So you have successfully listened to your customers – heard all of their pain points, success stories and concerns. So what do you do now? Learn, according to ACCENT Marketing Services, a performance marketing company for brands that are passionate about customer engagement.
While listening is imperative in turning first time customers into loyal brand advocates, companies should also recognize the importance of learning about their customers, as explained in ACCENT’s Continuous Engagement Improvement Process, which couples ACCENT’s resources with a data-driven approach to help brands get the most out of their customer relationships. According to ACCENT officials, companies ought to go through five steps when trying to reach their customers: listen, learn, connect, influence and optimize. Each stage is centered upon making each customer interaction more intelligent and engaging than the last, regardless of the interaction channel.
A few weeks ago, Tim Searcy, chief executive officer of ACCENT, talked to TMCnet about the need to listen and this week he shed light on the next stage of the customer engagement process, learn.
“In the second step, once you have listened to what your customers have to say, it’s time to get more information about them,” Searcy said in a podcast. “We start by reviewing their interaction history with the client and analyzing all the known transactional, demographic and behavioral data – creating what we referred to before as a singular set of information around the customer.”
“You also want to review those customer issues, concerns and questions,” he added. “Sometimes that comes from measuring what’s going on in the social media world, but it’s also around any data that has been collected about customer satisfaction and previous engagement. We want to identity some optimal engagement messaging and identify which channels are going to be best for the customer.”
The pivotal difference between listening and learning is that listening is about collecting information about the customer from every possible source and learning is about taking that information and making sense of it. The second step, learning, involves analyzing information to determine what to do with it in the future and drawing conclusions about the information to make better decisions.
“The analysis should be designed to give you a sense of where is your brand engagement say versus your competitor’s,” Searcy said. “Do you have products that create a sense of emotional attachment? You want to sense what the propensity is to buy your brand possibly by product line, possibly by line of business or overall brand image. You want to get a value established around their lifetime, but you can do that as well by looking at purchase histories and groupings of purchase histories to see what the potential lifetime value could be.”
For more on the “learn” step of the Continuous Engagement Improvement Process and on what are some of the key learnings that brands should be looking for during this step, click here to download the podcast.
Edited by Chris Freeburn