved by many methods, including, but not limited to -gamification, or the use of game features to motivate staff to achieve their objectives. This has been demonstrated to boost field agent performance significantly. It has been discovered that 80 percent of Field agents have met their sales targets, and more than half of newly hired Field agents have met their targets within the first month of employment if such methods are used.

Successful sales teams result from a company-wide commitment to ensuring reps have everything they need to do their jobs effectively. This means empowering reps with content, training, and guidance and here another method that is being increasingly adopted is the use of Virtual Assistants in helping the field sales agents. These assistants help the field sales personnel in many ways – from informing about critical activities to be done to guiding on technical aspects or giving suggestions based on activities observed. However, empowering your field agents doesn't always mean allowing them to work more efficiently; it also means rewarding their efforts. A symbolic recognition such as a certificate of excellence or an appreciation email, in addition to financial awards such as bonuses or pay hikes, can assist boost morale of your field agents, empowering them to consistently high performance and leading other team members by example.

To flourish in today's selling environment, you need teams that work together and make educated, profitable decisions. It is feasible to develop such teams that meet revenue objectives and drive growth plans by leveraging technology. Salespeople who are empowered and not overwhelmed with tedious manual work are ready to provide excellent job and to close the most demanding deals.

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State of Customer eXperience 2022

To develop your business, you must first improve the customer experience (CX)  that your business delivers to guarantee that your customers are well-served and have transformative interactions with your brand. The pandemic has not only continued to accelerate the shift to digital customer experiences, but also pushed organisations to adopt and implement technologies in hopes of gaining a competitive edge. For a fully connected, effortless CX that adds value to your consumers and business, you need a well-defined CX strategy and clear leadership.

It sounds severe, but the truth is, if you cannot keep up with their increasing demands, your customers will leave you. It’s as simple as that.

Link between customer experience and business performance is directly dependent on breaking down overall experience into smaller insights based on your company's specific goals and different stages of the customer journey. Customers today no longer base their loyalty on price or product. Instead, they are loyal to companies based on the experience they receive. Customers are willing to spend more money to buy from a firm that provides good customer service. Thus, to attract, engage, and keep consumers, organizations are increasingly investing in a customer experience.

Therefore, what are the important elements of design and delivering superior customer experience.  

The state of customer experience (CX) report presents innovation opportunities, insights and best practices by some of the top firms in Asia bringing customer journeys to the next level.

It was an enlightening experience being one of the contributors for this state of the CX 2022 report… watch it on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JebqqCWjKzY

or… download the report from here - https://twimbit.com/insights/state-of-customer-experience-2022

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Using conversational AI and RPA to deliver superior customer experience

In this era of hyper-automation, customer experience is becoming the biggest differentiator for organizations. Product companies used to design products to deliver a better experience and more value for money as compared to their competitors. That used to be, and largely, still is – the differentiating factor. However, in the age of the internet and omnipresent connectivity, a large proportion of focus has shifted to how customer experiences the brand prior, during, and after the acquisition stage of the journey. 

In a market where product differentiation based merely on available features is becoming very narrow and pricing is becoming commoditized, brands both product and service-oriented have realized that ultimately, what experience they deliver to their customers and prospects may be the ultimate key to high sales and market share. The role of digitalized Omni-channel, with speed, efficiency, and accuracy becoming the core traits that must be offered to customers. Companies are seeking well-balanced offline to online strategies as the consumer journey shifts from offline to online. Companies that use these methods are winning the digitization race, gaining more customers, and increasing sales.

There is a wide range of conversational AI applications currently being experimented with or actually being deployed at scale across all industries. From customer service to marketing to security, these algorithm-powered intelligent programs are helping organizations connect with customers and employees in a wide variety of formats and ways. In fact, conversational AI has become a centerpiece for many organizations’ digital transformation in the wake of the global pandemic.

Conversational AI, as one of the most promising methods, is a technology that enables humans and computers to communicate clearly and effectively through speech or text. Conversational AI, while being complex in the background (evidenced by the time it has taken to reach this stage of maturity), works by recognizing a user’s speech or text patterns, predicting their intent, and responding with an adaptive, automated script. While, there are many platforms, the best conversational AI platforms today can create truly natural, human-like interactions. Conversational AI’s rise in popularity is based on its “friendliness” factor – being flexible to work with (and enhance) other technologies, and also by enabling a frictionless, human-like, end-user experience.  

Chatbots were brought into CX as part of this digital approach, and they are one of the most advanced and promising forms of human-machine connection. Conversational AI has been transformed by a combination of diverse AI types such as natural language processing, machine learning, and semantic understanding.

Unstructured data in the form of guided dialogues guide conversational AI, although it may also be passed off to a human worker if necessary. Conversational AI enables the delivery of a tailored customer dialogue at scale across many channels, resulting in a seamless customer journey.

Simultaneously, RPA appears to be emerging as a potential option that employs robots to automate repetitive operations and manual processes with the goal of speeding up CX processes while lowering operational costs. RPA (Robotic Process Automation) Robots are guided by structured data inputs in a bottom-up, process-centric way. Even if customer contacts are routine, they are never the same in each transition. It also lacks the ability to respond swiftly to changes or handle exceptions.

Combining Conversional AI with RPA, which mimics user actions and conducts task-based activities, might be termed a self-serving engagement model. In such a case, RPA may effortlessly interact with chatbots and assist the chatbot in completing a CX task, accessing, or storing information. The requirement of prompting RPA “bots” to further commence and complete the process can be satisfied by the bidirectional data flow between chatbots and RPA.

As a result, RPA and conversational AI can be regarded ideal partners, as each picks up where the other leaves off in the process. When both are used together, CX can provide speedy, tailored encounters and customer assistance at scale. This integration's super-intelligent design will not only help consumers get their questions answered faster, but it will also provide the company an edge over its competitors by providing great digital branding.

While dealing with sophisticated requests and queries in real-time, an RPA-enabled chatbot can interface with not one, but numerous back-end enterprise systems. Chatbots combined with RPA and AI will provide your customer service a competitive edge by streamlining processes, increasing productivity, and lowering operational expenses.

The convergence of conversational AI and intelligent automation is part of an extended omnichannel experience meant to facilitate faster, more personalized, and responsive customer service

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New Normal - Borderless Workforce

The world has changed, and it has changed very rapidly indeed in the last 2 years. We all agree that the COVID-19 outbreak is a world-changing event that will have long-lasting implications for the global economy. It has been a once-in-a-generation global impact event. While there is no doubt that the pandemic is amplifying the adoption of new technologies, technological advancements were already changing the world over the past two decades, from living standards to the very nature of our work. It takes a world-changing event like the COVID-19 pandemic to accelerate certain trends so dramatically and workforce-related changes have been, perhaps, the most profound.

“Adaptability is about the powerful difference between adapting to cope and adapting to win” – Max McKeown

See, even before the pandemic struck, some features of the state of technological progress aka digital transformation were especially salient.

First, technology was already disrupting production processes, especially through the rapid scale-up of digital platforms.

Second, technology created seismic shifts in the mix of skills required to succeed in the labor market. these include cognitive skills such as critical thinking, as well as socio-behavioral skills such as managing and recognizing emotions that enhance teamwork or selling better. Earnings are higher for those who have a combination of these skills.

Third, digital technology changed the terms of work. Rather than “standard” long-term contracts, digital technologies have given rise to more short-term work, often via online work platforms. These “gigs” make certain kinds of work more accessible and flexible.

A hybrid virtual approach in which some workers work on-site while others work from home promises greater access to talent, enhanced productivity for individuals and small teams, cheaper costs, increased individual freedom, and better employee experiences. There are three major obstacles in implementing remote working:

1.            Securing the infrastructure for remote working

2.            Implementing new work policies in a structural way

3.            Balancing the work and private lives of Employees

With 40% of companies encouraging increased flexibility in terms of the country or office to work from over the next three years, and over 36% increasing the number of international remote workers not necessarily affiliated with a local office, the workforce of the future appears to be far more fluid and globalized.

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence -it is to act with yesterday’s logic”- Peter Drucker

With such conditions, businesses' appetites will be piqued for one thing: A borderless Workforce.

Why?

1.            Is it More Effective? - Employees working remotely in various regions of the world save operating costs like salary, administrative expenditures, and business travel expenses. With a global workforce, you can provide round-the-clock support and significantly reduce your turnaround time. 

2.            Does it create new market opportunities? - Local skills may be unlocked and new possibilities can be created by a more globalized workforce. Striking for a borderless global workforce allows your organization to access high-quality personnel from all around the world, increasing your chances of being recognized in any market.

3.            Is it more sustainable? - Remote working decreases commute time and business travel, improving a company's environmental, social, and governance credentials. It aids in the prevention of brain drain from developing markets on a global level, and it aids in the creation of stronger social cohesion in smaller towns and rural regions on a local level.

As organizations start to reopen, they are finding that their workforce is not keen to give up remote work. Companies can no longer say that they cannot operate remotely (a common reason to avoid remote work pre-2020), but with an ongoing global pandemic, they also cannot ask employees to come back to the office full-time. The most popular solution is the thing that every organization seems to be grappling with now — the hybrid model.

