Seven ways to foster long-term customer relationships

Better marketing – including suppression lists. Targeting and retargeting are important aspects of every marketing strategy. But targeting loyal customers with irrelevant advertisements not only annoys them, but also wastes precious marketing dollars. The ideal customer-experience solution will provide the marketing team with a suppression list created from systems across the enterprise. This will resolve multiple identities related to the same customer, to engage existing customers with relevant advertisements and exclude those customers from new-user acquisition campaigns.

Customer trust. The first step towards building a loyal customer is to win customer trust. Brands need to be totally transparent about data they collect and how they provide each customer with complete control of their own data. The ideal customer experience solution will create a unified customer profile – including data the customer supplied during the registration process and data the organization has inferred or consolidated from other enterprise systems. It will then give full control of that data to the customer.

Managing consent. Consent is a large and evolving issue for enterprises to manage – especially as jurisdictions introduce different regulations. The well-planned customer journey will capture consent from the outset and automatically add the details to the customer’s profile. The company can then immediately act upon those preferences by ensuring customers are only included in engagement initiatives for which they have provided consent.

Real-time conversion. Here’s a startling statistic: 70 percent of customers abandon their eCommerce carts before they check out. The ideal customer-experience solution will monitor the customer’s journey and predict when they are likely to become a “cart abandonist.” It will then initiate actions to encourage the customer to follow through with the sale, while the customer is still active on the channel.

Identifying customers and prospects with high lifetime value. Repeat customers are not all created equally. Every company wants to identify customers with high lifetime value – and figure out how to acquire more of them. The right solution will classify existing customers, build profiles of them, and then use a “look-alike” approach to identify prospects that are likely to also become high-value customers.

Next-best action for customer service agents. Solving problems and reducing churn is a key role for customer service agents, and these frontline workers do their jobs best when they have access to useful data. The ideal customer-experience solution will unify online and offline data to provide the agent with a complete and up-to-date view of the enterprise’s interactions with that customer. This data includes interactions such as:

• browsing on eCommerce sites, the company’s social media, and other platforms
• purchases, both online and in-store
• fulfillment and delivery
• warranty status
• any contact with the customer, including compliments, questions, or complaints.

When a customer contacts an agent, a well-designed customer-experience solution should apply AI to the issue and the customer profile, then suggest to the agent the best action or actions to take in order to satisfy the customer and build loyalty.

Reading the signs to reduce churn. Any enterprise that relies upon a subscription model needs to reduce churn. The best customer-experience solution will employ AI to read signals – such as a call or email to customer service – and score each customer on their likelihood to cancel. AI can then blend this score with the customer’s lifetime value and make recommendations about how to better engage with that customer. This engagement – in the form of personalized content, delivered across the most appropriate channel – can reduce the potential for churn.

These are just a few of the ways in which a well-designed solution can enhance the relationship between companies and customers. What’s more, these are all real-world examples – drawn from the experiences of clients who have deployed Data-driven Customer Experience by Capgemini.

Data-driven Customer Experience empowers enterprises to take full advantage of interconnected data while building trust, transparency, and long-term relationships with customers. It collects all relevant customer-first and enterprise functions and related data into unified customer profiles. These profiles uniquely identify each customer and provide a personalized, global view of their relationship with an organization’s brands. It does this in real-time to turn raw data into more reliable, actionable insights. And it preserves privacy and ensures compliance with all relevant regulatory requirements.

With Data-driven Customer Experience, Capgemini’s Insights & Data professionals are ready to help organizations transform their customers’ journeys. Capgemini supports its clients through every step of the process – from creating the strategy and operating model to selecting the best mix of technology components and data platforms, to implementing the solution, training those who use it, and measuring its effectiveness.