This is a guest post from Robin Collyer, Marketing and Decisioning specialist, Pegasystems

We are currently in a new age of Customer Experience, where customers’ expectations are continually rising. They expect businesses to anticipate their needs over multiple channels, whether online, in store, or in an app – putting new demands on today’s CRM systems. The industry now needs to support end-to-end contextual engagement with customers, from the initial marketing touch through sales, onboarding, delivery and throughout the growth of the customer relationship.

Taking all of this into consideration, it’s time for organisations to align their CRM delivery to meet today’s customer and business demands. It may be a high aim for businesses to strive for, but there are a few useful tips on next-level CRM strategies that will shape the future of customer engagement:

Empathy with the customer

The simplest hack you can apply to customer engagement is to ensure you have empathy at the forefront of your engagements. Too often in marketing, professionals talk about ‘doing marketing’ to their customer base and forget what it feels like to actually be a consumer or a customer on the receiving end of that experience.

Above all else, it’s important to remember that we’re all human beyond our roles within CRM. So before looking at how you can revolutionise your marketing strategy, try putting yourself in your customer’s shoes and consider how you would want to be treated in the same situation.

Less marketing, more context

Traditionally, marketers have planned their approach to customers with military precision, as this was the only option available to them. Every step in a campaign needed to be planned out and enacted towards segments of customers or ‘targets’. However, with the real time context that’s available to today’s marketer, it’s becoming increasingly important to offer much more relevant, timely, and coherent communications to each individual customer.

Marketers no longer need to guess what the best communication is going to be for a particular customer in advance. They can let the customer’s context build a personal journey from a bank of strategies and propositions that embody the brand’s values and objectives. Marketers now have the information available to them to make sure that the engagement is taking account of the context now, in real time, creating decision strategies that leverage predictive and adaptive models to ensure the customer experience aligns with the values of the brand. Ultimately, this customer engagement becomes much less about ‘doing marketing’, and more about balancing the business’ objectives and the customer’s needs at every moment of truth.

From product centric to customer centric

Organisations are naturally product centric. As marketers, we are well aware of Kotler’s 4Ps but it’s often the product that preoccupies us most. A product teams’ main focus is on how they are going to get a product to market and how they are going to promote their message above other products. Unsurprisingly, the teams become preoccupied with selling as much of a particular product as possible, as opposed to considering a customer’s value to their business over time.

A simple hack to remember is that it is customers, not products and services, that drive revenue. You might raise revenue from a product-push in the short-term but it is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) that matters in the long-term.

Moving away from channel centricity

In parallel to the above, organisations also need to move away from a channel centric mindset. Looking back at the race for organisations to establish themselves online, we can see how this threatened to turn a company’s traditional business and web business into almost completely separate operations. As other channels like mobile and social came along there was another rush for organisations to be present in those channels, forgetting that the customer is constant across all of them. Naturally, the characteristics of any one channel need to be leveraged, but the experience must be a coherent one for your customers.

Today’s businesses need to be able to unify the customer’s experience across all of their products, and do so consistently across the different channels, both inbound and outbound. Customers must also be able to move their conversations from one channel to another without having to start again. Just think of your own experiences, and use that as a guidepost.

Communication vs Medium

Throughout the customer experience, a business should not only be thinking ‘what is the next communication’ but also ‘what is the best medium for that message?’ This is not just about what’s right for your customers, as businesses will always have certain constraints. The lesson here is recognising that you can optimise the message and the medium, for the customer and your business.

Balance customer’s next best action with your own next best action

The customer experience is a real time conversation, where the customer is continuously thinking about what their next step will be. As a business, you need to be able to balance the customer’s next best action with your own next best action, taking into account everything that’s going on. Sometimes, it may mean that doing nothing is the next best action.

With this in mind, the customer experience becomes the whole organisation’s responsibility, not just one particular channel or product team. The new age of customer experience demands complete cultural understanding across the organisation, which includes a growing list of customer-centric roles and responsibilities.

These six elements will steer you in the right direction, but ultimately it’s your own experiences as a customer that will really drive you into the new age of customer experience.

 
This is a guest post from Robin Collyer, Marketing and Decisioning specialist, Pegasystems

Robin is a Marketing and Decisioning Specialist at Pegasystems where he helps some of the world’s largest companies appreciate and adopt the benefits of contextual customer engagement, conversational marketing and next best action. An experienced senior sales and marketing executive, Robin has for the last 20 years led sales and marketing teams at Concrete Media, Aprimo, smartFOCUS and Xerox.  In a world that is increasingly omni-channel Robin is passionate about working with marketers in a range of verticals and geographies, championing customer-centric thinking to drive revenue growth, revenue protection and improved customer satisfaction. The impact of Robin’s work has resulted in organisations adding hundreds of millions of dollars to their bottom lines. You can connect with Robin on Twitter @RobinCollyer.

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