People refer to the hybrid model a lot; it involves some combination of working remotely and from an office. So far, the hybrid model looks different for every organization, but there are a few clear themes. Whatever the specifics, however, companies that choose to incorporate a hybrid model will all face some challenges ranging from culture-specific to seamless collaboration to the kind of talent that is available. Borderless workforces break down geographical barriers and develop a culture of cooperation and complete adaptability, allowing businesses to grow at an unprecedented rate while leveraging global talent to solve business problems.

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How to Keep your Sales Funnel Growing and Healthy

The world has changed, and it has changed very rapidly indeed in the last 2 years. It takes a world-changing event like the COVID-19 pandemic to accelerate certain trends so dramatically and B2B sales are no exception. Let us take a moment and remember what it used to be like when B2B buyers actually picked up the phone and called you. Now, let’s skip ahead to the real world of today where a vast majority of decision-makers skip the sales team altogether when making a purchase decision. By the time they are ready to make a decision to purchase and if you have not been engaging with them, you’ve lost the sale. That’s why B2B inbound marketing is so essential in lead generation. Inbound marketing strategies generate far more sales leads than other marketing efforts. Customer journeys and mapping them are an essential part of this effort.

A Customer Journey model for visualizing every stage of the journey a customer goes through while making any purchases. Optimizing Sales Funnel accurately is a critical task to achieve the goal of taking your target audience to the finish line in the way they need to be served. If you already have one, you need to understand the holes in your funnel that leak and never convert.

According to Envision Creative’s Founder and CEO, David Smith (https://www.envision-creative.com/blog/attract-engage-convert-retain-customers-economic-change/) – “In times of economic crisis, many brand’s first instinct is to pull back on marketing and advertising, which is a natural reaction. While everyone is doing their best to be cautious, it’s important to remember that maintaining a presence through thoughtful, (and sensitive) marketing communication is even more crucial during these times. While taking a broad approach to reduce or even eliminate your marketing initiatives might save funds in the short term, these actions may be at the cost of damaging your brand’s awareness with your ideal target audience during a time where top-of-mind awareness is critical. ”

Understanding a sales funnel before creating it is important to create one that best suits your business model and focuses on your target audience. With a clear business vision and marketing strategy, you can increase the awareness of your brand that attracts customers. At this point, onwards a business is required to have different stages in their funnel that engages and convert their prospects to sales. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_funnel) – “The purchase funnel, or purchasing funnel, is a consumer-focused marketing model that illustrates the theoretical customer journey toward the purchase of a good or service. In 1898, E. St. Elmo Lewis developed a model that mapped a theoretical customer journey from the moment a brand or product attracted consumer attention to the point of action or purchase. St. Elmo Lewis' idea is often referred to as the AIDA-model, an acronym that stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action”. It has not changed too much in the last 120 years although the methods, which support the process, have largely been affected by the digitization of our culture.

The first common stage of any Sales funnel is creating awareness about your brand in the market that catches the attention of customers. At this stage, your prospective customers are arriving on your websites, social media pages, word of mouth, or any other traffic source with requirements in their mind that they expect to be solved. This is the widest stage of the funnel where customers observe what you are offering or just in simple terms “Just Looking”.  An ideal right place and right time scenario would be customers directly deciding to buy what you are offering, but practically it never happens!

Depending on your business model, there can be multiple stages post attracting your customers. However, all of them contribute towards engaging your prospective customers into your brand. If the customer has reached this stage of your funnel, it is a sign that they are interested in what you are offering and are probably evaluating and comparing it. At this stage, your product should be pushed to the customer to woo them. With established expertise, you can help your consumer to make an informed decision and proceed towards the final stage of your Sales Funnel.

At the final stage of your sales funnel where your prospects are about to get converted to actual sales, your customer is fully aware of your brand and the solutions you are offering for their requirements. While the customer is ready to select the best brand from their comparison, making the best attractive offers can be a good final step that will convert your prospects into your customers and become part of your business ecosystem.  However, there is more to this stage that you need to do! Since your customer has chosen your brand over a lot of other available options, it becomes critical and necessary to earn their trust and commitment towards your brand. A post-purchase survey or a follow-up email can help you understand the feedback of your customers that will help you to attract more customers in the first stage of your sales funnel.

Once your build your sales funnel, it’s also necessary to measure the success and effectiveness of your funnel. The key funnel metrics that can help you collect quantitative and qualitative data such as Cost per acquisition – cost on marketing to acquire new customers, Customer lifetime value, conversion rates, and conversion rate per channel can be utilized.

Creating and optimizing a sales funnel is hard time-consuming work but a necessary step to ensure your survival in a competitive marketplace. Building a Sales funnel is not a one-time activity. Sales funnel cultivates over time by adjusting every stage approach with the feedback you receive from your metrics. A satisfied customer will give your repeat business as well as refer you and there are high chances, they might get into the funnel again due to the competitive nature of the market. Thus, it becomes necessary to keep your funnel stages updated at regular intervals of time. A good flow of customers right from the top all the way to the action stage will ensure you have a healthy business.

