Action # 1: Ensure that Your Customer Service is Excellent

Per our Voice of Customer,(VOC), research findings, customers expect good Customer Service as a minimum competency. The Customer Service you provide has to meet all the criteria we outlined in our recent newsletter summarizing results of our research regarding Customer Service Call Center Experiences.

Action # 2: Shift to True Customer Engagement

Innovative marketers like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and AmieStreet.com have achieved significant results by providing deeper levels of engagement and value for customers. Results are significantly greater than from traditional “Spray and Pray” blasts of email, mail and phone.

The current issue of Direct magazine, (see below) highlights the results Microsoft achieved by providing small business customers with deeper levels of engagement and value.  Top line results:

• Exceptionally high opt-in rates: 40% to 70%+
• Click-through rates up to 75%
• Very positive customer feedback and customer satisfaction scores
• Responsiveness to opt-in driven offers exceeds the control population
• Spending by SB+ members significantly exceeds non-members.

AmieStreet.com is another relationship marketing innovator. This young company is the hottest on-line social networking music company and within the first 90 days of implementing VOC-research driven strategies achieved:

• 16% increase in new customers
• 16% increase in repeat purchases
• 13% increase in on-site sales
• 75% increase in newsletter-driven sales.

Microsoft and AmieStreet.com achieved this magnitude of results by committing to deeper customer engagement through a disciplined 3 step process.

The 3-Step Voice of Customer Relationship Marketing Process^® we developed includes:

Let’s review how you can use the 3-Step process.

Step 1: Voice of Customer Research
This economy has changed decision maker’s priorities; therefore, you need to understand their expectations before risking marketing dollars on outdated assumptions about the marketplace.
VOC learnings based on 88 VOC Research studies for many divisions of  Microsoft, NBC, AmieStreet.com, Bio-Rad Laboratories, Reliant Energy, HP, IBM, and Progressive Hydraulics, Inc. among others…

• Relationships:
• “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 bills.”
• The Web:
• “I don’t just want to transact, I want to connect with your company and your brand.”
• “An easy navigation and commerce process is a minimal competency… you better be at least as good as Amazon.”
• “I am looking for 2 levels of connection: with your company and with others who share my needs and interests.”
• “When you tell me to go to the web for service, especially while I am growing old waiting for a phone rep, what I hear is ‘Go…help yourself.”

• Per McKinsey research, people who participate in an effective online community, return to a site:
• Nine times as often
• Five times as long.

• Communications:
• “E-mail may be the base of your communications with me, but I’m getting too much junk.  If it’s really important, send it to me by mail.”
• “Mail should be specific to my role, to what I do all day long.”
• “Regardless of the medium, it must be relevant to my needs. You need to determine relevance before sending me anything”.
• Communications and Data Gathering:
• Advice from C - Level Execs:
• “You think because I’m the CIO, you have to send all your marketing communications to me.  That’s not how decisions are made here.”
• “You’re using me as an executive mailroom and I don’t appreciate it.”
• “I will tell you who you should communicate with, what information they need, when and via what medium.”

• The critical issues facing decision makers in this economy, as they evaluate your product or service.
• Steps in the decision-making process and who are the decision makers and influencers.
• What information and offers are most effective at each step and via what mix of channels.
• The optimal role for:

	Web		Field Sales
	Email / Mail		Tech Support
	Inside Sales		Stores.



• How your customers define a value-added and competitively differentiating relationship with your company.
• Effective value propositions for engaging customers in an Opt-In relationship with you so they will trust you with their detailed self-profiled preferences.
• What information and how much information customers / prospects will self-profile regarding their preferences.
• This information will populate your opt-in database with uniquely accurate information.
  
  

Step 2: Establish Opt-In Preference-Based Relationships and Uniquely Powerful Databases
VOC research reveals your customers’ wants and needs in extraordinary detail.
In Step 2, these voice of customer expectations are used to develop strategies for achieving an unprecedented level of engagement with your customers, such that they opt-in and self-profile their preferences.
This enables you to create the most accurate and powerful database possible.
You build a laser-accurate database UNOBTAINABLE any other way:

• VOC identifies what customers want and expect from you.
• Opt-in programs use this information to attract customer participation – true opt-in, not passive “permission” to send another newsletter.
• As they opt-in, customers profile themselves by giving you deeper information about their personal and professional preferences.
• You learn exactly what your customers want, what offers they’ll respond to, when and how they want to be contacted, and more.
• This extraordinarily detailed intelligence becomes your highly-targeted, 100% proprietary database.

Step 3: Deploy Your Multichannel Mix Per Opt-In Preferences
Multichannel Success Factors: unless you obtain opt-in message and media preferences and aversions…you’ll simply be engaging in multichannel irritation!

VOC-generated customer intelligence drives the creation of highly targeted value propositions for engaging customers in a deeper level of dialogue with you. Step 3 leverages these customer requirements into action and enables you to create the integrated, multichannel programs that deliver the right product or service to the right person at the right time via the right medium…as requested by your customer.
Guided by self-profiled customer preferences, you launch integrated marketing campaigns that will achieve double-digit responses:

• Your self-profiled database tells you exactly what to market to whom, when, and via what mix of media.
• Your marketing becomes far more relevant and targeted.
• Your web site becomes far more than a transactional venue for purchase — Instead it becomes a destination and point of connection with customers who’ve opted in.

I wish you the best of luck in using these proven techniques. Follow the discipline of the 3-Step Process and you will see significant increases in response.

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For additional case studies, click here.

Click here for additional customer relationship management solutions case studies.

We wish you the best of luck in using the Voice-of-Customer-driven 3-Step Marketing Process to achieve double-digit response.

    To read previous newsletters, click here.
    For additional case studies, click here.