Learn how you can effortlessly create buyer personas for your business with the help of your customers.
A customer persona is a detailed description of your target customer. It is a product of deep research about your existing or target customer and represents a summary of their needs, preferences, and behavior.
Customer personas help you channel your focus into qualified prospects, manage your product and services to suit the needs of target customers, and ensure that all workflows (from marketing to sales) are designed to match the customer personas.
Doing these help you attract leads and customers that provide high value to your business over time.
How to Create a Customer Persona
So how can you create a customer persona for your business? Check our tips below.
1. Get your customers to participate in your research
Your customers are the most important element of your research. The entire strategy revolves around them and so it’s crucial that you’ll get input from them.
Anyone— from the leads that visit your website to your repeat customers— can participate in this research.
You can also automate this process by configuring your website or landing pages to prompt visitors to fill out a form. You can also send emails to subscribers that let them participate in surveys or even interviews.
2. Collect as much information as possible
Gather as much important and relevant information as needed for your research. You can start with demographic details such as their: Name, Email, Gender, Age, Company Position, and Company Name. Then you can move into more personal information such as their needs, buying habits, preferences, and online behavior, among others.
3. Dig deeper
Sometimes you need to dig deeper into your customers’ profiles by asking more specific questions. Here, your sales and marketing teams must work together to identify the type of questions you need to ask to get the desired response from your target customers.
For example, identifying whether a product or service may suit a customer may require you to ask more than the standard “Would you like to try this product?” question.
It may be necessary to ask what the customer does on a daily basis, what they like or dislike, or what they prioritize right now to establish the necessary conclusions.
Further assessments and evaluations may be needed to validate the conclusion you’ve arrived at after conducting your research.
4. Identify the appropriate messaging strategy for the personas created
Once you’ve created your personas, create a messaging strategy that suits these personas’ needs and preferences.
Everyone in your company must be able to speak the language that your personas are speaking, especially when they’re having direct conversations with them. This ensures that your messaging resonates well with your target audience.
Automate Your Data Collection
Effortlessly collect information about your leads and customers with their participation. Automate your workflows and have your sales and marketing teams access a rich database of customer information.
Help them establish a solid customer persona which allows them to tailor the sales and marketing experience accordingly.
Conducting customer surveys are important in determining customer sentiments, but they can be a hassle to perform. Find out how you can do them effortlessly.
Companies often use customer surveys to understand their audience’s needs and preferences and to gain a better understanding of their customers’ experiences interacting with the brand and by using their products or services.
But conducting customer surveys can be painstaking and time-consuming. What are the ways for you to conduct customer surveys effortlessly? Check out our tips below:
1. Use tools that let your collect and organize customer data
Using digital ecosystems that let you collect and organize data is one of the easiest ways for you to conduct customer surveys.
It’s important to note, however, that these digital ecosystems must have all the tools and features you need to gain insight from the data you’ve collected.
Some tools automatically display data through visual representations such charts and graphs. These can help you make meaningful and strategic business decisions to help your brand grow.
2. Automate your tasks
Digital ecosystems can also automate your tasks for you. For example, when a customer visits a sales and marketing channel (like your website or a landing page), the tool can automatically prompt them to answer a survey.
This reduces the need for you to call them to answer a survey or to wait for them to answer a survey you’ve sent through mail or email.
Some digital ecosystems also allow you to automate the creation of reports, which eliminates the need to manually write one, based on the answers you’ve received from your customers.
3. Keep the surveys short
To make it easy for you and your customers, surveys must be short and simple. They should be aligned with the business goals and objectives— what do you want to know from them and why?
This is important because, according to research, only 7% of customers actually respond to surveys they receive. And that means that long surveys are highly likely to be ignored or rejected.
4. Think about the timing
When it comes to conducting surveys, timing is key.
Surveys must be given at a time when customer availability is high to get a higher sample size— so you won’t have to do it again and again just to make the survey statistically significant (which takes a lot of time and effort).
Timing is also necessary if you want to gain a sincere and genuine response. For example, if you send a survey to determine customer satisfaction while the customer has not yet made a purchase, then the survey becomes meaningless.
Try to identify at which stage of the customer journey the survey is best conducted.
5. Offer incentives
Speaking of genuine responses, offering incentives encourages customers to participate and give honest feedback. Integrate narratives that let customers know how participating in the survey is going to help them in the process.
Words like “help us help you” or “let us know how we can do better” send a message that their inputs are going to affect them along the way— and will eventually redound to their benefit.
