Megatrend #1: Customers Expect Multichannel, PREFERENCE-DRIVEN Communications

The Myth: Many marketers act as if the introduction of social and digital media will suddenly "make it all better" and reverse declining response rates and customer disengagement.

The Reality: Unless we match our media and messages with the customer’s individual preferences regarding what information is relevant, and what channels should deliver those messages, all our social and digital media marketing will accomplish is add one more way to achieve more multimedia irritation!

This is one of several major findings based on Voice of Customer Relationship Research from companies such as Microsoft, NBC Universal, IBM, and MSC Industrial Direct. Other findings include:

The poor economy and empowerment of the web have significantly increased buyer expectations of relevance and value. The “center of power” has forever shifted from the marketer to the consumer. Marketers who succeed will rely less on “Spray and Pray” blasts and more on engagement and conversation, on the customer's terms.

Recent VOC learnings have identified four critical consumer megatrends to which marketers must rapidly adapt. We will discuss trends 2-4 in upcoming blogs.

Megatrend 1: Consumers, (BtoB and BtoC), are shifting from being passive recipients of marketing messages to creating and managing their own networks of multichannel, value-added sources.

The Challenge: How do you gain entry into their online and off-line worlds?

The answer is based on relevance and preference-based opt-in relationships. Once consumers have opted into a relationship and self-profiled, and once they experience messaging relevance, they often develop surprising levels of interest in receiving or accessing deeper levels of information ... via multiple channels!

Becoming one of those trusted multichannel sources is now a critical priority.

Jamie Nordstrom, President of Nordstrom Direct, notes that the store is carefully cultivating “people who shop at Nordstrom in more than one way, since multichannel shoppers spend four times, on average, what a one-source shopper spends.”

Try This:

Emphasize the value of opting in to a relationship with your company, via all media and channels.

Then personalize the communications per individual opt-in preferences, so the value and relevance is obvious. This will encourage deeper levels of on-going self-profiling.

What Don't You Know About Customer Expectations Between Purchases?

Most marketers don’t know enough about what goes on with their customers during the periods of silence between purchases.

This is because information about customers is often limited to the transactional: Did they buy, and if so what...or, no, they did not buy.

This lack of customer insight becomes even more dangerous when the re-purchase or renewal periods span long periods of time, say one to two years.

How can you provide useful, relevant information during those long intervals of silence between purchases…information that helps you create deeper engagement with customers and achieve competitive differentiation?

The only way is to develop a better understanding of your customer’s true needs. And the only accurate way to do that is to ask them.

The current cover story of Target Marketing magazine features a detailed case study of how HMS National increased renewal rates by over 20%, by implementing “voice of the customer” driven strategies that asked customers directly for greater insight regarding their needs and expectations.

Here are some highlights from the article:

All marketers think they know what their customers want. How many of them are wrong? How many lose sales because they're not hearing the "voice of the customer"? Can you be sure your customers are satisfied with the experience you think they want?

Tasked with raising renewal rates on home warranties, Doug Stein, president of HMS National, was faced with those questions. He turned to a process of in-depth customer interviews, called "voice-of-the-customer" research, for answers. The strategies and tactics HMS drew from that research measurably increased customer satisfaction, lifted renewal rates 20 percent across the board—75 percent in some segments—and helped the company chart a new course with the customer as its "North Star."

To read more click here.

Try This:

Ask yourself how much you could deepen customer engagement and revenue if you had direct “voice of customer” insight into your customer’s needs during those long silences between purchases.

In addition to in-depth voice of customer research, consider building one simple question into every customer or prospect related contact, across all media.

The question should be asked of prospects, purchasers, and customers with product or service issues.

The question might go something like this:

Can you please tell us your primary interests and needs related to our product or service, so we can provide you with relevant and useful information? (If it's not relevant to your needs, we won't send it to you.)

Capture the responses to this question in a contact management system and use the data to drive increasingly relevant and targeted communications which your customers and prospects will perceive as value based, not sales focused.

"Close" and "Win" Are Deadly Terms

The terms “Close” or “Win” are age-old Marketing and Sales terms for a new sale. They are also key performance metrics. They are also deadly, because they move our organizations in precisely the wrong direction when it comes to dealing with customers.

We need to move beyond just hunting for “closes," “kills," “scores,” and so on, as these terms perpetuate the traditional Acquisition focus of Marketing and Sales.

What happens as a result of this “hunting” orientation? Per our Voice of Customer research, this is how customers of many Fortune company clients feel:

“The fastest way to be forgotten is to buy from you.” “Relationship? You guys are about ‘buy and die’!” “We buy. You disappear without a trace. Oh, except for the monthly bills.”

The combination of a tough economy and Internet-empowered customers requires that companies focus on Retention and create deeper customer engagement. The “Close” should be re-conceived as the beginning of a relationship, where the company has earned a sale and now has the opportunity to provide increasingly greater value as it better understands the needs of that customer.

Recently, I had a conversation with Matthew Schwartz, Editor of ZoomInfo and “Follow the Lead”, about this issue. Here is a snippet of the conversation:

“...the ‘close’ should be looked upon as the beginning of a relationship, not an end …This is as opposed to a life-time value oriented point of view, which says I have earned the right to drill deep into problem-solving, needs-assessment for the customer, which will make me a much more valuable resource and will drive, incrementally, significantly more revenue.” To read more, click here.

To change our view of customers, to shift from short term “Wins” to long term relationships, we have to recognize that people are “coin operated.” Therefore, unless compensation plans for Marketing and Sales are changed, people’s behavior will not change. As a mentor of mine once said, “Pay them, and the heart will follow!” I’m conducting an ExecSense webinar on November 4th at 12 EST, titled: “The Best Tips & Techniques for Voice of the Customer Marketing for 2011: Guaranteed Ways to Increase Sales 20% to 30% Using Relationship Marketing Best Practices” Hope you can attend!

Try This:

What would happen in your company if Marketing and Sales had common metrics?

What if a portion of compensation for both groups was driven by factors such as: customer lifetime value, cross-sales, up-sales, and customer satisfaction?

Wouldn’t that drive deeper engagement and stronger relationships?

FYI, unrelated to the specific story above, but relevant and deeply gratifying, last week NPR.org highlighted an excerpt from our new book, “Voice-of-the-Customer Marketing”, as a blog post by 800 CEO Read. To see the story, click here.