Category: Customer Experience and Engagement

Loyalty programs have been there for years. Customers earn points for business with a brand, and the brand, in turn, nurtures the customer for more and more business. It is a win-win for both. However, the design of a loyalty program determines whether the customer feels value and thus starts nurturing the brand with more business. Further, they become brand advocates promoting in social media, word-of-mouth referrals, product reviews, and participation in promotions. If customer engagement is achieved, we can say the loyalty program is successful.

Does your company’s loyalty program work?

Loyalty programs are not just about customer acquisition; it is about customer retention and beyond. It is essential to do the homework before you roll it out. Many companies report great success but fail to analyse the sales data to prove it convincingly. As customers want more and more, loyalty programs should be the number one priority to them. If your customers are not getting their fair share of discounts and perks, you need to re-evaluate your loyalty program design. What do you want to achieve with your loyalty program? Are you looking to generate more business, get new customers, grow your existing customer base or some combination of these?

Is customer engagement being achieved?

Most customers feel it is too time-consuming to join, and it doesn’t make sense to them at all, even for some of the established loyalty programs. They may not be familiar with the terms and how the process will work. They may also find it confusing and intimidating to give you their loyalty card and all the details needed to enable the program to activate and process the points earned. On the other hand, a new member might not figure out how it all works and therefore not even feel comfortable joining. They may never even get past the registration form, the free points, or whatever, in these scenarios, how one gets the customer engagement achieved. The only solution is to make the loyalty program design simple, joining process simple, make it primarily automatic and make it work in the background without intimidating the customer much. Retail ViVA comes with a simple loyalty program that mainly works in the background, adding points to the customer’s account, make it very easy for customers to enroll and enjoy the difference.

Conclusion

Most brands in today’s competitive market are competing for sales with one another. The question for today’s brands is; Are they doing enough to differentiate themselves from their competitors? If not, it is time to start rethinking your customers’ relationship with your brand and focus on loyalty programs. “In business, as in love, if you want a steady supply of customers, you have to provide a steady supply of loyalty, and this means you must nurture the loyalty of your existing customers as well as attract new customers.” -Sir John Hegarty. Loyalty programs are nothing new and they are still influential today. However, innovative simplicity will help get more traction from customers. Technology can make it simple and choose a Retail ERP that has a simple process for joining and accruing loyalty credits to your customers.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

Customers interact with brands at multiple stages, be it first awareness before purchase, during the purchase, or after purchase. Each of these interactions is known as the customer touchpoint. Customer acquires positive or negative impressions about the brand at each touchpoint. Retailers must strive to deepen the relationship with customers at every opportunity of interaction to build brand loyalty. The medium of interaction (online, physical, offline) may differ depending on the customer’s choice, and Retailers must ensure that similar impressions are formed at every medium with which the customer interacts.

What are the Different Types of Touchpoints that Retail Customers Encounter?

The advancement of technology in the retail industry has made shopping simple for customers. Online order is an online sale and involves on-the-spot payment for products from the company. It reduces the need for a customer to visit stores and provides them with ease of shopping. In Pre-purchase online, retailers allow customers to pre-purchase an item online, not to stand in long queues at the time of store pick-up. This also assures the customer of speedy delivery of their purchase. A different type of touchpoint is where customers interact with a brand before they engage in a specific activity of buying or recommending. Then there is a physical store visit where a customer interacts with store personnel. There are also communications of various forms that reach the customer or prospective customer which also creates an impression. These communications may be related to products or related to the ethics or culture of the Brand. All of these are Customer Touchpoints, and each of these touchpoints creates a positive or negative impression on the customer’s mind.

What Are the Possible Reasons for Negative Touchpoints?

The customer may feel disappointed due to the treatment retailers provide them. Fakes, flaws, poor quality of product/service, shoddy services, delayed delivery, bad customer service, excessive claims on advertising, non-empathetic marketing, stocking issues, product recalls are some of the aspects which create negative impressions in customer’s mind. Most negative perceptions by customers are often the result of lack of experience, intelligence, professionalism, or lack of technical skill at the retailer level. Customers may leave the store/service station/online, and the retailer may never know about it. They could feel cheated or misled by the Brand. The key to achieving an optimal level of customer loyalty is by analysing the root cause of negative perceptions and taking steps to rectify the issue.

How Can Retailers Build Brand Loyalty?