Conduct surveys effortlessly
Want to know how you can effortlessly conduct customer surveys or gain their honest feedback?
Gain access to a complete set of tools with Saphyte’s digital ecosystem. Learn more about its features from our experts and how they can impact your business. Book a FREE demo here.
Customer feedback is very helpful to businesses. It lets businesses learn about the strengths and weaknesses of their brand and work on improving the customer experience. The problem is, sometimes, it can be challenging to gather customer feedback.
With a feedback loop, it becomes easier to understand what your customers are going through when using your product or service. But what is a customer feedback loop and how can you have one? Read on to find out.
What is a customer feedback loop and how can it help your business?
A customer feedback loop is a strategy designed to improve your product based on user reviews and feedback, using active interaction between the business and the customers.
To make it easier to gain constant access to customer feedback, tools like CRMs allow businesses to let their customers access a system where they can input their feedback anytime. The CRM then organizes all customer inputs in a meaningful way that makes it easier for brands to gain insights from the customers’ feedback.
This allows them to develop strategies to continuously improve customer experience, making it easier to establish brand loyalty in the end.
Tips to get started with a customer feedback loop
Here are a few tips to consider when implementing a customer feedback loop mechanism:
1. Use tools that make it easier for you to implement the feedback mechanism
Manually collecting feedback from customers can be done but the quality and quantity of feedback you’ll be getting will more likely be low. More than that, manually collecting feedback can be stressful for your teams.
To make it easier for you to collect feedback from all your sales channels, you can automate the collection process using CRMs like Saphyte that allow customers to provide feedback through forms (surveys), live chat, or a ticketing system.
2. Encourage customers to provide feedback
It’s also important to encourage customers to give sincere feedback. Otherwise, it’ll be difficult for you to determine their true experience when using your product or service.
Prompt customers to provide feedback only at critical stages like when they’ve made a purchase, or when they’ve made a rating on your website. You can also reward customers after they’ve provided feedback.
3. Analyze the feedback
Now that you have gathered customer feedback from all your sales and marketing channels, it’s time to organize them and identify trends and patterns in customer behavior and preferences.
You can create charts to gain meaningful insights from customer feedback. You can also organize them according to the departments involved (sales, marketing, technical, or support), or based on the type of review (positive or negative).
4. Start implementing changes
One of the most important steps when implementing a customer feedback loop mechanism is to actually start making changes based on customer feedback.
Customers provide feedback for a reason— they want to improve their experience the next time they encounter or engage with your brand. If the negative experience continues, it’s likely that they will churn and stop doing business with you.
The goal of the strategy is to improve brand loyalty, which helps you gain advocates for your brand who will refer it to their friends and families. Brand loyalty also helps you drive sales as there will be repeat purchases coming from the same loyal customers.
5. Close the loop
After customers leave feedback for your team, you should close the loop by following up with them directly. Timing is everything. And with tools like a CRM, you can provide a prompt response using automation.
For example, if a customer suggests you improve your product options, you can send them a quick, personalized email using the CRM to let them know the impact of their feedback on your team. This makes the customer feel heard and valued.
Start a customer feedback loop mechanism
Gather feedback from your customers now and make implementing the strategy easier by using tools like Saphyte.
With Saphyte, the manual process of collecting feedback from customers becomes automated using the system. You can also provide prompt responses, like thanking customers for their feedback, without manual effort.
We’ve gone past making your business’ identities, and now is the season for building your brand’s success through customer experience analytics. These days analytics is integral to refining your customer experience and overall customer journey.
For some time now, brands have focused on internal business functions like product design, supply chain, and customer service to drive new and better customer experiences. Some organizations focus more on their product and use customer feedback to generate value or develop loyalty products for better customer retention. We can all agree that these strategies are all good but can also be unsustainable in the long run.
Analytics Bringing more than just Data on the Table
Customer experience isn’t just about function and form. Guessing what your customers want can be counter-productive and, at the same time, annoying. Businesses fail to understand that the root of customer experience understands how your customer can relate to your entire brand. To gain and leverage such insight, organizations must learn how to harness the power of customer data and analytics.
Customer experience analytics is discovering, collecting, analyzing essential customer data. This process produces actionable insights to derive better decisions and solutions to benefit your customers and business. These decisions, in turn, allow your business to run for a more tailored or hyper-personalized experience for the individual customer.
Analytics will always be an integral part of refining the customer experience moving forward. Research shows that 90% of business managers believe analytics can improve their sales performance. Another study shows that 62% of businesses believe that analytics can increase their sales by 20%.
