Better know your customers for survival in this Digital age

With Digital Transformation, we are living in direct-to-customer world. 

Consumers don’t want to talk to middlemen or brokers when they need something. They also don’t want to be bombarded with irrelevant ads, nor do they want to be on the receiving end of a blanket, irrelevant marketing campaign.

Customer expectations are high, and growing! To provide a differentiating customer experience, you must exceed, or at least meet their expectations.

Almost anything you read today talks about customer engagement and customer experience. It’s not because those are the latest buzzwords, it’s because they really affects your top line. 

It is also a compliance matter now a days to know your customers well.

Customer simple expectations are Know Me, Understand me, Respect me, Listen to me, and Respond to me anytime, anyplace.

Modern customers demand intelligence from the organizations they engage with. They demand knowledge, care, and tailored content and campaigns.

Digital technology has turned customers into moving targets. Customers are hopping the channels all the day – start with smartphone, tablet at the breakfast, continuing on mobile while commuting to work, then hoping to laptop/pc in office, and again moving to other devices when out of office and then TV, tablet, mobile at home before finishing the day. This leaves huge digital footprint for businesses to further analyze.

Today, customer data, knowledge, and insights are more valuable and of more strategic importance than ever before

Business have to adopt to various key elements to engage customers:

·       Involve customers: allow customers to engage and involve in your business goals

·      Anywhere anytime Access: give them flexibility to connect to your business from anywhere, on any device, anytime

·   Relevant content to Engage: provide the content which makes sense to customers

·       Hyper personalize: customize the content to the very personal level meeting specific needs

·       Responsiveness: quick and effective response on customer interaction

Businesses can deploy big data analytics to bring in all the advanced customer intelligence while interacting with customers:

·     Customer journey data: Collecting all the customer data across all the touch points of your business

·    Behavior data: How customers have behaved while interacting with your business

·   Sentiments data: What customers are saying about your products and services – good or bad

This helps in Knowing the customers better than the competition does, not only knowing who they are and what they have purchased, but also understanding what they want at a particular moment in time.

Amazon, Disney, Apple, Starbucks go to great lengths to exceed customer expectations by leveraging customer information and insights.

Finally knowing the customer helps you in marketing, advertising, customer service, customer retention and loyalty and above all improve the customer experience.

Knowing your customer is key to survive. Find out who they are and how you can create products that truly solve their needs

How is your organization putting efforts to know your customers in digital age?