How Social Media is driving customer-brand interaction

 In my previous blog, I briefly touched upon how the internet, since it going mainstream in mid-1990s became ever more central to the way we do business, there sprang up quite a different and radically new way of how businesses manage reputation. In the offline world, it was relatively straightforward. The image was projected via centralized controlled media and the average customer or citizen’s opinion and experiences were relatively between the organization and them. However, with the advent of the internet, this started to democratize a bit more and really exploded into the true voice of the masses with the advent of social media. These days, it is important for a business or organization to pay attention to what and how is the online reputation shaping up since it affects almost every aspect of an organization from customer relations, new sales, even their ability to attract talent, and of course their future growth prospects.

This week, we will explore where and how ORM helps in driving customer-brand interactions.

Building and maintaining brand loyalty are one of the central themes of research for marketers for a very long time. Marketers have utilized various means to maintain the brand loyalty of their customers. Brand loyalty is defined as the partiality of a consumer towards one business or product over another, and it can truly make or break a company. It drives in-store traffic, visits to your website, word-of-mouth recommendations, and the conversion of leads to customers. This means the difference between profits and losses. Whether you like it or not, your customers are talking about your brand on social media. Customers have always dictated brand perception through word-of-mouth. Companies can put out good products, market those products, and attempt to steer branding in a certain direction, but it’s always been up to the customers. Now, word-of-mouth has moved online and happens on a much larger scale. And through various social media platforms it’s available for all to see and more often than not, in today’s interconnected world, brand loyalty depends on your ability to leverage the power of social media to build connections with your prospects and customers.

Tapping into your social media market and communicating with followers is no longer an option – it is a requirement. Hence, in this digital age, reputation management has become a critical component of every business. It is all about reputation when it comes to how a brand identifies itself and how the public perceives it.

The primary goal of online reputation management is to market and protect your brand so that it can be found, followed, and promoted in a digital world. Online Reputation Management aka ORM works by responding to negative, unfavourable customer comments and articles published on the internet that reflect poorly on your company's brand image.

Though both Online Reputation Management and Public Relations have the same goal, they approach it in quite different ways. ORM is more of a reactive effort that includes searching for and responding to potentially damaging information from other individuals or businesses. PR is more of a proactive effort to strengthen a brand, whereas ORM is more of a reactive effort that includes searching for and responding to potentially detrimental information from other individuals or businesses.

If you want customers to keep coming back to your brand, you have to connect with them in meaningful ways. Social media is the perfect place to build these relationships. First and foremost, doing a thorough online reputation audit could be considered the most basic of ORM activity. An online reputation management audit involves establishing how people view you online and the hurdles you face in challenging that perception, which can be done through brand monitoring. Simple questions like what kinds of websites do I see for my brand name. Do most people reach my business through search engines or external sites can be answered with this, and is the sentiment for my company's overall positive?

With the audit results in hand, you can outline your ORM goals, set limitations and constraints, and prioritise your duties to construct an Online Reputation Management Strategy for your firm.

Proactively monitoring online discussions gives you a real-time picture of your online presence and helps you to reply swiftly. People expect responses to social media remarks within a day or less. Prompt responses keep disgruntled consumers from providing negative comments and show that you value their assistance. The goal is to reply immediately and compassionately. A private message could become a public comment if you do not respond to customer inquiries swiftly.

To summarize, any company that wants to build client loyalty must remain on top of online reviews and develop an online reputation management strategy that shows its strengths and positions it well on the first page of search engines. Actively managing reputations can certainly benefit organization with bigger trust, better talent, less risks, and higher profit.

What is Online Reputation Management and Why Do You Need It?

As the internet became ever more central to the way we do business, there sprang up quite a different and radically new way of how businesses manage reputation. In the offline world, it was relatively straightforward. The image was projected via centralized controlled media and the average customer or citizen’s opinion and experiences were relatively between the organization and them. However, with the advent of the internet, this started to democratize a bit more and really exploded into the true voice of the masses with the advent of social media. These days, it is important for a business or organization to pay attention to what and how is the online reputation shaping up since it affects almost every aspect of an organization from customer relations, new sales, even their ability to attract talent, and of course their future growth prospects.

Why ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT is important for your business

·       Every organization tries to build a positive image about itself; in fact, the core of the business is all about building an image and improving it every day. In today’s immensely crowded, geography agnostic flat world, It is important to make sure your brand is interesting and fascinating to attract new customers.

·       The way customers interact with the business has undergone a tremendous change. These days, before buying anything online, they look for reviews online and on social media to know the product, brand, and its general views from others. More often than not, the preference of your customers largely depends on the search results.