Competing in Data-Driven Economy – Not as simple as ABC
Organizations must acknowledge or eliminate guesswork to compete and win in a data-driven economy. Data is more than just mere numbers. With this current economic setup and competitive environment, businesses must have access. They must have the ability to act on customer data with speed, agility, intelligence, and accuracy.
How Data and Analytics Helps Improve Customer Experience
You’ve heard of the phrase, “customers are the lifeblood of your business” a million times over, and you’re getting sick of hearing it. But, if you’re planning to leverage data and analytics, knowing your customers and keeping them engaged is the best thing you can do for your business.
Yes, it’s exciting to find new technologies and strategies and harness them for your business’s advantage. However, forgetting the main objective of your business is to create relationships that add value to your company and bottom line. An intelligent customer experience (CX) and your customer lifetime value (CLV) strategies are the best way to go. So how can analytics create an impact on customer experience?
Understand Customer Sentiments and Level with Customer Emotions
Emotions play an essential role in building relationships with customers and vis-a-vis. Marketers over the globe clearly understand the impact of emotions and feelings in the decision-making process. As mentioned in the previous lines of this article, competing in data driven-economy is not easy. Consumers face many marketing materials, from emails to social media platforms. Unsurprisingly, only a tiny amount of that gets through.
Learning how to act on collected and processed data is an essential skill that businesses should pick up. Despite the harsh competition, you’ll be at the most disadvantage without data analytics. Nowadays, using and processing big data to understand the customer better and insight into how they feel is critical to connecting with them emotionally and winning their loyalty.
Businesses may source data from different methods or mediums. These methods may include formal surveys, call transcripts, social media comments, reviews, and any other form of exchange between a brand and a customer. In return, the collected and processed data allows businesses to analyze quantitative and qualitative feedback to improve customer services, whether by changing or using softer language, more emotionally established marketing campaigns, or a more hyper-personalized service.
Streamline Service and Save Time
Having long sales funnels is no fun for your employees and your customers. Organizations should do their best to streamline processes and save time whenever possible.
Customers hate it when their calls are redirected frequently and still can’t seem to find a solution. In these cases, when your data is processed and analyzed, you can easily match sales reps to more appropriate roles or improve the efficiency of your entire team. Ensure that all customer information is in a single platform, like CRM software solutions, streamlining your business process and saving time is within reach.
Analytics Help Improve Communications
Communication is not about the words you say but how you say them. Not communicating well with your customer is like playing minesweeper. That is why it is essential to gather much customer feedback and reviews as possible.
In this case, you can use customer feedback and satisfaction scores to improve communications among employees and customers. Feedback and reviews allow your team to redirect their efforts and even tap on opportunities that have never been. Or even in situations where agents are not performing well because they spend too much time looking for peer support.
Your team can avoid confusion and re-routing communications with the help of accurate and valuable data. When data analytics are put in place, your team knows where they stand with the customer. They can use better communication strategies to make service interactions more efficient when they have this knowledge.
Enhance targeted marketing practices
Big data is also paramount for implementing effective and targeted marketing strategies. Organizations need to pay attention to click-through rates of links communicated via marketing emails, text messages, and other channels. For example, it can reveal whether a marketing strategy results in actual sales. Furthermore, geolocation data may allow brands to better target customers near brick-and-mortar stores or during the in-store shopping experience.
Brands may use the information collected to share sales events and other news on discounts applied in-store. As brands collect various types of data on their customers, taking a thoughtful and customer-centric approach to interpreting data can result in better service practices and more substantial customer experiences.
Key Takeaway
Analytics is more than just a piece of processed numbers. Analytics has become their lifeline to stay competitive in a data-driven economy to some businesses. Trusting in guesswork no longer works in this present day and age. Companies need accurate data, precise analytics, and responsible actions to stay relevant and even gain an advantage in the market.
In a customer-centric world, upping your customer data and analytics game is the best way to get ahead.
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To centralize or not to centralize – a hard call made harder with power struggles. The timeless tug-of-war between centralizing and not centralizing remains a dilemma for most companies. Business leaders believe that poorly judged centralization can stifle initiative, compel the business’s ability to tailor products and services locally, and burden business departments with high costs and poor service. [1]
However, as the world courses through in rapid motion, every business is now compelled to have a management system to help them streamline their daily processes and procedures. Systems that allow companies to establish management protocols and facilitate clear communication between departments. A business’s communication structure can influence discovery and the potential of its staff members, which in turn causes the company to innovate and implement its ideas.
