It was a week long and I was dedicated, motivated and excited the whole time. [Ok, fine. It was a long week that kicked off with me hallucinating from starvation and included moments where I was ready to tear the door off my fridge - but it ended on a high note with a 5lb weight loss, a hard earned sense of accomplishment and a tear jerking reunion with a bottle of red zin.] Goal met, I’ve moved right along with no real intention of enduring said detox again. But the process has me thinking about the ‘one hit’ relationships we have with certain brands. How can they bring us back after we’ve reached a goal – after we think we’re done?
Using my own experience and preferences as a starting point, I’ve thought of a couple ways that a brand who sells ‘one and done’ products or services could secure my loyalty, re-engage me and make me want to ‘do it all again’:
1) Connect with me during my journey: In the aforementioned example – I wasn’t enrolled in any type of formal program… it was merely a week long eating plan I read about on a blog. Had I enrolled in something formal and relinquished contact information, (ie, email address or phone number) I would have welcomed encouragement during the journey. I had to buy all kinds of exotic ingredients (easier said than done around here - dried bonito flakes? Really?) I also had to organize my meals by preparing them the night before. I was totally immersed in the process each day and would have welcomed an email or text message with tips on how to save time preparing. I would have been delighted if my foursquare check-in at the natural foods store had generated a discount on the incredibly expensive ingredients I had to buy, or even if a consolidated shopping list had magically appeared via text. These types of interactions would have just made the big price tag that much easier to swallow and it would have kept me engaged and encouraged.
2) Know what my results are: Most programs (like this detox) focus on the end game – pure results. So it would make sense if the brand a) knew my actual results b) helped me benchmark the results (I LOVE feeling at least better than average) and c) sent me personalized encouragement. If I had reported my progress in real time (for example on a mobile app) and received feedback and encouragement that was personalized to me “way to go Jenn, just 2 more days until you can reward yourself with a glass of wine.” I would have loved it. No one likes to feel like they are doing it alone. Even some sort of encouragement from others like me would have been really well received too: “You and 10 others are on day 3, see what they have to say, click here…” I would have clicked – if for nothing more to reaffirm that misery loves company.
3) Remind me of my success: So after it’s all said and done, and I’m enjoying my normal diet again – you can bet a timely reminder via email or text: “Those jeans still loose, or is it time for us to break out the juicer again?” would get noticed. Because no, my jeans aren’t loose anymore. (bummer) Point is - remind me of my results and re-engage me.
4) Give me incentive to try again: A split second after remembering how elated I was to fit into my jeans my mind would snap back to how difficult the program was to stick to and how expensive it was. If a brand were serious about customer loyalty and getting me to try the program again, the next logical step would be to incent me with a personalized invitation to come back. That could come in any format – a discount card for my favorite place to buy jeans? (creative!), a coupon to my local whole foods? (not as subtle, but maybe more effective) or most obvious – a discount to re-enroll if there was a fee to start with.
Bottom line: single use products and one hit programs have a huge challenge in creating customer loyalty or repeat business. The very nature of an end goal (like a weight loss program) sort of sets them up for that. Obviously, everyone wants to ‘maintain’ when they reach a personal goal like weight loss or better fitness in general – but very few people are ready to part with money for maintenance if they don’t have to.
My advice: Use the right combination of technology and customer insight to keep customers like me engaged. Be in it with me, remind me of my success and lure me back with incentives. Seems logical, right? The technology to pull this off exists today (insert self serving sentence at end of blog post here.) The question becomes, do brands know how to use the technology that exists to execute on this type of customer loyalty/retention strategy? Hint: it requires multi channel interaction management, adaptive decision support and the ability to pull customer data from anywhere at any time. We will continue this thought on a later post. Right now I have to go juice some beets and chard…
We came away feeling more excited than ever about launching our new apps in the AppExchange! The reoccurring themes we heard during the event that really got us pumped included:
Making everything:
Now: Real-time information shared across channels is the sure fire way to improve efficiency, satisfaction and performance.
Mobile: Delivering the decision support sales and service reps need anytime, anywhere and on any device will continue to differentiate leading organizations
As-a-Service: Freeing teams from the colossal time and expense suck of boxed solutions will empower them to define and execute strategies faster than ever before.
In the coming weeks, we will launch Swyft Mobile for Salesforce as well as, Swyft Contact Center for Salesforce. Both solutions echo the themes we heard at Dreamforce and we are thrilled to be a part of the growing family of apps that extend the possibilities of the Salesforce platform.
We also had a great time interacting with Dreamforce attendees at our booth. We enjoy using social apps like Foursquare to make events more fun, and our promotion included an iPad for one lucky winner that checked in during the event.
