The number of smart devices worldwide is exploding. According to Gartner, the typical family home could contain more than 500 connected devices by 2022. With such a huge number of channels through which customers and brands can interact, it’s easy to become overwhelmed on both sides. How do you effectively engage with customers when their attention is likely to be diverted by another device? How can you react in the split second they’re ready with a contextually appropriate message that drives the desired action?
These are just some of the questions that I answer in my recent webinar, “Optimizing Customer Engagement Across the Enterprise.”
In it, I go into detail about how a holistic approach is necessary for effective customer engagement, especially because of the high – and increasing – number of possible channels. Only a truly comprehensive cross-channel program can help craft the kind of customer experiences required to drive loyalty and higher-value interactions. This becomes especially true when your window of opportunity has shrunk and continues to do so.
You often have as little as 100 milliseconds to provide an experience that makes your customer’s life easier. If you can’t act in that timeframe, then the opportunity has already passed and you’ve missed your chance.
Getting to the point where you can react within such a small timeframe requires intense preparation and a bit of luck. This preparation takes the form of gathering as much data about your customers as possible, analyzing it, and then using the results of that analysis to execute as near to flawlessly as possible.
The good thing about data gathering is that people are generally fine with brands having their personal information—so long as there’s a powerful value exchange, of course. Once you’ve got the data, applying machine learning can drive compelling insights at a very high cadence, with little human intervention. Machine learning technology, which is fast becoming included in more digital marketing solutions, allows you to internally test your results and succeed more effectively than ever before.
Leveraging machine learning for your analytics then can bring you to the next best action quicker than manual analysis. Getting to this next best action is vital, especially because, if you only have a fleeting moment to engage with customers, then the message you’re delivering has to be precisely on-point every single time. And this has to be done across inbound and outbound channels, at the speed of the customer, every moment of every day.
At Redpoint, we accomplish this by ingesting data from multiple sources into a single cross-channel database and conducting in-line analytics, which allows you to orchestrate interactions across the various modes of engagement. The ability to do in-line analytics, we feel, is key because it enables us to create a single point of operational control for marketers. The Redpoint™ customer engagement platform offers this single point of operational control and a single point of data control, for without that, data silos are created and it becomes impossible to execute a coherent cross-channel customer engagement strategy.
Brands that execute effectively in this new always-on age of customer engagement stand to benefit enormously from real- or near-real time insight into their customers’ thoughts, behaviors, and preferences. The ones that don’t will continue to miss the mark on moments of engagement, lag in improvements and suffer from customer attrition. What kind of engagement do you want your brand to be remembered for? The choice is all yours.
