Connect with Your Customer in a Whole New Way

Like many a tagline from Salesforce, Connect with your customer in a whole new way is both inspirational and profitable. But from a practical point of view, how could you tell if you actually were? Here are seven capabilities to apply to your current operations to see how well they stack up in this new digitally enabled, services oriented world.

1. Detect and capture the stream of digital signals emanating from your prospects and customers. You can’t play the game if you can’t see the ball. Even if you do not have the power analytics to take advantage of these signals right away, you still should be collecting them. In the short term you may have to run them through someone else’s organization, but at least you’ll be able to know what is actually going on.
2. Proactively engage customers and prospects based on algorithmic prompting. In an age of digital cacophony, you can’t expect people to have the patience or the processing power to extract the signal from the noise. You have to use software to do that. Initially its recommendations will be spotty at best, but over time they will get better and better. That is, they will if you start now.
3. Respond to explicit communications rapidly and accurately. This is where omni-channel really matters—not in your outbound attempts to promote yourself but in your inbound ability to react appropriately to a direct request. It may come to your call center, to a website, via a text message, in an email: no matter. You have to catch it and route it as smoothly as a shortstop initiating a double play.
4. Enable self-service by automating your high-volume service transactions. Nothing signals your lack of commitment to customer experience more than forcing them to wait in queue to get services from a human being that could have been done by themselves on their own time. In an era of cloud computing and ubiquitous mobile devices, there is no excuse for not using software to manage the routine—it is faster, cheaper, and way more accurate. Failure to automate is tantamount to not giving a damn.
5. Focus your ecosystem of partners on addressing high-value needs. Partners need to make higher margins and customers need help on their toughest problems. It ought to be a marriage made in heaven. But companies get attached to their existing lines of service—the stuff they know how to do really well, the stuff that used to add value but not as much anymore. They are losing their connection to the customer, and you need to get them back on the path to adding real value.
6. Use on-line communities to engage your customers in answering FAQs from other customers. One of the great joys of the Internet is the discovery that people actually like helping each other out. There are volunteer armies everywhere, waiting to be enlisted to support something they personally find engaging and fulfilling. Online communities are a wonderful vehicle for this, surfacing and amplifying the most helpful voices, allowing new arrivals to experience their own welcome wagon.
7. Empower your customer-facing employees by giving them mobile access to CRM feeds. Companies live or die by how well they perform during their moments of engagement. Success depends on giving the people who represent you in these moments the best support you possibly can. These are the same people you expect to keep your CRM data up to date. How about you share it with them when they need it?
   

How well is your company doing against these seven tests? That’s a good topic of conversation for your next executive staff meeting. Just don’t be surprised if the answers are not rosy. Digital systems don’t grow on trees. If you don’t fund them, you don’t get them.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

_________________________________________________________________________

Geoffrey Moore | Zone to Win | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube