Brand advocacy is all about your business lovers introducing you to new customers, efficaciously driving new revenue and business intelligence. It further helps cut down on marketing expenses as well. It can benefit a business in a number of ways. Read on to know what such this advocacy can do for your business.
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Relationship marketing is a form of marketing that emphasizes customer retention and satisfaction, rather than a focus on sales transactions. It is an arrangement where both the buyer and seller have an interest in providing a more satisfying exchange. Using this process, businesses aim at making a comfort zone with a client that doesn’t aim at one-off sales. This, in turn, provides them a number of benefits:
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The quality of customer service you provide plays a vital role in deciding whether your business will be a hit or a miss. You may have the best of products but they are of no use if you cannot convince people to buy them. Your business is bound to fail if you are unable to meet the expectations of today’s customers. Customer service holds a major significance for any business. Let’s see how:
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CRM is very well known to help businesses manage processes such as lead tracking, customer support, customer data management, automating sales, simplifying sales processes and a lot more. This is not it, there’s a lot more to customer relationship management. CRM software help businesses in a number of ways that are not known to all. Read on to know what those uses are:
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Gamification is all about using game design elements in non-game contexts so as to improve user engagement, productivity, ease of use, the usefulness of systems, physical exercise and a lot more. This powerful concept, when used for businesses, provides a number of benefits. Read on to know how you can leverage gamification to boost your business’s success:
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Twitter provides immense opportunities for business growth. You can leverage this power and highly loved social media platform to grow your business like never before. Here are the best of all strategies that can help you make the most out of it:
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A single question helps calculate NPS: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?
The score for the answer varies from 0 to 10. People who respond with a score of 9 to 10 are called “Promoters”. Others who respond with a score of 0 to 6 are labeled “Detractors”. Apart from these, the responses of 7 and 8 are labeled “Passives”. Now, every business needs a good amount of promoters so as to inflate their profits. And here’s all that it takes to get a good amount of promoters:
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Live chat is undoubtedly an untapped potential to grow your business. A live chat feature on your website can drive numerous benefits towards your business. However, you need to use the live chat software wisely to enjoy those benefits. Here are the best strategies that can profit your business through live chat:
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All the CRM software are specially designed to help businesses meet the overall goals of customer relationship management. As a matter of fact, a CRM software can work wonders for your business provided you choose the right one. Let’s have a look at the best CRM software available:
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So far we have seen that live chat benefits a business in a number of ways. It can help reduce the bounce rates and site abandonment rate, boost sales and build strong customer relationships. There’s one more benefit of using live chat on your website. Wondering what it is? Well, live chat if used appropriately can increase your business’s conversion rates. Want to know how? Read on.
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Customer relationships need to be nurtured as they play a vital role in the success of a business. Companies should work towards the enhancement of customer relationships. Here are a few tips on how you can deepen the customer relationships:
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Customer retention basically means customers of the product or business tend to return to, continue to buy or in some other way not defect to another product or business, or to non-use entirely. Selling organizations fear customer defections and hence try to minimize them by employing effective strategies to retain the customers.
Researchers have proved that acquiring new customers cost more than retaining the existing ones. Moreover, customer retention is directly proportional to profitability. So, companies need to implement certain customer retention strategies so as to grow their business. Here are the best strategies to curb customer defection and develop long-term relationships:
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1.Provide adequate training to all the agents:
Skipping or shortening the training period, based on the fact that some agents need intense training while others do not can lead to the omission of useful experiences. This may further result in feelings of exclusion, inadequacy, and disorganization and in the worst cases, the agent leaving your company. Therefore, you should consider training each agent equally. Make sure that all the agents are subjected to the same training period so they can acquire the necessary knowledge and skills, become acculturated to the company’s values, and cultivate relationships with colleagues. This training period will enhance team collaboration and bond and will further lead to the exemption of agent attrition to a large extent.
2. Schedule the staff appropriately:
One of the most effective strategies in curbing agent attrition is focusing on the work-life balance of employees. This strategy works on the principle of mutual understanding, such that, employees need to understand that the business must meet its customers’ demands, while the business must understand that employees have external pressures as well. Thus, you need to develop a flexible approach creating a number of lifestyle schedule options that give employees more choices, whilst still meeting the business needs. Providing options is a great way of finding a suitable solution and satisfying all.