·       Internet and social media have truly given voice to everyone and now anyone can give reviews online, even your competitors can write negative reviews to spoil your reputation online.

·       With the help of ORM tools, strategies, and practices, one can eliminate the negative content that is untrue; this helps in painting the right picture in front of the customer.

·       Online reputation management helps you improve the reviews and feedback about your brand and create a positive brand image. Customers usually pay more attention to a brand that has positive feedback and reviews online. This helps to generate sales as well.

·       Online reputation management boosts the search engine optimization of your company.

Online reputation management helps you to overcome all this. A survey indicates that a vast majority of customers read online reviews before purchasing anything, therefore ORM becomes paramount today

Hence, reputation management has become a critical part of every organization in the digital age. The way a brand defines itself and how the public sees it is all about reputation. Online Reputation Management is primarily concerned with marketing and defending your brand so that it may be discovered, followed, promoted in a digital marketplace. ORM works by responding to negative thus unfavorable customer comments and articles that are posted online media that cast a poor light on your organization's brand image.

Your consumer base might be jeopardized if you do not manage your online reputation properly. Because according to one survey more than 80% of customers conduct some internet research prior to making a purchase, how you seem online is a make-or-break aspect in their final choice. In addition, with the majority of consumers reading reviews to decide if your organization is trustworthy, your online reputation is a business quality check. Treating online reviews as personal recommendations becomes critical in such situations. Because the Internet keeps practically everything, anything people say about your business online is likely to stay online.

Though both Online Reputation Management and Public Relations have the same aim, there is a significant variation in how they do it. PR is more of a proactive effort to strengthen a brand, whereas ORM is more of a reactive effort that includes searching for and responding to potentially detrimental information from other individuals or businesses.

Monitoring is an important component of maintaining your online reputation since it may provide you with valuable information about consumer satisfaction and feedback on your products or services. Customers who made a complaint and received a satisfactory answer from the company will return to do business with them. You can reduce negative customer comments and maintain a positive online presence by actively managing your reputation.

First and foremost, completing an extensive online reputation Audit may be regarded as an ORM activity. An online reputation management audit entails determining how people perceive you online and the challenges you have in contesting that perception, which may be accomplished through brand monitoring. This can assist with simple queries like What kind of websites do I see for my brand name?, Do most people find my business from search engines or external sites?, and Is the overall attitude for my business positive?

With the audit results in hand, you can create an Online Reputation Management Strategy for your company by outlining your ORM goals, establishing limits and constraints, and prioritizing your tasks.

Monitoring online chats, social media posts, discussion forums, reviews, etc in a proactive manner offers you a real-time snapshot of your online presence and allows you to respond quickly. People expect social media comments to be responded to within a day or less. Prompt answers prevent dissatisfied customers from leaving bad feedback and demonstrate that you appreciate their assistance. The goal here is to respond quickly and with empathy. If you don't reply to consumer inquiries promptly, a private communication might suddenly become a public comment.

To summarize, online reputation management is not a one-day or one-time activity rather it requires regular monitoring; online reputation management will help your business in the long term if you keep an eye on your activities and the activities done by your competitors.

How to succeed With a Customer-centric Marketing Strategy

Advances in technology and communication, combined with explosive growth in data and information, have given rise to a more empowered global consumer. During the past decade, consumer needs have changed significantly, with technology growing at an exponential rate, influencing consumer behavior and marketing strategies. Nearly three-quarters of the world will use just their smartphones to access the internet by 2025. By 2025, 85% of the global population will have access to mobile telephony and more than 75% of the customers will have low-cost tablets or smartphones. It is anticipated that almost 75 Billion devices would be connected globally with mobile-based internet being the primary method of connectivity. Social media and unprecedented access to information such as peer-to-peer product and service reviews are giving greater power to consumers, creating more demanding and informed consumers. These experiences are shaping consumer expectations across all sectors. Amongst all of this, personal interaction is still highly considered and will remain an important component of the overall strategy.

Every day, hundreds of marketing strategies are published, each with its own set of thoughts and studies, but nothing else counts if your customers do not connect with your brand. Any strategy is good if it keeps the customer’s interest. To build value and increase sales over time, understanding your customers is crucial for a predictable result from marketing activities.

Customer centricity is a corporate strategy that prioritizes customers and places them at the center of operations in order to provide a positive experience and build long-term relationships. Understanding how to create leads based on your ideal customer and developing an overall marketing strategy that focuses on the greatest results for your customers are both parts of customer-centric marketing planning.

When a customer becomes engaged with a brand, they are 70 percent more inclined to spend than a first-time customer is. All of this is the outcome of long-term customer trust in the brand. A loyal customer base cuts down on the time, money, and effort it takes to generate additional revenue.

