Branding the Customer ExperienceRally all customer-facing operations to one, enterprise-serving goal to realize the full value of customers
By Mark Smith Continued from Page 1 IDENTIFY, INTERACT, INFLUENCECIM depends on a new technology architecture that supports the three steps of CIM: identifying, interacting with, and influencing customers. (See Figure 1.) Identify customers. The first step is to identify and understand customers along with their past and predicted behavior. This step starts with building and maintaining a customer information hub that stores all relevant historical activities along with any external historical or near-realtime information (such as geo-demographic or weather data). This hub will be the foundation for a CIM system that leverages data warehouse architectures for operational and decisional requirements. To understand customers, you need to create value models of customer behavior and related information. Value models segment customers based on statistical variables. (See Figure 2.) These models can form a basis for predictive models that yield probabilities of future customer behavior. Iteration of this modeling leads to improved determination of how to conduct successful personalized customer interactions. Interact with customers. The second step is to design, deploy, and measure interaction campaigns through all channels and touchpoints. These campaigns are centrally managed and aligned to any customer or segment that enables a company to meet its overall CRM strategy. This system provides a fine level of control and lets you deploy interaction campaigns within a value model, customized to each segment's specific customer life cycle (See Figure 3.) Uniquely addressing customers at every step of the life cycle will optimize each interaction. To gain this fine level of control, interaction campaigns will have to be deployed from a central location into operational systems where the campaign is electronically placed for the customer or responsible employee. The key aspect of designing interaction campaigns resides in the design process, where you want to be able to automate or streamline the inbound interactions of the customer resulting from the outbound campaign. Consider, for example, an email interaction campaign that communicates an online promotional offer to customers who shop through direct retail outlets or telephone. The campaign would embed a link to the electronic store with customer profile information so that it places the customer into a shopping cart ready to finalize the transaction. This scenario exemplifies influencing customer behavior to align with enterprise goals. The relevant enterprise goals are to drive down operational costs while maintaining customer relationships. Online purchases further these goals by carrying a lower cost of sales and easing the collection of email addresses and the securing of permission to send promotions to them. Influence customers. The third step is to optimize interactions across all channels and touchpoints. This is done through generating, personalizing, and embedding interaction campaigns within customer-facing software systems. This enables a business to influence customer behavior with outbound interaction campaigns or through any inbound interactions. Customers should be acknowledged as customers, and every interaction should recognize the customer consistently. Dynamically generated, personalized interactions can range from product or price content at an electronic store to a screen inside of a call-center application. The operational system accesses the content through the interaction server, which is responsible for accessing the customer profile and interaction campaign information. HARVEST THE VALUEIt is becoming essential to harvest the full value of customer relationships to the organization by optimizing customer interactions. The benefits are higher cost efficiencies, revenue opportunities, and the CRM grail: customer relationships that are sustainable and mutually beneficial. The way you treat customers should be based on their value, and organizations will need to build a consistent approach to identifying, interacting with, and influencing customers through any channel or touchpoint. CIM is a new CRM practice and software implementation that will evolve over the next 10 years to effectively optimize customer relationships. Leveraging this new practice and adopting the three steps I outlined will help your organization understand its customers, optimizing every interaction in order to influence them. Meeting customer expectations will require organizations to significantly invest in new technologies that can deliver on the promise of CIM. The shift to efficiently "escorting" customers through the customer life cycle process will become common practice, and companies need to adapt to this change by evolving their existing CRM infrastructure. Mark Smith [mark.smith@fullcirclestrategies.com] is president and founder of Full Circle Strategies and an industry analyst in the applied use of information through leveraging analytics, business intelligence, and performance management. RESOURCES Blue Martini Software Inc.: www.bluemartini.com Broadbase/Kana: www.broadbase.com E.piphany Inc.: www.epiphany.com Marketswitch Corp.: www.marketswitch.com Oracle: www.oracle.com PeopleSoft Inc.: www.peoplesoft.com SAS Institute Inc.: www.sas.com Siebel Systems Inc.: www.siebel.com Unica Corp.: www.unica-usa.com
|
 |
Most Popular This Week
IE Weekly Newsletter
Subscribe to the newsletter
| |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
