The optimism of #Purpose & science of #design in forging #digital customer experiences! Opinions my own!

Don’t worry about breaching the contact policy. Instead emphasize on the relevance of every interaction you have with your customers. Think about it – if your contacts are relevant, your customers will be coming for more.

Tiptoeing around the contact policy framework is a defensive posture, listening to customers and staying relevant – that’s going on the offensive. But relevance is more than that. We have to anticipate customer needs and be timely in our propositions. Timing is almost everything. If I had to chose between a well-timed offer and a precise proposition I’d go for the former. Sure the proposition must still be relevant (good enough..), but timing would take precedence.

Take for example a customer looking to solve his cash flow problems. While a personal loan would be best and logical (to us, the Bank), extending a line of credit may also work. What’s more important is that we presented the proposition in good time, i.e. we anticipated his need. It’s doesn’t merely have to do with the value of our product, it’s also about the correct interactions we have with our customers in all possible cross-channel moments of contact. The broader the spectrum of available interactions under our belt, the better our sense of timing becomes…

To be relevant, look at all contacts with your customers and prospects

There are manned and unmanned/digital channels. Chances are as a company you’ve already made (significant!) investments in contact and opportunity management solutions to empower your front-lines, such as Siebel. Depends on how you look at it, but I’d start with your manned channels – I’d argue it’s the more difficult of the two, but once you have an operating rhythm established, you’re more or less sorted. Digital channels are inherently easier to measure, requiring little or no human intervention. However, ticket sizes for deals closed using manned channels are still several magnitudes larger, generally. Also, it’s the human channels the senior management understands (better). Now to be relevant for customers, direct marketing- is per definition cross-channel and cross departmental; customer value propositions would include product bundles mapped to life-stages and life-cyles.

When monitoring customer behavior, focus only on necessary and relevant information and derive the significance of every interaction. Else it’s rather easy to be inundated with “white noise”, and waste time analyzing what’s not required – at least what’s not required at the moment. Be sensitive to the type of interaction: customers calling in (inbound) to complain about a recently purchased product are especially significant. For example, a sales motivated interaction is now irrelevant since this particular customer is involved in an ongoing debate with our after sales division! These are some very important signals to look out for.

If someone contacts the information service, customer service, or sales for more information about a certain service or product, it’s interesting to know if this person has, for example, already downloaded a paper about the service or product – if we allocated a score, say on a scale of 1-10 for each interaction a customer/prospect generates, we would very quickly be able to prioritize what’s important. Using the same examples, when a customer calls into complain, we assign that interaction a negative score. If we tally the customer’s score over say a week, spanning all his interactions across our channels, what we arrive at is a proxy index for how ready the customer is to accept our latest proposition. We could take this concept further. If our rationale were to sell (which often is the case…) we would have to look out for all the crests (there would be troughs) in this oscillating “customer willingness” index.

Not only does it make the moment of contact more personal – and therefore more relevant –, it also ensures that you don’t have to explain all kinds of things that he or she might already know off – something that annoys the best of us. Start small – tackle the manned channels first – then stitch together data from more channels to make the interaction with customers more personal and informed.

Plan the customer journey accordingly by orchestrating cross-channel interactions. For example, a well designed email (using A/B testing) that when clicked, brings your prospect to your Bank’s website to view a personalized loans offer. This simple 1-2 combo may appear simple, but is founded on some serious marketing smarts: (1) we influence the customer journey and (2) the amount of personalization (relevance) to entice a view then click.