Even customers are wired to remember the negative, you can make a positive customer experience with your brand more memorable. You can influence your customers to remember the value in what you do for them. In subtle and consistent ways.
Customer Service
Business to Everyone – Offering an online solution as a business-ready consumable
The traditional B2B Customer is changing. The distinction between business user and consumer itself is blending. With an increasing mobile workforce who use smart phones and tablets as well as the practice of Bring-Your-Own-Device, products and services now exist where the user decides whether it’s used for business or personal use, and floats between the two. This customer wants the splash and accessibility that has traditionally been the realm of B2C, while retaining the professionalism and reliability of a B2B offering.
Make Your Customer the Hero of the Story
I was having a conversation recently with another Founder about how to perform superior customer engagement in a B2B environment. What slipped off my tongue without really thinking a great deal about it was that a key way to build a strong relationship with your customer and get repeat business is to make your customer look good in their own organization. (I added, it’s probably something you want to do for your boss too, but that’s for another conversation)
Treat your Customer’s Information as Treasure
My birthday is the 5th day of some month. So I was surprised and took notice when LinkedIn included in an announcement email to congratulate me on my birthday this month. I didn’t remember giving them my birthday, but I’ve had the account so long I thought maybe I gave it as account verification information. I presumed it was the usual headache that can arise out of the fact that the US represents dates as month/day and the UK/CAN represents dates as day/month.
Improve your customer’s experience by avoiding these easy mistakes
I had a huge problem this winter with the heating in my condominium apartment. It was made all the more unbearable because my engagement with the people who were responsible to fix it was way below par. I usually try to write a post that reflects positively on what to do – this prompted me to write a few basics on what you shouldn’t do.
Tackle escalations head-on, with a calm attitude and the purposefulness of intention
Be transparent and direct when discussing risks and issues with executives. (It’s also important to be tactful, timely and aware of priorities so as not to be creating tempests in teapots.) Management can deal with problems when they know about them. Problems arise when they don’t know about issues and the potential impacts. Ask any Surgeon or ER doctor.
Mapping CX – Charting the real journey of your engagement with Customers
Experience Mapping – whether on behave of the user or customer – is a relatively new concept . So there aren’t a lot of automated tools out there to do this. What you do find is that this is often offered as a consulting service or done as an occasional exercise by internal teams.
Do you have an OLA between your Marketing and Sales teams?
A written OLA can be used as an input into a requirements document of any Marketing Automation tool / Sales Automation tool interface project. All too often, these two departments use different tools that are more tailored to their specific functions. In order for information to pass easily between them an actual technical interface is typically required. If the operational process is understood and the necessary information to be passed between the teams is documented, then building this interface and setting up appropriate reporting tools can be done more effectively.