Why Choose to Centralize your Business System?
A centralized business system means keeping most of your inventory in one or a few platforms instead of having individual storage systems to maintain your account. Doing so can benefit your business’s overall design, including more efficient data control and quicker responses to prospects and customers. These are just some of the few benefits you can gain with a centralized business system.
Curious to know more about the power of a centralized business system? Here are more of its benefits that you may enjoy.
Effective Decisions
At the local level, decentralized business systems allow businesses to respond swiftly to unpredictable market conditions. However, in most cases, centralization provides firms with the most efficient decision-making and communication throughout the company. Some decisions, such as responding to unfavorable news events, are best made by executives, especially when it comes to timely decisions and when responses are essential to execution.
Accountability
Centralization also highlights decision-makers, making it easier for individual team members to be accountable for their decisions and actions. When the right choices are consistently made and implemented, recognition goes to the right people. Accountability compels corporate decision-makers to invest the right amount of time, effort, and energy to examine decisions and their impact on all stakeholders.
Consistency
Consistency is another necessary strength of business centralization. When the same person or group of executives make decisions on behalf of the company, those decisions are consistent and predictable. That way, it helps managers and employees know what to expect and prevents some frustration resulting from constant changes in decision patterns. In addition, decisions that affect customer relationships can improve brand consistency if made by the same executive.
Reduced costs
A centralized system adheres to standard procedures and practices that guide and reduce office and administration costs. With the right business system, businesses can now reduce spending on storage, augmenting staffing, and even location.
Improved quality of work
Standardized procedures and better supervision in a centralized business system improve work quality. With the help of systems and apps, businesses can now reduce the potential waste of manual labor and ensure quality and accurate work. Systems like CRM software can help minimize task duplication and increase labor costs.
Streamlined Information Flow
Most industries that rely on a constantly changing and inconsistent market have the advantage of being free to update. With a centralized source of information, it’ll be easier for managers and employees to implement strategies and easier to track individual performance. When data is readily accessible, communication is streamlined, thus adding more value to your bottom line.
Definitive Chain of Command
A definitive chain of command paired with a centralized business system is also beneficial for staff seeking more supporting guidance regarding their responsibilities and expectations. A centralized system works reasonably well to provide people with clear directions.
The vague nature of a decentralized system may confuse common workflows, but increased autonomy is desirable to employees who prefer working on a flexible schedule. Companies that handle a lot of employees with a work-from-home set-up can significantly benefit when they have centralized business systems that combine reduced oversight and self-reporting tools to streamline admin and managerial responsibilities.
Creating Standard Internal Metrics
It is easier to create a standardized format in the central system when developing internal performance metrics. A top-down management structure allows managers and executives to integrate communication and reporting standards with minimal deviation. If the indicators of success are relatively simple, it may be beneficial to centralize the whole structure of the organization. A well-distributed system allows individual departments or teams to decide how to report and avoid confusion about performance results. Active communication between managers and executives helps answer any questions in the report.
Relationship with customers
Building a direct customer relationship is easier to use in a decentralized organization because there aren’t many communication and reach restrictions. Optimizing social media channels is a prominent decentralization feature that allows businesses to interact with multiple geographic markets with lesser difficulty. Online customer service via numerous communication lines is easy to do with flexible behavioral guidelines.
However, the power of centralized business systems often has specific guidelines for how they should conduct themselves with the general public, giving businesses more control over their brand image. Companies in industries such as children’s media and baby products typically communicate with the general public through a strong public relations team. In contrast to automated online systems, an in-house customer service team with in-depth knowledge and experience may also respond to complaints.
Key Takeaway
Decentralization may offer plenty of untapped business potential, and it may give plenty of autonomy on an individual level. However, amidst a decentralized environment, businesses need a bit of control of how things are run inside our business to control efficiency and effectiveness. This is the true power of a centralized business system.
Are you taking measures to centralize your business flow? If not, Saphyte will be more than happy to take you in on a little open secret. Call us today, and let’s get your business centralized today!
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Data is everywhere. From a business perspective, data can be taken from the amount a customer paid for a purchase, the number of website visits a day, any information typed in by the customer, and a whole lot more.
On average, businesses receive data and metrics from 28 unique sources, according to Deloitte.
Data lets us know what’s going on in the business, what we can do more to get more people to do something, and what we need to avoid doing to keep customers coming back for more.