The most common way of creating an effective strategy, especially for marketing is to start by conducting a customer behavior study, which may assist split customers into distinct categories and personas’ as well as covering the most basic phase of constructing a customer profile, is a good place to start when developing a plan. This aids businesses in defining and focusing on their target market.

One can create original content that is relevant to one’s audience by focusing on a specific market, as a vast majority of consumers prefer relevant and personalized content. It is critical to align content not only to different stages of the buying process but also to specific buyer personas, as the type of content that will engage and incentivize them will differ depending on their characteristics and preferences.

With the proper content in hand, one can begin implementing it using an Omnichannel strategy, with special emphasis on social media. Social media and internet-based customer conversations – both good and bad – are federated, dynamic, contagious, and opinion making about products and services. As social media is about real-time and people-centric interactions, external social initiatives will have limited success if not backed by a similar focus on agent engagement. The way forward is to build internal collaboration capabilities that help deliver a superior external customer experience. The key here is to concentrate one’s efforts in the areas where one’s target audience exists, engages, learns and spends time. Share the content in these places and collaborate with the audience to create memorable experiences. This will help in increasing the likelihood of customer advocacy, which can foster a sense of community within loyalty the loyal customer base.

Along with content, other factors that can contribute to customer-centric strategies include training the talent that is aligned with customer-centric thinking and understands the value of customer experience delivered by the organization. Here the role of Contact center representatives who are the first and most front-facing workforce is extremely important. They will shape many of the first customer interactions. This must be coupled with relevant and timely information. Successful organizations break down silos of information and use an enterprise-wide approach to customer information and insight. A single, accurate, accessible enterprise customer view is essential to the success of any organization that wants to differentiate on customer-centricity.

Measuring the performance of one’s strategies is equally important, so having customer success metrics to measure customer-centricity becomes critical. Calculating churn rates can assist you in keeping track of customer satisfaction. Similarly, Net Promoter Score and customer lifetime value are two metrics that can assist you in determining the success of your customer-centric marketing strategy.

95% of senior business leaders believe that the next competitive differentiator is customer experience. The irony is that 80% of companies believe they deliver a superior customer experience. But only 8% of their customers agree!

A customer-centric marketing approach is the most effective way to stay competitive, onboard ideal consumers, and increase the lifetime value of your customers. The modern consumer is acutely aware of their requirements and the myriad options and choices available to them. The transition to becoming a truly customer-centric organization is difficult and time-consuming, but even minor policy and procedure improvements can have a big impact on both employees and customers. Every part of your business should be focused on providing the best possible customer experience, resulting in your customers becoming your reason for success.

The scenario is similar in almost most of the B2C organizations like Manufacturing, Automotive, Retail, FMCG, Telcos, BFSI, etc. However, the investments in marketing technology or process and people development areas to service their customers do not commensurate to this ratio currently. Moreover, organizations are driving efficiency and extending the cost play within the ecosystem and are not as much focussed on effectiveness.

To summarize, for the modern marketing strategy to succeed, it is imperative that the experiences during the acquisition and post-acquisition phases be engineered and managed properly. A customer experience is an interaction between an organization and a customer is a complex function of the brand promise, which has set the expectations to the customer and the sum total of the life cycle of an engagement or interaction experiences – product performance, service delivery, people interaction, and process experience. It is perceived through a customer’s conscious and subconscious mind. It is a blend of an organization’s rational performance, the senses stimulated and the emotions evoked and intuitively measured against customer expectations across all moments of contact 

Customer Journey Mapping: The secret to Superior CX

Customers' behavior is surmised to be rather unpredictable, thus businesses strive to make lasting first impressions and provide unique purchase experiences. Those who wish to learn how your clients purchase in today's digital environment should focus on the most impactful channels and touchpoints in their buying journeys.

 Customer Experience Mapping is a method that helps you identify your consumers' motivating elements during the purchase process. It may be defined as a customer's journey through the phases of their relationship with a company, which includes all interactions between the consumer and the firm across several channels. It's basically a flowchart that displays the steps of a client's interaction with a firm, from purchasing things online to contacting customer support.

 Although most firms are rather effective at acquiring data on their customers, data alone does not adequately express the customer's problems and experiences. At such instances, a customer journey map, which is a visual representation of a customer's interaction with a firm through time, may give insight into the customer's overall experience. It assists your team in better understanding and addressing the wants and pain points of your customers when they interact with your product or service. Thus, a customer journey map allows your company to observe how your brand contacts a potential client and then travels through the many touchpoints of the sales process.

Depending on the sort of business and the types of consumers served, each customer journey map will be unique. However, there are a few key elements that will be consistent throughout every map you build. Some of them are:

 

1.      Personas: Personas, which are composite representations of a market segment of consumers with similar requirements, objectives, and motivations, are the greatest way to understand customers' behaviors and sentiments. It may provide you a comprehensive picture of who your consumers are, what they want, and how they engage with your company across all channels.

