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The rise of social media and mobility has made it more important than ever before to foster a customer-focused company. The advent of mobile devices means social media is always at customers’ fingertips, and that instant feedback in the form of tweets and Facebook posts gives them a voice that can’t be ignored. The confluence of mobile, social and machines has impacted customer service and customer loyalty in a radically new way.
In 2009, McKinsey & Company introduced the Customer Decision Journey and a loyalty score but this was really only the beginning. Loyalty Scores such as Net Promoter Score focused on “How likely are you to recommend this product to someone else?” when what we really want to know is how can we measure the value of a customer over a lifetime and begin to unravel the true value of a customer.
Now, with the rise of M2M, McKinsey & Company’s vision can become a reality. What if there was a way to track every touch point a product had with a consumer, from the moment they considered buying the product up through the entire lifespan and experience of owning it? This would provide us with the ability to mine data for valuable insight about the relationship between the product and the customer, from beginning to end. This tracking can be used to study customer loyalty, which is an extremely important component in delivering great customer service. While this concept is compelling in theory, it’s difficult to implement in practice – because until very recently there was no way to track a customer’s experience at every turn, making it especially difficult to track loyalty along the customer decision journey.
Today we have the uncanny capability to predict how likely a customer is to buy or recommend a product based on the information the machines they use gather. Take the example of a simple printer. That printer company now has the ability to track every customer touch point associated with a particular product and trace every interaction the customer had in the process of buying the printer, which could offer extremely valuable insight for a variety of reasons. The company could see that a customer recommended the product to a friend and that friend actually bought the printer, and then recommended that printer to five other people. In that way, companies can discover how valuable a customer is based on their recommendations and how they interact with the product.
Connected machines have ushered in a new era of possibilities for customer loyalty using mobile, social, and cloud technology in five key areas:
Let’s imagine you can give each product a unique identifying characteristic and you could register this unique identifier in the cloud. Everywhere that product traveled, and everything that product “touched” would become associated with it and those relationships would connect together in the cloud. For example, if you gave a printer a unique identifier, you could then track it through its entire lifespan.
That printer company could then build an advertising campaign for a new printer and push it out to Facebook. The Facebook ad campaign is also given a unique identifier, and is connected to the printer the customer bought. When a customer clicks on the Facebook ad it takes them to the Facebook Fan page. At this point, the customer’s experience is connected to that particular printer. A company could also assign the Facebook Ad campaign to a specific step in the customer decision’s lifecycle– for example Stage #1 —“interested.” Once the customer clicked on the Facebook advertisement for that printer, they would move from “interested” to “engaged.”
Once the customer has moved into the “engaged” phase, their data is used differently. For example, menus on the customer’s iPhone will change when in proximity of the printer because the cloud knows that the customer is standing near the printer and they are in the engaged stage. Of course the customer can “opt out” at any point along the way and wipe out all connections to the printer. An example of being in the engaged stage is if the Facebook ad reaches out to the customer when they are in the vicinity of a Best Buy retail store, then the printer’s unique identifier might reach out to the customer and invite them to take advantage of a $50 discount coupon if they enter the store.
While the customer is awaiting delivery, their relationship with their printer and their entire experience shifts. Their iPhone menu now changes to accommodate questions such as “where is my printer?” and provides menu items to give training on the printer prior to its arrival. After it arrives, the menu shifts again to the installation phase and the customer sees functions supporting connection and configuration. All along the way, the customer has the ability to escalate to an expert and leverage any customer service function.
Once the printer is successfully installed, it shifts to the support phase of the customer lifecycle. A customer’s loyalty and satisfaction will bump up another notch because their needs were met during delivery and installation, and they now have an operational printer that was effortlessly installed. In addition, in the support stage the customer sees different options depending on the state of the printer. Since the printer is a “smart,” connected device, it can report errors and issues and the iPhone menu can shift to provide support functions.
The future of connected machines is rapidly approaching. By connecting products to the cloud, consumers can have a more engaging and meaningful experience because their product is tracking the entire customer lifecycle, from beginning to end. By gathering data about interactions with customers, connected products can use that information to improve customer loyalty.
This post originally appeared on Wired.
Learn more about connecting customer to the Cloud with the Quick Peek at the Salesforce App Ebook at the link below.