But to ensure that businesses get clean and accurate data, and so they can organize this data to gain some insights out of them, businesses need to have a customer data platform.
What Is A Customer Data Platform?
A customer data platform is a software that collects data from your customers.
It may have tools and features that let you perform tasks like telemarketing, email marketing, lead generation, catalog management, and etc. Customer data platforms may also have dashboards that showcase important and relevant data and insights at a glance.
In 2018, the customer data platform market size was valued at USD 730.1 million. It is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.5% from 2019 to 2025.
Why Having A Customer Data Platform Is Important
Customer data platforms give you an in-depth understanding of every individual customer so that you can personalize your services to cater to their unique needs and preferences.
Knowing what an individual customer needs and wants allows sales, marketing, and support teams to effectively address the customer’s issues and solve their problems.
Without data, businesses may have to repetitively ask the customer for information (especially when the issue has to be handled by multiple teams) to deliver the appropriate response. This can delay the service which may affect the customer experience and give the brand a bad reputation at the end of the day.
A customer data platform may collect the following types of data:
Customer identification: this refers to the identity of the customer— their name, address, mobile number, email address, and other related information.
Qualitative (feedback, opinions, suggestions, etc.): this refers to other useful information gathered from the customer that cannot be quantified, such as their opinions, statements, suggestions, feedback, notes, and etc.
Behavioral: this refers to any data related to a customer’s behavior such as their purchase behavior, marketing behavior, app usage, social media behavior, etc.
Product: this refers to any data related to the customer’s interaction with the product and services of the business such as products purchased, products viewed on the website, abandoned products added to the cart, etc.
4 Ways A Customer Data Platform Can Accelerate Business Growth
These are the common ways a customer data platform accelerate business growth:
1. It lets businesses gain a deeper understanding of their customers to deliver better services
Customer data platforms can automate the collection of data from customers to lessen the tasks of sales and marketing teams.
They can prompt website visitors to fill out needed information which will then be automatically migrated to the database of the platform.
There, the customer data platform can sort the information and give sales and marketing teams a quick glimpse of the type of lead or customer they’re dealing with.
When sales and marketing teams have a deep understanding of the lead or customer they’re facing, it allows them to craft a workflow that best suits the needs and preferences of the target customer.
In fact, according to Econsultancy & IBM, 33% of elite marketers say having the right technologies for data collection and analysis (such as a customer data platform) is the most important step to understanding customers.
Having the right data allows businesses to improve the experience of the customer, which increases the chances of the customer moving forward in the sales funnel.
2. It provides users important and relevant data for quick, data-driven decision-making
Customer data platforms often have dashboards that showcase ongoing data related to the business’s sales, marketing, and support efforts.
They may even automatically interpret the data to provide insights, which helps managers and leaders make quick decisions to steer the company to success.
Data analytics help inform businesses which strategy is working and which isn’t. Because of this, businesses can continue implementing workflows that give results and stop or change those that aren’t working.
3. It allows businesses to quickly monitor marketing ROI
Marketing efforts are needed to promote the brand to the market and hopefully establish connections with potential customers. But some marketing activities require a hefty investment for them to work.
This is why businesses ought to monitor their marketing performance to ensure that they’re giving the expected results or return on investment (ROI).
Without a customer data platform, this may require many manual, repetitive tasks and calculations which can be stressful to the team responsible.
A customer data platform can automate some of these tasks. It can even quickly provide the results of marketing efforts (such as email marketing, advertising campaigns, etc.) to businesses so they can make the necessary adjustments without delay.
4. It helps businesses improve offline and online customer experience
The pandemic has accelerated the online activities of consumers— more and more people buy over the internet now than before.
Because of this, businesses need to emphasize the importance of providing quality service to their customers online as they have done over the past few years on their brick and mortar stores.
A customer data platform can bridge the distance between businesses and consumers on the internet. It can predict what a customer wants and allow the business to offer it even before the customer says it. Some information provided by the customer data platform can help inform businesses what to do next when the customer visits.
With a customer data platform, businesses can quickly collect customer feedback so they can improve what needs to be improved to cater to future customers and encourage repeat purchases.
Conclusion
Customer data platforms help accelerate business growth in the following ways:
It helps businesses provide better service through the data it collects from customers with minimal user participation
It quickly provides relevant data and insights to aid managers and leaders in making business decisions
It allows businesses to monitor marketing efforts and ensure they provide the expected results
It improves the experience of customers online and offline to encourage repeat purchases and establish customer loyalty
Learn more about how you can accelerate your business growth with a customer data platform. Click here to get started.