 

2.       Identifying the stages of the customer journey that your customer is attempting to complete. Rather than focusing on internal process processes, one should focus on creating a customer journey map with phases that depict your client's goal-oriented trip.

 

3.      Customer touchpoints: One of the most significant parts of the customer journey map is the touchpoints between the customer and the business. Each touchpoint specifies a specific action the consumer did with the business. Identifying your touchpoints is a crucial step in establishing a customer journey map and ensuring that your consumers are happy at every stage.

 

4.      Emotion: It's crucial to think about how your consumers could react to each engagement. Identifying the places of friction in the customer experience may help companies see their client personas in a new light.

 After you've established all of the components, it's a wonderful exercise to bring them all together from the customer's perspective. Companies frequently need to construct many customer journey maps based on a jumbled picture of how consumers interact with them.

Customer journeys aren't always going to be straightforward. Customers may hop ahead and back multiple times within the same segment throughout the course of their lifetime. As a result, taking exceptions into account while mapping the Customer Journey may be a smart idea. Another smart approach is to involve other departments since each department has a stake in defining the customer's experience and may give a distinct perspective. Customer Journey Mapping will, in the end, never be a static entity; like everything else in the digital age, it will be forced to be Agile.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to creating a customer experience, so your company will have to figure out what works best for you. However, the Trip Mapping frameworks you develop should help you gain a better knowledge of the journey your consumers take as they interact with your organization, brand, goods, partners, and employees. Knowing where your consumer is on their journey might help you anticipate what they could encounter next.

Happy New Year - 2022

Wave goodbye to the old and embrace the new with hope, dreams, and ambition. Bring in New Year off with more motivation, positivity, and some resolutions! 

Wishing you a Happy New Year full of happiness!

Where CX meets Technology - Intelligent Experiences

As the pandemic forced us to change our very way of living, consumer behavior also changed drastically. Overnight, many people who were “fence-sitters” when it came to transacting “online” were literally forced to online since in-person contact became the least preferred way of doing commerce. This online commerce forced organizations to really take a deep look at their customer journeys both online and offline. Digital Technologies, earlier often relegated to “coming in future” or “nice to have” became “essential” to survival. Retail was the hardest hit with this realization.

However, we find that now almost every area of the customer experience is being transformed by new technologies. Customers have evolved to anticipate new levels of perfection, performance, and just about everything in between as the possibilities of digital technology improve. Customers' expectations are continuously evolving; thus, the current customer experience must go above and beyond old customer care practices. Companies that give a meaningful but relevant experience that meets or exceeds their consumers' expectations will be successful.

To stay on top of these advancements and trends, we must grasp these new technologies and use them to communicate, interact, and promote in novel ways. Today's organizations need to discover the proper digital tools to provide a great customer experience, build brand loyalty, and drive sales growth. CX is taking advantage of today's technology and data to improve the entire customer experience. This involves sharing data amongst teams such as marketing and customer support, developing new roles to act on the data, and using new technologies such as AI, resulting in the implementation of a class of digital practices that leverage data to improve the whole digital trip for customers.

Leading firms in customer experience management are already utilizing these new technologies to achieve a competitive advantage. This ranking is topped by the utilization of artificial intelligence. According to one Research, by 2022, consumers would probably be handling 85 percent or more of their interactions with the organization without the need to be engaging with a human, at least for simple interactions. Many of the technological breakthroughs accessible to CX delivery teams are determined by how artificial intelligence, conversational interfaces, and robotic automation are implemented. There are two aspects to this. One is related to productivity and efficiency. By automating frequent and repetitive processes, these solutions save expenses and boost agent productivity. The other aspect, perhaps more important, is to do with delivering superior experiences through quick, efficient, and empathetic engagements during various segments of customer journeys. Conversational Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence are another method for automating simple chores. Today's industry-standard chatbots offer an incredible step forward for organizations looking to automate and outsource easy, regular inquiries and interactions to an intelligent system, thanks to an algorithmic learning feature that allows it to learn from past discussions and adapt replies. Another widely used option, IoT, may boost a company's bottom line by cutting operational expenses, improving productivity, and assisting companies in expanding into new markets or developing new goods.

One technique, which seems to be gaining tremendous traction in understanding and delivering empathetic engagements, is speech analytics, which is being increasingly used to augment existing AI processes enabled processes by listening for heightened voice pitches and other emotional indications, analyzing the customer's sentiments, further contextualizing with backend order data and transferring them to an agent when appropriate. It also gives fresh sources of feedback by identifying emotional drivers and focusing on terms or themes that regularly provoke specific feelings.