3. Leverage the power of skill development:
Providing skill development programs is yet another powerful strategy that can help curb agent attrition in customer support centers. As a matter of fact, agents who feel their on the job skill-set is not at all progressive are more likely to disengage with their work and are more prone to leaving. However, all these insecurities can be eliminated and job satisfaction can be increased with opportunities for agents to learn new skills and new technologies. This will help them be more competent and confident, perform their work-related duties and stay longer with your company.
In order to measure the performance of a call center’s customer service representatives individually and as a whole, call center analytics is used. Also, this is used to gauge a call center’s overall approach to customer relationship management (CRM) in a quick and responsive manner. Call center management uses this analytics to evaluate interactions, spot patterns, identify knowledge gaps, and make corrections through more training or other means.
1. Text analytics:
The term text analytics refers to a set of linguistic, statistical, and machine learning techniques that model and structure the information content of textual sources for business intelligence, exploratory data analysis, research, or investigation. It is extensively used to respond to business problems, whether independently or in conjunction with query and analysis of fielded, numerical data. Also, the communication with customers these days is not limited to just the written documents. It is also carried out through email, secure messaging, Facebook, Twitter, and other text-centered media. Text analytics, as call center analytics, can review and monitor not only the messages sent to customers but also the message they send to the company. This helps in having a thorough knowledge of customers’ issues.
2. Speech analytics:
The process of analyzing recorded calls to gather customer information to improve communication and future interaction is known as speech analytics. This process is used by customer contact centers to extract information buried in client interactions with an enterprise. Using speech analytics, companies can monitor calls in real time and unearth inefficiencies in their current model, and make process improvements, such as moving to a call script or developing systems for call center agents to utilize in order to achieve the desired outcome. Moreover, the technology can pinpoint cost drivers, trend analysis, identify strengths and weaknesses with processes and products.
The term “Cross-media queuing” refers to a call center methodology in which all incoming messages, be it a phone call, an e-mail, fax, interactive voice response (IVR) message, website submission or an instant message, is routed in the same way. As per a resource, Intel provided a whitepaper which states that the cross-media queuing application needs five components. Cross-media queuing is achieved with the help of technology tools that help in creating a queue engine, media interaction modules, agent application modules, configuration and administration modules and a statistical and reporting module.
The specified components and their functions have been described in detail below:
1.A queue engine:
The cross-media queuing requires a queue engine to act as a central coordination point. A system manager configures business rules. This coordination point negotiates all interactions with customers based upon these business rules.
2. Media interaction modules:
Customer queries may be received through a number of channels. In order to accept incoming customer queries from media channels and send the queries to agent applications as directed by the queue engine, media interaction modules are needed.
3. Agent application modules:
Customer queries arrive every now and then at call center agents’ desktops. Therefore, in order to enable automatic management of these queries, agent application modules are needed. The modules could be built by the system developers. Agent application modules can even be modified to be integrated into specific desktop applications.
5. Configuration and administration modules:
Configuration and administration modules are the ones that system administrators can use to establish business rules for routing media configure and manage queuing features.
6. Statistics and reporting module:
This type of module is required for recording and reporting purpose in a cross-media queuing system. A statistics and reporting module records and reports upon the flow of communication. It also lets you measure the system’s performance and record it as well.
1. Leverage the power of your smile:
Callers would appreciate calm and friendly demeanor. Donning a pleasant expression automatically helps your voice convey friendliness and openness. On the other, staying straight-faced, on the other hand, immediately removes that kindness from your voice. Therefore, try greeting a pretend client as you would on the phone i.e. out loud, first with a smile and afterwards without. This would help you deal with a difficult customer and please him/ her. Moreover you would not be subjected to hear hear more of a strain indicating that you do not really want to be talking to this person right now !
2. Understand that nothing is meant to be taken personally:
There are many instances where while dealing with a difficult customer, business owners or customer support agents take it personally. It needs to be understood that customer is being difficult due to past experiences with other companies. It is a fact that customers who have had bad prior experiences with other companies are often hyper-sensitive and read into things too much and often end up becoming difficult over the smallest things. Whenever any such case is encountered, it is important to calmly and clearly put the situation into perspective for the customer and assure them that their queries will be resolved in the shortest possible time span. This will lead to the customer being calmer and more cooperative.
3. Business owners and customers desire the same thing:
A pleasant, happy and speedy transaction is what both business owners and customers desire. Therefore, while dealing with a difficult customer, business owners can resolve any disputes by letting the customer know they are willing to fully work with them to make them happy. Letting the customer know they are there to help will lead to the customer becoming less difficult and easier to work with.
