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As part of driving business revenue and growth, organizations have realized that loyalty plays an important factor. However, just retaining loyal customers isn't fueling accelerated growth. Organizations need to leverage their loyal base to attract new customers by building ambassadors and advocates. In this day and age where social media has become a key source of information, driving advocacy programs through social channels fuels growth and drives higher revenue for business. So, lets take a look at how we can help build customer advocates and fuel growth.
At the core of where the problem lies is how customers are connected with your business and services. Upon a purchase of your product, customers are increasingly demanding an ease of access to services through multiple channels that you engage them with. They want to use identities that they are connecting elsewhere such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. Simply put, they don't want to remember another set of credential that you provide them with. As a result, providing flexible authentication mechanisms that leverage social identities has become a necessity for organization as part of their on-boarding process. In a recent survey done by Gartner, more than half of retail merchants have built capabilities that allow for social identities as a mechanism for their customers to connect with their businesses. This becomes particularly important for organizations that have multiple customer touch points based on the business units and groups that interact with customers.
Once on-boarded, customers are seeking avenues where your services are able to recognize them and personalize an experience for them. Customers are seeking simple ways where their preferences in their social channels are used for personalizing their experience with your services. As part of the customer on-board, customers can authorize to share this information such that businesses can get their social preferences that can help segment a customer to drive personalization and a better user experience. Such preferences can also be updated on an on-going basis as well augmented by interactions that customers with your services. Social preferences combined with service interactions such as purchases, cases etc.. help segmenting customers and drive appropriate service levels. And of course privacy matters, so ensure you are transparent in terms of usage of their preferences and profiles.
The next step in this evolution is to driving personalized services to customers. Loyalty through coupons and rewards are fast being replaced by personalized services that factors into account the discounts and service levels. This greatly simplifies the process where customers find what is suitable or appropriate for them. Look at trends in retail marketing where such personalization based on past purchases and social preferences are helping drive much higher purchases by customers. By personalizing and simplifying user experience, organizations can now drive better loyalty and retention of customers.
While driving personalized and simplified experience is critical to build loyalty, it is also important that organizations establish an engagement platform that allows businesses to have conversations to help improve their products and services. Such engagement platforms allow customers to be part of the process and have a sense of belonging. Also, allowing for proper transparency and creating seamless processes that allow for customers to be recognized for their ideas and feedback.
All of the above, results in something truly profound where customers become your ambassador within the social channels. Again, the use of social identities greatly help as it makes this process very seamless. All the more, by adopting social identities the organizations ability to create and promote advocacy is far greater and impactful.
About the Author
Suchin Rengan is a lead for the Identity and Access Management go to market solutions within the Customer Success Group at Salesforce.