Retailers can build loyalty in various ways. Customer Loyalty can be achieved through multiple touchpoints, and while the efforts made at each of these touchpoints should be different, they should be consistent. All these touchpoints should be based on an increased satisfaction with the merchandise, good service, variety of products, delivery, communication, brand personality, exclusive products, etc. It should also include a solution to identified Customer Pain Points. There are times when a customer has developed a deep emotional attachment with the brand but has yet to make the purchase. This happens with luxury goods often. Emotional bonds must be not only preserved but enhanced with every aspiring customer for conversion. Retailers can achieve all the above by using an integrated Retail ERP product that operates as a single solution to provide a consistent service experience. Retail ViVA, our Retail ERP, integrates all touchpoints of the customer and serves as a single solution, giving Retailers an absolute chance to provide a consistent brand experience to their customers.

Conclusion

Marketing is often viewed as an activity that goes in one direction. However, it is a constantly evolving activity. Therefore, retailers need to take a long-term view of customer behaviour to succeed in customer acquisition, loyalty creation, and retention. Every Customer Touchpoint is important and needs to be managed as per brand standards to provide a consistently superior experience through a single solution approach.

When customers acquire products that are linked to after-sales service, the second innings of the customer experience journey starts then. An excellent after-sales service will enhance customer loyalty. Firstly, customers must find it easy to contact for assistance. Secondly, they must be handled professionally and serviced according to urgency and circumstances. Long wait times, inordinate delay in service, and inadequate communication can frustrate customers and result in a poor experience

The customer experience journey

A customer journey, which customers experience when interacting with a product or service brand, is divided into two phases — engagement and satisfaction. Engagement is the first, where customers acquire products. This phase is where customers provide feedback, try out different products and begin to purchase. Satisfaction builds upon the existing satisfaction when customers find it easy to engage with customer care. The satisfaction from customer care engagement is vital for a company, as enhanced customer satisfaction there would lead to an additional robust sale. Therefore, an excellent customer experience is essential for any company by improving after-sales service.

The importance of customer service

People buy from a company for reasons beyond its products or services. The entire experience of dealing with the company should be seamless, rewarding, and of good quality. Customer loyalty is a crucial success factor in today’s fast-paced world. Product companies from industries across all the geographies compete for their customers and high-quality sales force. Although customer-centricity is an essential element in a business, it can become a real challenge when the sales force focuses on customer acquisition rather than retention.

What is after-sales service?

1. After-sales service helps service providers keep the door open for current and prospective customers by enabling customers to make quick, simple, and reliable purchase decisions and drive awareness and sales. 2. The industry’s after-sales model calls for better customer experience through 24×7 services and co-creation of new customer experience and loyalty. 3. After-sales service is often divided into two phases: Presence of the service provider: Service providers who are present at the time of customer service needs are considered to have good customer service. Service providers who remain absent for most of such times would be considered to have poor customer service.

The customer experience journey

To ensure that every part of the customer experience journey is enhanced and strengthened, here are ways to go about it. 1. Communication – Educate, educate and educate; How many times have you had to wait hours to get the part you need or made to drive from home to the supplier or the workshop, only to find that a technician couldn’t be found? Communicating with customers about the status of the parts and service requests as they happen can be rewarding to the customers without any anxiety in their minds. 2. Service – Offer compassion and empathy-How many times have you faced troubles with a repair or maintenance issue, only to be told you are at fault for something you didn’t know about?

After-sales-service: how to provide an enhanced customer experience

Maintaining customer loyalty and happiness requires various services and resources to be provided most optimally. In addition, after-sales service is not just about customer support. Instead, a method to enhance the service is to differentiate your product through unique offerings that support your products. A sound digitized after-sales-service module in the Retail ERP built in an integrated manner can make a huge difference. Hence, we embedded and integrated a robust warranty and after-sales-service module as part of our Retail ViVA and perfected it over a decade-long usage experience by our retail customers.

Conclusion

The high-touch customer experience design is the way to go to ensure customer delight. Research has clearly shown that the immediate satisfaction of customers is often most vital to customer loyalty and retention. Our experiences and relationships with others, including with brands, are critical predictors of the way we think, feel, and behave, as well as how we act toward them. It is also necessary that customers be empowered and to feel as if they have a say in how the brand functions and engages. The ingredients to optimize customer experience must be embedded within the business model and strategies of today’s leading companies through good digitization.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

4 min read

Nowadays, quite often we find new hires going through digital onboarding on their first day, all by themselves. Hitherto, Companies chose a specific day as new hires joining day for HR resources to physically onboarding every new hire. With the advent of digital onboarding setting in, we have overcome this limitation

We are living in an experience economy, and we are also living in the digital economy. Experience is something that leaves you with memories of the past or which gives you great satisfaction during usage. Experience can also be about implicit trust and faith in something like a brand due to continuous good experience gained over time. But then, the experience can be gained from another person or digitally gained by using a gadget or website or a service on the web. As a universe, we seem to weigh good digital experience as equal as personal experiences, if one must conclude from the popularity of social media. Else, the least we conclude is that digital experience is becoming an acceptable norm in the absence of direct personal experience possible.

