Posted by S Swaminathan on Mon, May 17, 2010
With digital marketing taking centrestage, it time to reassess and evaluate age-old marketing techniques and adapt them to new digital world. Here's how Domino's Pizza is doing it.
Domino's Pizza is using the persuasive power of socially connected consumers who have huge influence over each other; the key idea here is how they harness that power and put it to work for thier brand—with rewards, of course, for the consumers in question.
Domino's Pizza has developed a widget that consumers can place on their social networking profile, blog or other online presence, which their friends can then click on in order to order a pizza. For every order, they get 0.5 percent of the sale.
Read more here
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Fri, May 08, 2009
The complaining customer - we just can’t stand them! Well, most of us can’t stand them. The reality is that business organizations should love them. Shep Hyken comments that "A complaining customer tells you where you can improve. They actually come forward and show us where we make mistakes. But, most of the time, people hate to hear the complaints. First, a few facts you should know about people who complain. Most of the time, when people have a complaint, they complain to everyone else rather than the person or people who caused the complaint. If you resolve your customers’ complaints, you will keep them most of the time. But first you have to know there is a complaint. So, how can we find those complainers? Well, most likely customers won’t tell us, so, we have to ask them. It is that simple. Call them up or ask them in person. Actively solicit feedback to find out what they are thinking."
And most criticaly use Customer behaviour data to spot Customer service failures as they occur. Customers are constantly leaving behind a data footprint of "failed brand promises". Direct data analytics to spot incidents of customer promises "not met". The crux of " Analytical marketing" is using data to drive an improved customer experience. Imagine if a bank were to call you up and say " I am sorry sir ,we are one day behind schedule on your cheque book request,please accept our apologies and your cheque book will be with you tomorrow morning". Or better still build predictive models to find customers where "service levels are likely to slip" and then proactively monitor that customer's transactions to create a moment of delight.
And when you find a problem or complaint, resolve it on the spot. No company is perfect. So find out what those imperfections might be. And, when you hear about a problem, fix it. And make sure you give that customer a reason to come back so you can do it right the next time. Take that moment of misery and turn it into a MOMENT OF MAGIC.See what Shep Hyken has to say about ‘The Complaining Customer’http://www.hyken.com/Article_11.html
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Sun, Apr 26, 2009
Airmiles, the rewards program owned by British Airways, is launching a new company devoted to managing white label loyalty programs for other businesses.
It is interesting to see how the core proposition of a Loyalty program,which is to enable "profitable growth from loyal customers" can get quickly re directed to an entirely new business model. Why would a business transfer its core strategic diffrentiator on a platform and make it available to others?
The Mileage Company, which went public this week, will run the existing Airmiles program and British Airways' frequent flier program, BA Miles. Andrew Swaffield, managing director of The Mileage Company feels that since the recession has really started to bite around the world, loyalty points are more valuable to customers, and loyalty schemes are more valuable to businesses who are looking for ways of keeping customers loyal and ensuring they don't lose them to the competition.
The Mileage Company will use some major lessons gleaned from 20 years in the business to drive strategy for its new clients. It will stick to the tenets that successful reward schemes must be simple and consistent, with rewards that are attainable. The Mileage Company will use its particular expertise in the travel arena to woo new clients from that industry. Retailers and service providers also have shown interest in working with the company, Swaffield said, particularly those with higher-income customers. Airmiles' recent success could help encourage new clients to climb aboard with The Mileage Company.
See what Lauren Bell has to say about ‘Airmiles to help others manage loyalty programs'.
http://www.dmnews.com/Airmiles-to-help-others-manage-loyalty-programs/article/130696/
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Sat, Apr 18, 2009
Each time a customer makes contact with an organization through any channel, it is an opportunity to build the relationship and also revenue!In fact even a customer complaint call is actually a gold mine,because very few customers actually care enough for the brand to actually complain! In growth countries like India ,the added opportunity is to use the inbound calls as vehicles for customer education leading to better onboarding of customers.
There are monumental gains to be realized when companies prepare themselves to engage with customers who are calling in. When consumers contact an organization, whether a communications firm, financial institution, retailer or otherwise, that organization has already incurred a cost, simply by answering the phone or putting up a Web site. The challenge is how to more effectively convert those interactions into value opportunities for the consumer and the brand alike.