1. Long term adoption of self service tools:
Showing customers how to utilize self service tools leads to the long term adoption of self service tools which is yet another benefit of co- browsing. It is extremely beneficial when:
i) a company is launching new online tools or updating existing tools or procedures
ii) when specific customer segments are having trouble using online tools
iii) when white-glove service can be provided to top-tier customers.
2. Differential customer service experience:
These days customers ask to co-browse when they contact an agent because they know co-browsing allows them to get help instantly and conveniently. In other words, co- browsing creates a differentiated customer service experience. This exempts the risk of losing customers and results in returning customers. Hence it improves your business performance.
3. Customer service agent satisfaction:
There is a possibility of agents being frustrated when customers articulate issues and agents are required to verbally direct the customer to perform actions online. Thus, providing the agents with technologies such as co- browsing reduces this frustration and leads to an increased efficiency of customer support. Moreover, agents appreciate being given the tools they need to be more efficient and productive so they are able to meet their performance goals.
5. Reduced call handling time and improved efficiency of customer support system:
Co-browse technology helps in the reduction of call handling time. As a matter of fact, the less call-handling time agents will take, the more level of customer service they will provide. Thus, co- browsing promotes efficiency by enabling agents to handle issues more quickly and accurately. It can also be used as a real-time live training tool to help on board new agents and familiarize them with the customer experience quickly and efficaciously. The customers also get satisfied as they get faster resolution and the agents save their time.
Co-browsing, in context of web browsing refers to joint navigation through the world wide web by two/ more people accessing the same web pages at same time. Complete co-browsing supports automatic synchronization of the browsers’ state and content, including frames, portlets, or even content of the form fields and controls. Various tools are employed for this purpose some of which can even identify complex media objects such as audio and video players and offer capability of synchronous playback with start/pause/stop functionality.
Co browsing is a short form of collaborative browsing. It is a software-enabled technique that allows someone in an enterprise contact center to interact with a customer by using the customer’s web browser to show them something. In case of a B2B scenario, it can actually be used ease out the complex purchasing process for the customers. For instance, a B2B customer facing difficulty placing an order could call a customer service representative who could then show the customer how to use the ordering pages by sharing screen on the desktop or whatever device is being used. Collaborative browsing may include e-mail, fax, regular telephone, and internet phone contact as part of an interaction.
Co-browsing has so far evolved to support a full user web experience. It has come up as a great tool for customer service and support teams. You need to keep the following points in your mind while considering a co- browsing solution for your business:
i) co-browsing solutions must be offered in a seamless manner irrespective of the communication channel the customer initiates the conversation from.
ii) solutions that cannot share critical information that exists outside of the browser will inhibit the experience your customers expect.
iii) co-browsing technology that mandates tagging each and every page that a customer may want to share may be a technical challenge and, in many cases, not feasible.
iv) co-browse solutions that share a browser experience may help with simple web page based content but are not capable of extending to view the rich content on every web page, so make sure that all viewers are seeing the same and synchronized content
1. Content Marketing:
Content marketing refers to the marketing focused on creating, publishing and distributing content to online targeted audience.It is a crucial element for B2B lead generation. It is often used by businesses in order to attract attention, generate leads, expand their customer base, generate online sales, increase brand awareness or engage an online community of users. While pursuing content marketing, the main focus of the businesses should be the needs of the prospect or customer.
Once a business has identified the customer’s need, information can be presented in a variety of formats, including news, video,white papers, e-books, infographics, email newsletters, case studies, podcasts, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, blogs, etc. The appropriate type of content for any business will depend on the business’ goals and target customer.
2. Search engine marketing:
Search engine marketing includes both paid search results (using tools like Google Adwords or Bing Ads, formerly known as Microsoft ad-center) and organic search results (SEO) and plays a crucial rule in B2B lead generation. It includes the following steps:
In the previous post we talked about B2B lead generation and its components. Now let’s take a look at the strategies that can be employed to generate leads online:
1.Email marketing:
It refers to sending a commercial message to a group of people (typically potential or current customers), using email. It basically inculcates the use of email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Email marketing can be carried out using:
2. Social marketing:
This type of marketing involves leveraging social media to generate leads online. Businesses can use it to generate and nurture millions of dollars worth of leads. As a matter of fact, one of the most obvious ways to generate B2B leads from social media is using LinkedIn. Since social media is an integral part of content marketing, and to some extent, search marketing, so, your blogging or info graphics can be extremely successful if you are active on social media platforms.
In order to integrate social networks into their marketing strategies, companies have to develop a marketing model. One such model includes the following steps:
