As the digital revolution expands the number of marketing channels, brands are seeing a tremendous blurring of the lines between traditional loyalty programs, digital transformations, and customer experience initiatives. In this new competitive landscape, all brands must adopt loyalty initiatives without traditional boundaries, shares, Guy CierzanManaging Partner, ICF Next.
No brand is perfect when it comes to loyalty these days, but Starbucks is doing a lot right.
For starters, their entire rewards program is housed on a mobile app that customers can also use to store payment info, purchase drinks, and order remotely. In this way, tangible customer interactions are seamlessly integrated in a digital ecosystem with the rewards they may reap from those interactions.
Contrary to several airlines — whose shift from distance to revenue-based loyalty programs have only made it harder, more expensive, and more complicated to achieve certain tier statuses than in the past — Starbucks rewards enrollment is friction-less, engrained in signing into the app itself. There’s a reason the app accounted for 30% of all transactions last year, and holds more consumer cash than many banks.
https://www.martechadvisor.com/articles/customer-experience-2/what-brands-can-learn-from-starbucks-expansive-view-of-customer-loyalty/
In order to deliver positive customer interactions, customer service practices have had to evolve to meet rising customer expectations. One of the practices that has become compulsory is for customer service to be available on multiple communication channels. While social media marketing and email marketing were hailed as the holy grail of modern customer support – in 2019, more people are using customer support in messaging apps compared to news feed broadcasting, probably because they prefer real-time interactive conversations.
Messaging apps like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat have become the ultimate platforms for fast efficient and personalized support and engagement. A study conducted by Vanson Bourne for Twilio surveyed 6,000 consumers in Europe, Asia and North America and found that nine out of ten consumers would like to be able to use a messaging platform to talk to businesses. However, there are countless messaging platforms available today.
With so many messaging apps on which to communicate with customers, it can be an administrative nightmare to manage seamless cross-channel communication with customers. So how can a support team manage their omnichannel messaging?
Well, you can assign agents to manage all the communications across apps or assign a dedicated agent to manage each individual app – however, both these options have their own limitations.
When one person is running social media customer support, that agent can quickly become overwhelmed with the duties of being the point of contact for all inquiries. On the other hand, hiring one individual per social media platform can be expensive for a small to medium enterprise, especially when the volume of interaction does not justify such costs.
https://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/omnichannel-customer-support-in-messaging-apps-what-the-smart-brands-are-doing-02240925/
Every year, the customer service industry talks about the changing consumer landscape and how and how companies need to address their customers’ preferences RIGHT NOW or risk massive churn the likes of which contact centers around the world have never seen. Like all prognostications however, some predictions come true and others do not; or at least do not with the immediacy visionaries forecasted.
Look at the obituaries written for voice in customer service. How many have been written and how many have been wrong? The decline of voice has been forecasted for years and yes, it has declined steadily but to manhandle Mark Twain’s famous quote, the reports of voice’s death are greatly exaggerated.
http://customerthink.com/consumers-are-evolving-the-customer-experience-are-brands-evolving-with-them/
According to a survey by Statista, nearly 2.62 billion people have active social media accounts worldwide today. The high tech industry has long understood that targeted ads and social media campaigns are powerful tools for driving brand awareness and sales. However, despite the fact that social media drives more traffic to a website than organic search, conversion rates are still extremely low. In fact, according to AdWeek, social media traffic has an average conversion rate of 0.71 percent, with organic search converting at 1.95 percent and email at 3.19 percent.
Some high tech companies are very successful in creating communities and developing a strong following on their social media accounts and this is definitely the first step to increasing conversion. But how do you use these communities to build customer loyalty, provide a better customer experience and increase sales conversion rates?
https://www.itproportal.com/features/3-ways-technology-brands-can-leverage-live-engagement-on-social-media/