In order to do this, marketers need to change their perspective and let the customer history, marketplace and business objective drive the engagement at an individual level. Aligning key elements of the customer engagement model, such as channel, cycle, content, cost and competition, as well as embedding advanced analytics into the offer catalog, facilitates personalized one-on-one communication. With an integrated process, high-volume consumer brands can increase conversion rates, identify qualified leads, improve retention and increase satisfaction levels by engaging consumers in targeted conversations.
See what Diane Lucero has to say about ‘Optimizing customer engagement'.
http://www.dmnews.com/Optimizing-customer-engagement/article/127545/
Posted by S Swaminathan on Sun, Nov 30, 2008
Data services are freeing corporate data from the silos, allowing for its use on demand while providing security to the data's custodians. The demand for more data more quickly is driving IT departments to rethink their entire systems architectures.
At Cequity, we have been helping clients work within the constraints of multiple -source systems while making data accessible for marketing when they need it. Our philosophy has been to make data more flexible and easy to access so that enterprises can take advantage of huge amounts of data that they accumulate today.
Dana Gardner writes on how important it is to get rid of data silos for better customer management:
In the past, data was structured, secure and tightly controlled. The bad news is that the data was limited by the firewall of personnel, technologies and process rigidity. Today, however, the demand is for just-in-time and inclusive data, moving away from a monolithic data system mentality to multiple sources of data that provide real-time inferences on consumers, activities, events, and transactions.
The move is in the ownership of data value to the very people who really need it, who help define its analysis, and who can best use it for business and consumption advantage. Analysis and productivity values rule the future of data as services. The [new] model is of keeping the data where it belongs and yet making it available to the rest of the world. Our data is trapped in these silos, where each department owns the data and there is a manual paper process to request a report.
According to Brad Svee, "Requesting a customer report takes a long time, and what we have been able to do is try to expose that data through Web services using mashup-type UI (user interface) technology and data services to keep the data in the place that it belongs, without having a flat file flying between FTP servers, as you talked about, and start to show people data that they haven't seen before in an instant, consumable way."
Read more on how to use your data for better customer management
Posted by S Swaminathan on Sat, Nov 29, 2008
We have always seen that companies struggle to manage the leads that they generate. Either they are not followed-up effectively or there is a conflict of what is defined as a hot/warm lead by sales and marketing or there is no defined process of managing unconverted leads to extract more value out of the marketing investments made.
Tim Wilson has an interesting perspective on how better customer management can lead to significant increase in return on marketing investment:
Old school lead-generating efforts often fail because Marketing and Sales initiatives are dependent on each other but disconnected. The image often associated with this relationship is a funnel. At the top of the funnel is Marketing, which finds and lures leads that are then pushed down to the lower portion of the funnel, which is Sales.
This funnel image is fundamentally flawed because it suggests a linear process. Rather, to succeed, the process must be ongoing and circular, like cogs that continue to rotate and engage each other. One cog is Marketing (tactics), and this must be in alignment with a Sales cog (engagement), both of which are driven by a third cog: the continuous process of lead marketing optimization.
Complaints from the Sales department often occur because Marketing prematurely hands over leads to Sales, which creates efficiency problems. First, some of the information that needs to be gathered could have been gathered automatically through a Marketing dialogue. Second, the lack of that information results in lead handoffs that have little or no near-term potential. Over time, these inefficiencies cause Sales representatives to lose trust in the value the Marketing department is providing. In the worst case, it results in the salesperson starting to cold call himself, which makes the level of inefficiency even greater. According to Anders Grondstedt:
"Non customer centric thinking organizations are organized to efficiently produce and distribute goods. They relegate customer management and brand building to marketing and communication departments and agencies that sequester themselves in separate offices, isolated both from each other and from the customer, churning out advertising and other communications material to an information overloaded world. They make a virtue of outspending and outshouting the competition. Run more ads. Maximize the numbers of impressions. Get more ‘ink.' They are frittering away millions of dollars in "marketing."
Read more to learn why successful companies must move towards Customer-Centricity