Armed with this sentiment analysis technology and with comprehensive dashboards, agents can quickly acquire a full image of each client, their purchase history, and their expected goals for each engagement – and then take on a consultative role, alleviating emergent and even projected requirements as well instantly acquire a thorough understanding of each client. These new and continually growing technologies are assisting businesses not only to extend their client base but also to get a macro-level understanding of their customers. Adopting such technologies for one’s organization is providing a more competitive advantage over competitors that have yet to connect technology with customer experience.

For a few years, a huge focus of most of the organizations and service providers was to deflect a transaction or engagement towards a non-voice channel – with the hope that customers would find these easier and such channels also afford a lower cost to serve. However, as seen, most of the customers are not very comfortable using non-voice channels especially with an AI-powered bot behind the channel during a time of crisis or during a buying journey. In a country like India, literacy rates while climbing has also proved to be a challenge for a largely English-dominated non-voice channel scene. Hence, we see that voice is making a comeback, albeit in a different avatar for service providers! And Speech Analytics and related technologies are at the heart of this revolution.

This is not limited to service providers or call centers only! General use of such virtual assistants is happening on an increasingly wide scale. For example, Taxi and cab drivers in India are routinely seen using some form of voice-powered virtual assistant for doing routine things – hands-free! Mostly the interface is maps or google assistant. The next frontier in Speech-enabled virtual assistants would be real-time language translation capabilities, which would allow two humans to converse with each other even though they might speak different languages. 5G and increasingly powerful speech engines are the key. While we are far away from Star Trek’s Universal Translator, but such technologies, on a simpler scale can revolutionize the way we interact with each other and transact online.

The next frontier in CX and EX definitely involves a significant role for such technologies available through a variety of interface formats!

Virtual Assistants: Their Role in Superior CX & EX

The Digital era compels many companies to maintain continuous connections with their customers until the resolution of their queries or issues. As a result, with customer service as a top priority, the ideal customer experience allows consumers to communicate via the channel of their choosing while keeping the context of interactions intact. A limitless firm has a new operating system that incorporates a shift in thinking as well as the increased embrace of emerging technology. The conventional tethered and physical workflow is morphing into interactive customer communications through various digital channels.

The role of Virtual assistants is developing as businesses adapt to the Omni Channel experience which is increasingly being expected by their end customers. Though virtual assistants first appeared in the 1960s with ELIZA and IBM's Shoebox voice-activated calculators, this technology is now emerging as the go-to solution in the realm of customer experience.

A traditional virtual assistant may be conceived of as an application that responds to a user's voice or text command and does the work at hand. Emerging virtual assistants, on the other hand, are programs that integrate the use of artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, natural language processing, and machine learning to extract information and complicated data from conversations in order to comprehend and process them.

Structured data with standardized rules can easily adapt to RPA solutions whereas unstructured data with less application of standardization utilized Cognitive automation, a virtual assistant is a next-level combo that can extract information and complicated data from a conversation using a voice and text-based interface.

Virtual Assistant algorithms develop the capacity to construct data models that detect and adapt behavior patterns by merging past data. With the inclusion of historical data, preferences, and other user information on a regular basis, a virtual assistant can answer difficult queries, offer suggestions and predictions, and even start a discussion.

Pre-programmed virtual assistants, which are more rule-based, with logic mapped out with a logical next step for various answers users might ask, are giving way to more complex and dynamic AI virtual assistants, which can be divided into two categories: NLP virtual assistants and machine learning virtual assistants. As a result, virtual assistants are becoming smarter by ditching automated chats and becoming more participatory, as seen by one of the most popular products on the market, Google Home, which knows each user's voice and issues a secure ID to each. The trend is also emerging to integrate different Virtual assistants, which can provide enhanced functionality to consumers and end-users.

However, there are certain privacy issues with AI-enabled virtual assistants that gather and retain user data indefinitely for better upgrades and user experience; this may be mitigated with strict data privacy rules from the corporations that provide this technology. After all, technology is a double-edged weapon that must be handled with caution.

Virtual Assistants have a chance to build a new digital workforce that will supplement human talents while also benefiting B2C and B2B end customers. Virtual assistant technology may be efficiently applied to external customer-facing use-cases using Conversational AI and cloud-enabled services, assisting enterprises in meeting the demands of digital natives and growing omnichannel digital contact with Omnichannel digital virtual assistants. At the same time, with employee experience also becoming increasingly important in the delivery of holistic Total Stakeholder Experience, virtual assistants are playing an increasingly important role in enabling employees to perform their tasks with much more accuracy, speed, and efficiency. These assistants are used in a variety of formats including conversational text, guidance coaches, and even as “co-listeners” to a voice conversation and then providing guidance based on inferences derived from a vast database of previous interactions and persona-based profiling.

The next frontier in CX and EX definitely involves a significant role for virtual assistants available through a variety of interface formats!