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From the eyes of your millennial customer (3/4): Reward our Loyalty

Capgemini
2019-09-23

This article is the third of a four part series about millennial customers’ expectations for Retail. If you have not yet read Part One and Two, please view it now. Each article will discuss an expectation and recommendations for aligning your business and IT strategy to meet the desires of your customers using Salesforce. Each customer experience topic is supported by research by Gartner and Forbes.

Expectation 3: Rewarding our loyalty

Continually discounting your product does not necessarily uphold your brand integrity, but at the same time, millennials do appreciate recognition for our loyalty. The difficulty is, what is “loyalty” really?

Customer Loyalty from a business perspective is typically that customers continue to spend money with your brand. According to Net Promoter Score (NPS), if your customer scores 9 or 10 out of ten point scale, they are likely to also promote your brand (please see chart below). Yet, NPS survey data can be inaccurate. If you look at people who take surveys they usually are very dissatisfied or satisfied, while typically the customers who are in the middle of the scale do not even bother to fill in the form. That’s why retailers need to turn to other ways to measure loyalty, and what better way to do so than by rewarding those who give you the additional feedback you need to make better customer service decisions.

If you took my advice to create Customer 360 Profiles in article 1  and to establish diverse products/services in article 2, now it’s time to get feedback from your customers about your new portfolio. But as we discussed, attaining the majority of your customers’ feedback is difficult and a simple survey request will no longer help you achieve your aim.

So, why not reward your customers for giving feedback by using a Loyalty Program? Instead of saying, “take this survey,” you can say, “we want to reward you for your valuable feedback.” Now, I’m not talking just another loyalty card that I’ll sign up for and never use because I physically need to bring it into the store.

Your Loyalty Program needs to meet millennials where we hang out in the digital world.

Luckily for you, with Salesforce’s acquisitions of Heroku and Mulesoft, you have the ability and freedom to create as custom of an experience on your mobile app as you want. Heroku’s goal is to write, deploy, manage, and scale next-generation web apps (Salesforce). Alongside Mulesoft, that enables “customers to connect all of the information throughout their enterprise across all public and private clouds and data sources” which enhances innovation (Salesforce).

So, let’s imagine for a minute what these technical abilities mean for your business. You can create an app that meets the variety of needs of your customers and the information between your app and the rest of your digital platforms will sync. So, as your customer provides more feedback on the app, your Customer Service team can proactively address their needs, your Product team can create, edit, or delete products that are no longer relevant, and your IT team can adapt your app to your users’ needs.

So, time to create the app, right? Wait one second! First, we need to analyze your customer insights from your Customer 360 Profiles and have a discussion with your diverse team. Why will your millennial customer want to use your app? A good way to start is to understand how the Loyalty app might impact your customer’s journey. By drawing a Customer Journey Map, you can see how your customer currently interacts with your brand and provides feedback.

  • Do they provide feedback to you directly, via a third party, to a customer service agent, or to a social media channel?
  • When do they typically give feedback?
  • How do you respond to your customer’s feedback across these channels?
  • How do you currently provide guidance to your retail associate and customer service agents on how to handle customer’s feedback?

This is where Salesforce Service Cloud’s omni-channel solution is incredibly useful. It allows you to have a consistent voice across all of your feedback channels and also to have a system of record. You can use Einstein to further examine insights as your system of record grows with customer feedback overtime. You also need to know what to ask Einstein. For example, “what were the most common feedback themes for this year?” The answers from this question could lead to compelling reasons why millennials might use your Loyalty app.

Let’s assume you received this feedback from Anne on Twitter: “I just do not understand why my wedding shoes did not arrive by the estimated delivery date. Now, I won’t have my something blue for my big day!” If you have omni-channel and social case creation enabled and configured in Service Cloud, the tweet will create a case automatically and assign it to the next available agent. From the Service Cloud Console, your agent can see all of the details of Anne’s order and Anne’s 360 Customer Profile.

Let’s learn more about Anne. Anne is a millennial in her mid-30’s, moved from New York to Amsterdam a year ago, and has previously purchased wedding jewelry. There is a chat conversation attached to her profile where she asks an agent if the shoes will arrive by September 13th because she is getting married on September 30th. The agent assures Anne that the estimated delivery date is between September 7th and 13th, and wishes her congratulations on her wedding day. The current agent working on Anne’s case can refer to a Salesforce Knowledge article about a similar case where shoes were late for a specific event, and determine if this solution will resolve Anne’s case quickly and with the highest Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). Empowered with a good understanding of Anne, the agent replies to Anne’s tweet that he will contact her immediately, calls Anne and apologizes, informs her that he will send Anne a replacement pair free of charge with expedited shipping so that it will arrive on September 20th in time for her wedding, and follow-up with the rest of his team to determine what went wrong behind the scenes.

Let’s take the same scenario and imagine if Anne could follow-up on her order status via a Loyalty App. On September 12th, Anne gets nervous because her shoes have still not arrived, so she logs into her app to check the status of her delivery. The order says ‘Out for Delivery’ and the timestamp reads ‘Today’. Later that day, Anne is at the movies with her fiance, and forgets about the delivery. When she leaves the theater and turns her phone on, her app sends her a delivery push notification: ‘Delivery Attempted – second attempt will be made tomorrow’. Anne clicks on the notification and the app opens to show that the delivery was attempted at 21:00.

The following day, Anne waits at home for the 4 hour delivery window because she does not want to miss the second attempt. Her shoes do not arrive. Instead of posting an upset message on Twitter, Anne decides to troubleshoot on the app. When she looks at her delivery status it indeed says ‘Out for Delivery’ but it already 22:00 and Anne doubts any more deliveries will happen today. At the bottom of the Order Status screen is a set of feedback icons, where in one click Anne can give the order a ‘Thumbs Up’ or ‘Thumbs Down’. She clicks the red ‘Thumbs Down,’ which initiates the Einstein Chat Bot in the app. Anne begins a conversation with the chat bot, while her case is waiting in the queue.  The Einstein Chat Bot gathers the initial information and verification that the live agent will need to solve Anne’s case. In a few minutes, Anne is connected to an agent who is once again empowered with additional context about Anne’s case and knowledge with a recommended solution. The agent resolves Anne’s case and sets up a reminder in Service Cloud to reach out to Anne after the estimated delivery date to ensure she receives her prized purchase.

A few days later, Anne posts this image and @ mentions the shoe maker with her gratitude: “Just in time my something blue to bring in the new #annetogeorge”.

Technology should always be people-first. Your Loyalty App has saved the day and in process Anne has become a promoter of your brand. The reality is there can always be shipment delays or customer service issues, but if you enable your service agents to have empathy and to solve cases quickly, even the worst case scenario can become a success story for your brand. As you can see, every digital solution here was meant to support the customer’s experience and the agent’s abilities.

Want to learn more about how we can partner to bring your customer to the forefront of your business? Send me a note!

Here are some ways we can partner with you to achieve this vision:

  • Mobile Application Design & Development, Customer Experience Strategy, Contact Center Enhancement

Much Gratitude to the Following Authors:

Read the other blogs of the series From the eyes of your millennial customer (1/4): Increasing Brand Recognition From the eyes of your millennial customer (2/4): Diversity of Products & Services More on Salesforce Learn more about the Capgemini Salesforce partnership and our Salesforce practice Register for our Salesforce Winter release ’20 event!