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“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
-Warren Buffet
Managing customer experience has become a priority in the digital age. With the emergence of new and innovative digital technologies, customer behavior has been continuously reshaped, making it harder for companies to predict and proactively respond to customer needs and demands.
When the customer expectations are unmet, customers begin to question the credibility of the business they regularly interact with and turn to competitors for better service.
To avoid this, businesses must understand the important factors that comprise customer experiences and manage them. They can do this by mapping the customer journey, identifying gaps across the different stages of the customer journey, and optimizing the journey to enhance the customer experience.
From complete strangers, customers can become your brand representatives who will actively advocate for the use of your products and services.
Why Managing Customer Experience is Crucial
Managing customer experience is crucial and relevant in the digital age. Among the reasons are the following:
1. Because customers are different now than they used to be
Earlier businesses operated purely on a brick-and-mortar model that engage with their customers and earned sales and profits.
But this model has been disrupted by digital innovators that contributed to the birth of the digital age. Nowadays, businesses are offering and delivering online services.
This has shaped and reshaped consumer behavior. With fast internet connectivity and availability, customers now want complete product information at their fingertips as they go about their daily lives.
They’re also caring less about which channel they use to communicate— they can browse business websites through their PCs, make purchases on mobile devices, or even check your products in-store and make purchases online.
Because of new consumer behavior and emerging technologies, customer expectations are changing. They now hold businesses at higher standards when it comes to their online and offline shopping experiences.
Moreover, the wide availability of information and quick access to competitors’ channels have also made them now more demanding in terms of quality service. They can make quick comparisons, provide public feedback, and influence other consumers’ purchase decisions which empowers them to make demands from businesses.
This is why consumer experience is crucial in the digital age. A bad experience can leave a bad taste in the mouth of customers and negatively affect your business reputation.
2. Because businesses can easily lose leads along the way
The availability of multiple channels also makes it difficult for businesses to track where their leads are coming from and what types of customers they have.
This lack of customer information makes it easy for businesses to lose them along the way. To sustain customers’ interests, businesses need to send relevant and useful information to each customer. But this seem impossible without knowing the customer first.
3. Because future customers may avoid your business upon hearing about bad reviews
As mentioned above, the wide access of information and connectivity between users makes it easy for consumers to influence each others’ purchase decisions.
When a customer leaves a bad review due to a bad experience with your business, it may deter others from purchasing too.
4. Because customers’ entire purchase decision may rest on customer experience
This is a business nightmare. All the stages in the pipeline may go smoothly— from the acquisition of the lead and to the first contact with the sales team— but a little inconvenience or, for example, a lack of integration of payment solutions on your website can make a customer decide not to push through with the purchase.
A customer’s entire purchase decision may rest on the entire experience, which is why it’s crucial in the digital age.
5. Because customers may become brand advocates due to quality experience
But when a customer’s experience is smooth, it may be the first thing that comes into their mind when hearing about your brand.
It may lead to loyalty. And loyalty can make customers become brand advocates— recommending your brand to others whenever a need arises.
How CRM Helps Improve Customer Experience
A CRM can let companies track millions of consumers and address gaps in service instantaneously. They also make the communication process between the customer and the business smoother and more efficient.
With a CRM, busineses can provide customer feedback loops, quickly interact with customers at each stage of the pipeline and discover bottlenecks and key issues along the customer journey.
Along the way, they can discover the customer’s state of mind at each touch point, develop a better understanding of each customer’s needs and expectations, and drive improvements to deliver the best customer experience.
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Digital ecosystems are a set of tools that software providers offer to businesses. These sets of tools can communicate with each other and can be accessed from a single interface. This lets users perform tasks fast and without having to switch platforms.
As digitalization continues to grow in the business world, digital ecosystems are quickly reshaping the way businesses work.
From capturing leads to closing deals, businesses that work with software providers have proven to have an edge over those that rely on traditional work processes. They have been seen as fast, reliable, and can give better services than companies that refuse to adopt technology.
In fact, companies that orchestrated digitally connected ecosystems were reported to have a revenue growth approximately 27% higher than the average for their industries. Their profit margins were also 20% above the average for their industries.
Redefining the US Health Industry
In the US, the adoption of digital health tech by companies like Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson resulted in the rapid discovery of drugs to combat new COVID-19 strains (using artificial intelligence). Moreover, the positive consumer response to digital ecosystems has led companies to adopt them fast.
