Do you know what makes a good customer portal? An excellent digital customer experience includes the ability for customers to be able to achieve speed, responsiveness and personalisation at any stage of their journey and a support portal can provide this.
For online customers, the journey starts with the customer as a prospect, then moves to being an opportunity and finally becoming a customer. However, you need to be aware that customer behaviour is rapidly changing and customers like the choice of a multitude of digital channels.
As stated by Qualtrics “From a business perspective, the number of digital channels now available seems dizzying, as is the speed with which a user moves between platforms and channels during a single journey. Customer journeys are complex, with shoppers switching channels multiple times as they move from awareness to consideration to purchase.”
Multi-Channel Marketing Platforms
There are various platforms available to provide an integrated digital customer experience, but how do you track customer interactions? The answer lies in Multichannel Marketing Hubs and is key in giving you the ability to provide customer support.
Gartner recently defined the multichannel marketing hub (MMH) as – “… a technology that orchestrates a company’s communications with and offers to, customer segments across multiple channels”.
The key capabilities for these platforms include
- Customer Profile Management: The customer profile analysis involves comprehensively recording and managing all the customer’s previous interactions with the business. Ref: https://www.kapturecrm.com/customer-profiling.
- Campaign Workflow: The purpose of workflow is to help plan and automate marketing campaigns. It lets you easily set even very complex campaigns in order. Ref: https://support.salesmanago.com/workflow-creating-automated-campaign
- Event Triggering: As the name suggests, event-triggered marketing executes campaigns based on events in the customer’s life. It is a truly personalized strategy that can not only help form personal connections with customers but allows you to respond to your customers’ needs at precisely the right moment. Ref: https://xperience.io/discover/blog/event-triggered-marketing-more-meaningful-than-eve.
- Marketing personalization, also known as personalized marketing or one-to-one marketing, is the practice of using data to deliver brand messages targeted to an individual prospect. Ref: https://instapage.com/blog/personalized-marketing
- Marketing Channel Support: Supporting multiple channels across various platforms.
- Real-Time Decision-Making is the ability to deliver decision support within the shortest possible time-frame using the best possible set of data and decision-making model to direct and report on business operations and interactions. Ref: https://www.actian.com/company/blog/why-do-you-need-real-time-decision-making-in-times-of-market-uncertainty-and-what-is-it-anyway
- Recommendations are based on positive customer experiences that are shared with others in a wide variety of ways.
- Marketing Analytics with AI: AI marketing uses artificial intelligence technologies to provide marketing analytics report based on data collection, data analysis, and additional observations of audience or economic trends that may impact marketing efforts.
- End-to-end integration with all digital channels and applications throughout the customer journey.
A great example is Optimove, their tools allow you to manage your customer journeys, automate your multichannel campaigns, activity triggered marketing campaign and many more.
Integration
A fully integrated digital customer experience is only possible after integrating a platform that supports all digital channels. It must also work in synergy with the rest of the applications chosen to be part of the customer journey.
A robust integration strategy is necessary to ensure all relevant touchpoints are integrated with both front-office and back-office. This gives customers access to all relevant information in one place and increases customer satisfaction.
For instance, customers using self-service should have the ability to refer to historic activity including their interactions, activities, subscribed services, payments, invoices etc.
Similarly, a call centre executive should have a 360-degree view of the customer when they are interacting with them including social media interactions, call logs, profile and previous recommendations etc.
Conclusion
In today’s fast-moving environment, understanding the customer mindset and making sure your customer is getting a similar experience across omnichannel digital touchpoints has become the new normal.
Implementing platforms with integration is your first step. The next key step is to monitor and track. The KPIs you should continuously keep an eye on are Customer Effort Score, Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction.
Ashine Consultancy Solutions provides industry-leading advice on Customer Experience Strategy. For bespoke Customer Portal solutions, data management solutions, business process automation, custom software development, website development, mobile app development and other bespoke software solutions to improve your customer experience (CX), get in touch for a free consultation.
