An article submitted to Badsender by Edouard MayeuxSenior Business Consultant at Infor.
Companies are constantly opening up new customer relationship channels: call center, SMS, push/notification, stores, web, live chat, smartphone/tablet application, email, social networks... nevertheless, it is important to offer a customer experience that is as consistent and personalized as possible and across all channels.
Managing the omni-channel customer experience means mastering the coherence of messages and offers in ever more varied customer journeys. Mobile, for example, continues to grow in importance with over 45 % of Internet traffic (MédiamétrieMarch 2015). It allows a brand to keep a quasi permanent contact with its customer and to potentially capture a multitude of contextual information. The notion of real time takes on even more importance here.
From a technological point of view, customer relationship channels are managed by often disparate platforms. A platform e-Commerce for example, provides personalization opportunities on the Web, but when it comes to ensuring consistency with points of sale, a call center or even an email, the task is more delicate.
In this context, how do you choose the right solution that allows marketing teams to drive and personalize interactions across all channels?
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1. Prefer an independent system
It is advisable to choose a system that will offer advanced capabilities to capture and consolidate all customer data from multiple systems (CRM, Call Center, e-Commerce/Web, POS, ERP...). The solution must be able to integrate demographic, transactional, behavioral and contextual real-time data (Web trackinggeolocation...). Ideally, the system should be flexible enough to allow the connection of more and more new channels.
2. Preserve optimal data quality
In an ideal world, all the data related to a customer is associated with a single identifier. In reality, it is much more complicated because a customer can have several emails, change phone numbers, use several names, first names, nicknames and typos can slip in. To avoid duplicates and other inconsistencies, it is advisable to opt for a solution with tools that continuously optimize data quality.
3. Analyze in real time while guaranteeing imperceptible response times
Managing the personalization of millions of customer interactions in real time requires a powerful technology that must not disrupt the fluidity of the customer experience. In order to progressively extend personalization to more and more channels, it's best to evaluate the robustness of the system and its ability to handle the load during peak periods.
4. Giving real ownership to marketing teams
Business teams need a simple and intuitive solution to configure rules, define campaigns, manage offers and messages. To provide maximum agility, arbitration capabilities must be provided to control priorities based on margin, stock levels, sales objectives, etc. The system must also allow for continuous monitoring and measurement of the system's effectiveness.
5. Be autonomous and self-learning
Providing the best personalized experience for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of customers requires an intelligent system that can continuously evolve and adapt to customer behavior. Self-learning technology keeps maintenance costs low by dramatically reducing manual rule management. Better yet, it is able to maintain increasingly relevant predictive models.
