To win and retain customers and survive in today’s competitive landscape, companies have moved beyond merely relying on product excellence, to offering an overall superior customer experience. Today, it’s not only about how good a product is, but also about how companies deliver the experience. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, in their seminar book, Return on Customer (2005), declared the customer experience to be the single most important factor for business success. Moreover, according to the McKinsey study on ‘consumer decision-making’, 40% of customers change their mind at the moment of purchase, thus every small aspect of the overall experience contributes to tipping the scale of consumer preference. Despite sound successful product development, production and marketing, with mediocre customer experience, any organization’s efforts will be lost in today’s consumer driven market place.
What if organizations could free themselves from managing the technology required to deliver a superior customer experience and focus on delivering the experience itself? Integrated and managed ICT solutions could help companies deliver better customer experiences, by freeing them up to focus on the experience rather than the delivery. While cloud based Software as a Service (SaaS) marketing communication tools handle the technical challenges, companies can focus on creating an enhanced, relevant and targeted customer experiences. This is made possible through the level of personalization and engagement that SaaS offerings can bring to companies to enhance the way they interact with their customers.
Despite its simplicity in building and maintaining the infrastructure, SaaS also enables companies to unlock the possibilities of creating customer experiences in many ways. For example, instead of using broadcast messages to retain existing customers, companies can send personalized message to their customers based on their behaviour and preferences: the right message through the right channel, at the right time and even at the right place. Cloud marketing solutions also enable two way communications, creating a conversation, rather than a dialogue with customers, which increase relevance and therefore, engagement with the customer, on a rational as well emotional level.
Both Engagement and personalization become even more important, with markets dominated by the ‘millennials’. Based on study by Forbes, in America alone, there are 80 million ‘millennials’ which represent a fourth of the entire population, with a collective USD $200 billion annual buying power. While in Indonesia, Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS) reports that there are also around 80 million millennials which represent a third of national population. It is a big chunk of the potential market considering most of the millennial are already in ‘productive’ age brackets and make personal decisions on purchases.
Forbes also revealed in their study of 1,300 millennials, which only 1% is influenced by advertising and 33% rely on online (blog and social media) reviews before making a purchase decision. Therefore, digital touch points like emails, SMS, in-store advertising, digital billboard, location-based advertising and social media platforms, play a major role in ensuring that customers feel that they have access to a company or brand, throughout the purchasing lifecycle.
In today’s market, driven by digitally-savvy millennials, customer experience is no longer the responsibility of just the salespeople in the bricks and mortar store. A targeted, engaging and personalized digital marketing approach delivered through a cloud marketing (SaaS) platform that enhances the customer experience, will contribute to business success, customer growth and ultimately business sustainability.