Keeping “Forever Customers”
Innovations in mobile, social and cloud-based technology are pushing consumer behavior in new ways and prompting organizations to rethink the way they capture, engage and retain customers. Indeed, consumers expect more these days: more service, more integration, and more savvy communications. This makes the job for marketers and brand leaders more difficult, but also more potentially fruitful than ever before. There has never been a better time to reach customers, relate on new and more relevant levels, and engage in ways that can keep customers coming back for life.
In the past, companies communicated with customers in a one-way dialogue: here’s your statement, here’s your bill; with no real thought about the strategy behind the communication. But these days a customer-centric approach to communications is essential, otherwise your customers will simply move on to someone else. Every organization must think about how it will meet the changing expectations of their customers or risk losing their loyalty to the competition.
New Opportunity
Most companies recognize the importance of keeping customers for life, but many are over-focused on new customer acquisition and are missing revenue opportunity with the customers they already have. According to Forbes, 94% of companies feel keeping customers for life is a high priority, nearly half (49%) confess to being unhappy with their current marketing technology’s ability to support those goals.
A Single Customer View
The holy grail of customer lifetime management is the ability to have one view of the customer within the organization. This capability is a top priority, but technical challenges—including a multiplicity of systems, fragmentation of data and the resulting silos—slow progress. On average, organizations use 36 different data-gathering systems and vendors for marketing efforts and a lack of integration among data and teams challenges the delivery of seamless, personalized customer interactions as a result.
A Platform to Boost Engagement
How can companies overcome these hurdles and keep customers for life? Cloud-based customer communications tools from OMI provide a single platform to manage all of your customer communications no matter what form they take. By consolidating communications within one marketing and communications platform, organizations of all sizes and types can truly manage the customer experience and drive deeper levels of customer engagement via transactional, marketing, and social communications. Embracing the changes will not come without challenges, but the right mix of technological tools and thoughtful strategies will lead you to a new generation of success.