With more mobile devices than humans in the world and over a billion people participating in social networks, today’s customers are more connected and networked than ever before. They’re also more knowledgeable and better informed.
With increasing frequency, customers are shunning vendor-owned sources of information and tapping the wisdom of crowds to make buying decisions. In fact, 57 percent of the buying process is completed before a first interaction with sales. Social media, peer groups and community sites have taken a lead role in shaping perceptions about brands, products, and companies:
- 79 percent of customers spend at least 50 percent of their shopping time researching products online
- 53 percent of them abandoned an in-store purchase due to negative sentiment they uncovered
Social media accounts for 50 percent of all Web usage and has surpassed email in both global reach and usage. Marketers that effectively harness its power can engage their customers like never before and create unprecedented value for their organizations.
Predict and influence customer behavior. Today’s customers transact with at least two channels in a buying cycle. According to the study, “Omnicommerce: Taking payments to the next level” a whopping 61 percent of U.S. shoppers look at a store online before purchasing anything in a store. Additionally, 35 percent of U.S, shoppers see an item in a store first, check its price and then purchase it online. To accommodate these new purchasing behaviors, organizations must provide customers with the right information at the right time, regardless of channel. Social media provides the ideal platform to do this.
Make every conversation count. As never before, your company can see and be seen, talk and be talked about:
- The Global Fortune 100 are mentioned a total of 10.5 million times per month across social channels.
- 2.4 billion brand conversations take place in America every day.
- 59 percent of consumers in Asia Pacific comment on brands online.
Savvy companies recognize the power of social channels and are leveraging them to predict and influence behavior and respond quickly to customer needs. Using tools that can process billions of social media posts across millions of sites globally, they are extracting structured insights that enable them to quickly discover customer needs and trends and quantifying customer perceptions about products, services and companies to effectively track their market success.
With the right data architecture, marketers can also capture a complete history of customers’ social interactions, prioritize messages received from Facebook and Twitter, and enable collaboration among team members to boost the quality of customer responses.
Are such tools worth investing in? Only if you want to be aware of what your customers and competitors are saying about you. Orknow if you have a service failure quickly. Or proactively respond to and resolve a customer complaintbefore it is made…
Reign in Big Data. Identifying and gathering the right data is not an easy task, but with the help of advanced cloud technology and analytics, it can be done. All too often, an organization may have multiple systems of records with varying degrees of differences in customer information. By partnering with IT, marketing can develop systems to effectively gather customer data, uncover new insights, assess the most effective courses of action and execute them.
Advanced analytical tools and in-memory computing, as an example, have the power to interrogate large data sets quickly. Cloud sales applications provide all the customer informationmarketers need in a central location, available at a glance and delivered in the right context. The latest customer information can be pushed from home base – anytime, anywhere.
By leveraging the flexible deployment of the cloud, companies can pull together a real-time, 360-degree view of their business from both internal and external data sources, then use powerful analytics to uncover hidden market trends and gain customer insights from big data. And they can access this real-time information anywhere, anytime from any device and respond immediately to rapidly changing consumer behavior.
Stop telling. Start listening. The full value of a customer includes not just their purchase history, but also future selections and behavior. The cost of acquiring new customers can be high, and in an era of social media, one irate customer can easily have a negative impact on the purchasing decisions of others as well.
Many businesses fail to make the social media connection and only take into account short term returns when engaging customers. For example, if a customer calls into the call center with an issue, but the call goes poorly and ends with an irate customer, that experience can be easily shared on social channels – potentially costing revenue from more than just one person. In this case, most likely that customer will not conduct any future business with the organization, or at least, minimize it. If the customer has influence on his family or friends, they will persuade others not to do business with the organization. Think passengers stranded on runways who Tweet their discontent…
Engage your customers throughout their journey. Today’s customers engage with an organization via multiple channels. In order to provide a seamless omni-channel customer experience, marketing organizations must clearly define customer journey maps and understand the interaction channels utilized along the way. Customer preference and contextual information from previous interactions must be carried forward and used to engage customers in each step. Needs and desires must be clearly understood. Help must be delivered. Then – and only then – can adviser status and brand loyalty be earned.
Tim Minahan is the Chief Marketing Officer of SAP Cloud, a worlwide provider of software-based solutions.