In August 2020, telehealth adoption rates by American adults increased to 36% (from the pre-pandemic rate of 11%). This indicates the willingness of the consumer market to engage businesses through their online channels as these benefit them too.
Online channels such as telehealth are highly accessible and safe— unlike going to clinics or hospitals for a physical examination, especially when their illness doesn’t require serious medical attention.
There are also factors that fuel the adoption of digital ecosystems in the healthcare industry such as lower costs, accessibility for customers, and the renewed focus on positive patient outcomes.
Transforming the Consumer Goods Sector
Some companies make decisions based on estimates. Others on data. And those that lean towards the latter often see themselves in favorable positions.
One of these companies is The Honest Company, a consumer goods company that sells beauty and baby products. It’s a company founded by actress Jessica Alba and was valued at nearly $1 billion as of October 2017. And when it comes to company growth, to Alba, it’s all about data.
“I love facts and data,” Alba told People (magazine). “So whenever there’s a naysayer with a laundry list of why everything shouldn’t happen, I love asking questions. ‘Oh really? Why couldn’t this work?’ And then you collect all the data that you need to come in and hit them over the head with it.”
Data has been essential in pivoting companies for growth, especially when the market is unstable and consumer behavior is unpredictable.
What digital ecosystems do is allow businesses to streamline the collection of data about their customers. This lets them spot consumer trends and changes in purchasing habits.
When companies are vigilant enough, they can reshape their business model to take advantage of new opportunities, as well as mitigate the risks emerging from an evolving market.
Empowering startups and small businesses
Successful startups are usually from humble beginnings. With enough determination and luck, many have grown into becoming unicorns that they are today.
But some companies don’t just rely on themselves nor on the vicissitudes of the market. They rely on the old adage “the customer is always right,” that they always make sure to collect customer feedback whenever they can.
Style Theory, a Singapore-based fashion rental subscription platform, has now grown into a multimillion-dollar business because of a not-so-hidden secret— building a minimum viable product (MVP) first, testing, and iterating quickly in response to customer feedback.
The co-founders of Style Theory, Chris Halim and Raena Lim. Photo: CNBC
“The best way to launch anything is always do it simple with minimal scope, get it to market asap, then get customers’ feedback,” said co-founder Raena Lim.
“Based on customers’ feedback, you can then iterate and make it better. I think that’s a much better way to build something that customers will love,” she continued.
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The word “customer-centric” is thrown around in a lot of boardrooms. But what does it mean to be customer-centric? And will it pay off?
What Is Customer-Centric?
Customer-centric is a strategy that involves creating the best experience for the customer for a meaningful, long-term business relationship. In this strategy, the customer is at the core of the business’s decisions and operations.
Providing a positive customer experience helps the business achieve customer satisfaction. Once the customer is satisfied, the chance for a repeat purchase is high. This behavior, when repeated, builds customer loyalty and drives sales results.
Overall, being customer-centric is necessary for companies especially when the business environment is competitive. It helps them distinguish themselves from the other brands. It also ensures long-term business success.
What you should know:
Customer-centric is a strategy focused on enhancing customer experience.
It helps businesses set themselves apart from the competition, drive down business costs, build customer loyalty, reduce customer churn, and improve overall sales.
Using technology is necessary to implement a customer-centric approach. It helps businesses run smoother workflows. It facilitates faster information exchange. And it helps businesses generate insights faster.
Benefits Of Being Customer-Centric
Being customer-centric has multiple benefits to businesses. Here are a few:
Lower business costs
For businesses to drive sales, they must acquire new customers through lead generation tactics. But these tend to be costly. Spending on ads to gain a wider audience reach, giving discounts, or other promotional activities, to name a few examples, are expensive to run.
Compared to having existing customers make repeat purchases to gain sales, lead acquisition tends to drive costs higher. This need to acquire new leads is eliminated when the business successfully runs on customers making repeat purchases.
Reduces customer churn
When customers are dissatisfied with a business, they tend to leave the business and choose the competition. This is wasted sales potential and is often measured by the rate of customer churn. Reducing customer churn improves sales performance, which, in effect, improves profitability.
When a business focuses on the customer experience, it ensures that the customer is satisfied with the service from the start of their journey towards the end of the sales process. This reduces the chances of customers churning.
Builds customer loyalty
Aside from reducing customer churn, being customer-centric ensures that customers get to stay, make future purchases, and recommend your products and services to others.