Our lucky winner is Rhiannon Bach, VIP Marketing Associate from Harrah’s
(Rhiannon, Now you can chatter on the go and ‘roll like Benioff’… but please - store the iPad somewhere besides your pants!!)
We spend enormous amounts of time helping organizations understand how our technology can help them improve their customer interactions across multiple channels and almost every time, we end up telling a story to help illustrate the point. We decided to take one of our stories and turn it into a short video that can do a little of the explaining on demand. In this video, we explain how to make interactions across mail, the call center and field sales more efficient, profitable and seamless.
It was a great conference with an interesting mix of international and domestic companies and I was given the opportunity to moderate the keynote panel that was focused on maintaining and reinforcing brand integrity across multiple channels. There were a couple of guys on the panel who know a little about brand management: BJ McDonald from Continental Airlines and Bob Simmonds from Disney. Both are responsible for domestic and international contact centers and have to balance answering service questions, delighting customers and being efficient while maintaining a brand image that’s consistent with their online presence, glossy TV spots and the subjective meaning of their brands in the minds of their customers, that’s been built up over years of exposure and investment. Sounds simple, right? —Hardly.
They’re both using old-school techniques (agent incentives and immersive training), as well as, new approaches (social media integration and significant technology investments) to manage this complex challenge. I asked them each to talk about how they position their brand with new employees and the tools they use to support a consistent customer experience (you’ll be able to access the replay on our site soon.)
Although there are clear differences between Disney (who has Cast Members not Agents) and Continental’s approaches there are also some similarities I gleaned that could translate to any consumer facing business: our brand stands for something; it’s important to be consistent and there’s an awareness that the challenge of maintaining the integrity of a brand increases every day with every new social media outlet and passionate blogger.
I also hosted a panel that reviewed how diverse companies had deployed technology to improve loyalty, retention and customer cross-selling. Tapan Dandnaik, the SVP in charge of Mediacom’s customer service centers (http://mediacomcable.com/index.php) talked about his experience with Swyft’s solution, and described how they simultaneously increased cross-sell results while getting more efficient by using real-time decisioning and personalization to guide their agents. Using Swyft their agents make the right recommendations – just in time.
Tapan also shared some really interesting insights on the evolving challenges that agents have in absorbing a tremendous amount of customer and product information, how that’s significantly increased over the past few years and that technology and best practices can bridge the gap. Tapan has brought a six sigma discipline and a financial modeling philosophy to the challenge and that’s clearly driving positive results. (You’ll be able to access a recap of his comments here soon.)
As for the Exhibitor Hall - Swyft’s Foursquare promotion within our booth (http://www.getswyft.com/foursquare/) was a lot of fun. Frankly many attendees were not fully up to speed on Foursquare but dropped by the booth to learn more and play the game. Mathew Ames ended up as the undisputed mayor of the ICCE, and took home a coveted Foursquare Mayor T-shirt. The game was a good conversation starter and folds in well with our emphasis on Swyft for Mobile (http://www.getswyft.com/channels/details/mobile_channel). Jenn (VonHagen our CMO) did a tremendous amount of work to make Foursquare relevant within our platform and is, in my opinion, on the cutting edge of social media marketing for a B to B solution. Look for a similar theme at our booth at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce Cloud Expo (http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF10/cloudexpo/) in December. Stop by if you attend Dreamforce. Steve, Ryan, John and I will all be there. We’ll be highlighting our soon to be announced (or did I just do that?) app Swyft Mobile for Salesforce.com…
I’m always encouraged when our customers discover ways of using our solution that we never envisioned, but add value in unexpected ways. I was talking with a customer the other day and he mentioned that they’ve found some pretty interesting collateral benefits to our solution. In one of their large contact centers they’ve found:
• It’s easier to train new employees on their complex product catalog via our interactive sales guides
• Our service alerts have helped them avoid multiple transfers and extended on-hold times to get the right information
• Agent turn-over is lower after deploying our system, which he attributes to more engaged agents
• They can roll out complex new products and offers, that they would not have considered previously making through agents, without much friction
We have traditionally focused on the benefits to the top-line when using the Swyft solution (sell more = more money) but the benefits to the expense line seem to be just as interesting (do more with less = lower expense).
This client believes that the net result is this: Swyft has significantly moved the needle for them in efficiency and expense savings - both benefits that they hadn’t considered when evaluating our solution. They were focused on selling more, which they’ve done, but, in the current environment, they are also acutely aware of any positive impact to efficiency. He’s been asked to do more with less and it’s nice that we can help…even if that’s a “hidden” benefit.