Companies that adopt digital on-boarding to their new hires must create them with experience as the backbone. They want their new hires to enjoy the digital experience and gain positive emotions, beliefs, and motivation for the purpose and people in the Company. New hires digital onboarding experience can also set the right motto of the company’s drive towards “Digital First & Digital Always,” right from day one. I have often advocated digital onboarding as a tool to know and gauge digital familiarity of new hires and chart a course of training needs for their improvements. After all, the world is turning digital, and if we cannot coach our employees to be exceptionally digitally savvy, we are not going to be strong in the marketplace.

An enterprise that is multi-location driven but has centralized human resource services have no choice but to adapt to digital on-boarding to take care of new hires joining at remote locations. This way, digital onboarding helps to break the geographical barriers. Some enterprises use digital onboarding as a smart HR tool to simplify the creation of employee profiles invisibly by the new hire themselves. Whatever be the reason an enterprise adopts, the moot point is whether it can create the same personal touch as doing a direct physical onboarding?

Let us, for a moment, look at theatre plays and movies as an analogy. While movies have outgrown as the best entertainment medium than theatre plays, all of us have been mentally adapting to proxy presence as something which we enjoy. In the film, dialogue, voice, and scenes create all the emotions. Akin to this, if the digital content can be engaging with good narratives, a soulful voice with good moderation and an elegant portrayal of enterprise core values and other content that is relevant to onboarding, it is possible to achieve the same impact like a physical onboarding.

While there is no doubt that human-to-human contact is superior to anything pseudo, the digital is not too far in catching up with its innovations of delivery. But if you desire strong standardization in your delivery of new hire onboarding experience, I ought to advocate that digital is the best medium to adopt.

When we designed Retail ViVA, we gave the utmost thrust to digital onboarding as creating the best first impression. Hence, we developed a flexible, fully digital onboarding module, that a citizen user can create and configure.

Digital acceptance is more than ever now, and possibly, COVID-19 has accelerated its adoption across generations by default. With the remote workforce growing and becoming a new-normal, digital onboarding is the way to go and considered normal-normal rather than new normal.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

Customer Relationship is a process of establishing long term connections with your customers. Retailers must be able to make their customers come back to them often because of the strong relationship built. Customers reward Retailers with repeat buying in case the relationship is satisfying for them.

Customer loyalty refers to strong patronage to a single brand of products or services that a customer gets affiliated to, irrespective of significant noise about competition circling her/him. The critical point to note here is about not being influenced to switch to another brand or service. The loyalty is so strong that it is a deep commitment to re-patronize consistently

In my example, when I need to do international travel, I just lead to Emirates to book my tickets without even looking at what prices other airlines are offering. I do not get motivated to browse umpteen travel sites that provide a price comparison of various operators. Beyond just mere loyalty, this is genuinely blending your confidence onto a brand implicitly

In a Customer Relationship journey, the first step is to build a relationship with customers and then convert them to true loyalty status. To move Customers from relationship to loyalty, customization, and personalization come into play from the service provider angle. In return, the Customer becomes the brand ambassador to others, echoing brand uniqueness time and again.

Relationships are benefits that a customer enjoys over and above the product or service, she/he acquires and views it as her/his personal gain for being a regular customer. When such a relationship attains a solidarity position where he is unattracted to switch loyalties, she/he turns into a truly loyal customer. As the customer reaches true loyalty status, her/his perceived demand would be to get special treatment. If a brand can satisfy that aspiration of a truly loyal customer, the longevity gets further strengthened, and a solid bond gets established. This unshakeable bond makes the customer own the brand as if it is her/his own and fight for righteous demand if things are seen not being up to the regularly experienced brand status

Another critical aspect that merits attention in the Customer journey from relationship to true loyalty is constant communication from the brand to build trust. Two-way communication can enhance trust and lead ways to understand the customer better, further leading way to personalization.

In designing Retail ViVA, this vital aspect of two-way communication and personalization is integrated into our Customer Relationship Module (CRM) design since being so essential to build customer loyalty. A well-conceived CRM module is so vital to convert customer relationships to true loyalty

Every customer you acquire goes through a journey from being just a customer simpliciter to relationship customer to true loyal customer. While customer goes through this journey based on trust, experience, and perceptions, it is Retailers who need to work to enable such trust, experience, and sound perceptions. To conclude, the Retailer must give utmost importance to enhancing the relationship with customers to true loyalty.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com