Customer loyalty helps the business gain a wider reach through recommendations and referrals. For example, when a customer is satisfied with your product or service, they tend to introduce your brand to others on occasions when a need arises.
How to Be Customer-Centric
One of the popular ways to be customer-centric is to use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. The software is designed to help businesses get to know their customers more, gain data and information, and craft a workflow that enhances their services.
CRMs are known to help businesses gather information about their potential and existing customers. They do this by using landing pages, for example, to prompt website visitors to fill out a form and get their contact information.
Or by providing feedback loop mechanisms that help customers smoothly provide feedback at strategic points of the sales process (e.g. when closing a deal or after the customer makes a purchase).
They can also help businesses tailor their content and send content via email automatically, based on a schedule. This is important especially when the business runs a drip email marketing strategy.
Learn more about drip email marketing here:
Customer-centric Through Tech
Learn more about using tech to implement a customer-centric strategy. Get started here.
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Check out how digital ecosystems can boost your company performance by getting started here.
A successful online business does not settle with closing a sale. It goes beyond— it makes customers fall in love with the business.
Customer experience (CX) is the top priority for many business professionals. The reason is simple: a good customer experience can help reduce churn and increase sales revenues. According to a report, 81% of companies that provide better customer experience were found to perform better than their competitors.
More than that, customers are also willing to pay higher prices for better service. In fact, research noted that 86% of customers indicate their willingness to pay more in exchange for better experiences.
So let’s cut to the chase. How can companies deliver an experience that customers would enjoy? Here are 6 ways for you to take note of.
Six Ways To Provide Better Customer Experience
Let’s take a look at strategies that help create a great customer experience strategy. These are found to help improve customer satisfaction, reduce customer churn, and increase profits.
1. Create a goal
The first step that you should take in providing a better customer experience is to have a goal centered on, well, the customer experience.
Have a vision and provide a set of statements that allow you to materialize that vision. These will be your guiding principles that will help shape your acts and decisions that would ultimately result in providing a better customer experience.
2. Understand your customers better
It’s hard to provide a better customer experience without understanding your customers first. To do this, gather data from them that reflects their needs, interests, and preferences.
And it’s not just enough to collect feedback. Make sure that their feedback is authentic. And you can do this by strategically placing a feedback loop mechanism at certain points of the buying process.
For example, allowing customers to provide feedback at the end of the purchase allows you to gauge their satisfaction with their purchase. You can also reward this behavior by providing incentives after every feedback given.
You can also understand your customers— even from the start— by allowing them to fill out forms in exchange for lead magnets.
Learn more about customer profiling here:
3. Do it from the start
As mentioned above, gathering data can be done all throughout the buying process. And it includes the start of the buying process— when customers are still considered as leads.
Map the customer journey and experience— what do leads feel at the starting point of your engagement? What pushes them to take the next step? What generates and sustains interest? And what makes them stay as loyal customers?
Answering these questions through the lens of the customer (or the lead) allows you to correct certain workflows that do not provide an impact during the journey. It should also be highlighted that certain interactions need to be quick before customers lose interest.
Learn more about implementing quick, automated workflows here:
4. Empathize
They say that the best customer experiences are achieved when businesses create an emotional connection with customers. Emotions shape the attitudes that drive decisions— that’s why in mapping customer journeys, what customers feel should be taken into account.
When customers are engaged emotionally, they’re found to be more likely to recommend your business to others, repurchase, and even be less price-sensitive than those that weren’t emotionally engaged.
5. Manage customer expectations
To reduce customer churn, managing customer expectations should be done all throughout the customer journey. Many negative experiences are a result of unmet expectations, so managing expectations help shape the desired customer experience.
Right from that start, it’s suggested to determine what the customer expects from the company. Ask open-ended questions and check what the customer perceives from your business.
Questions like “what kind of results do you expect to achieve at the end of the day?” or “what’s your timeframe?” help businesses address expectations right from the start.
6. Assess and evaluate
At the end of the day, it’s all about data. Did your customer experience strategy produce results that you expect? Were they unsatisfactory? And to answer these questions, you’ll need to have data about your performances.
Using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software that generates data and insights in real-time helps you gain a better understanding of the customer experience. It also helps you make data-driven decisions so that, at the end of the day, you won’t be second-guessing what to do next to improve your customer experience strategy.
Improve Customer Experience Through Tech
Learn more about how a system can help you gather data and generate insights in real-time. Get started here.
Curious how digital ecosystems can help improve your business?
Check out how digital ecosystems can boost your company performance by getting started here.
