The entire insurance community is wrapping its head around the big disruptions: shared economy, autonomous vehicles, Internet of things and so forth. These new models and technologies will in fact change the industry. That an industry with “rich heritage” (overheard term meant to convey so much about a more established industry like insurance) is focused on these changes is a good thing. But there is something simpler and more base that needs to change insurance: Our Unified Customer Experience Expectation.
Our Unified Customer Experience Expectation
When I lived in New York back in the day when the Beastie Boys, Grandmaster Melle Mel, and Afrika Bambatta roamed the earth, we would call car service to get from Brooklyn anywhere. It sucked. The call sucked. The not knowing when or if the guy would show up sucked. The air freshener sucked. You get the picture.
Now we use the Uber (or Lyft, ) app. I don’t have to talk with anyone. The darn thing tells me where my driver is and simply works with as low a ‘cognitive load’ as possible. It is the definition of easy, and it’s the definition of the customer experience I expect in all of my transactions. Business executives are getting wise to the fact that it’s no longer acceptable to have “best in class” on anything including customer experience. Customer expectations don’t stay within a class. It’s not okay for one type of service to suck just because no one else in the industry delivers “Amazon-level” experience.
We now have a “unified customer experience expectation.” The simplicity and elegance of the ride service app of today means that my rental car experience must measure up (not yet), my roadside assistance experience must measure up, my restaurant reservation system (thanks OpenTable) must measure up.
Brands that aim to be “best in class” and willing to settle for being in the top three within their industry, are missing the trend. Customers expectations are set by the best of what they experience in their lives and that bar is constantly going up as VC money looks for ways to disrupt and dislodge slow-moving business.
Build a method for a cycle of meeting and exceeding the expectations of the new connected customer. That means aim towards “best” not “best in class.”
First, you have to decide if “account-based marketing” is really a “thing.” Unlike other marketing channel disciplines or specialisms, account-based marketing (ABM), doesn’t require a whole new set of technologies. Sure, there are emerging tech and service providers who specialize and sell under the promise of ABM and provide valuable new capabilities that play a part. But ABM is more of a strategy, data, integration and process story. You cannot just buy “technology platform x,” integrate via IT and train your marketers. Which means it’s hard.
For B2B marketing, not much could be more alluring than the idea that I can target the right people at companies x, y, and z with valuable content and advertising with sequenced precision and churn up demand just waiting for a savvy salesperson to follow up with the “two’ of the “one-two-punch.” Clearly this approach promises to create warm leads, shorten sell cycles, build interest or even preference to make selling oh, so much more, efficient.
“In its purest form, account based marketing has been around forever. Account based marketing is simply instead of fishing with nets, we’re fishing with spears. You identify exactly the prospects you want to do business with and then you market very precisely and narrowly to them directly. I think we have a renewed interest in ABM now, because there’s an advancement in tools and technology that make it a little easier to execute – but the idea of doing target account selling and target account marketing is not new”
“Account-Based Marketing is used by B2B marketers to identify and target the accounts they value the most. ABM solutions typically include account-based data and technology to help companies attract, engage, convert and then measure progress against customers and prospects.”
Targeting accounts vs. segments
Let’s say you sell to mid-size plastics manufacturers. To reach them via digital marketing, you would create a continuously more clever way to reach “segments” that include the people at the type of companies you want to sell to. But your sales team already has a prospect list - specific accounts - they want to go after. Let’s say you have about 300 companies on that list. With ABM, you would be targeting the people who work at those 300 companies with more personalized marketing.
One of the biggest challenges is achieving the scale of impressions and frequency that trigger enough data to be generated and released by partners like LinkedIn and others. There are challenges with achieving the kind of scale of impressions that many ad networks rely on to work and that second problem of getting the data out of the networks to pass along to sales. These hurdles will be reduced quickly over time.
Sorting the most valuable partners vs. the “frothy” ones
A lot of the existing marketing technology stack makes parts of ABM possible. From personalization on the front end of the marketing side to the lead nurturing of the CRM end of things. The trick is to figure out where any additional value-add comes from and how to add that without needlessly investing in new tech or too many new partners. Clearly, targeting accounts (companies) or leads (individuals) across the Web is a valuable piece of the pie as is funneling that data as to what content and advertising they were exposed to/showed interest in to the sales teams and their CRM. Companies like Demandbase might then be a reasonable choice, for example.
The renewed version of account-based marketing is still new. Clear authority on how to do it and what it takes is not yet clearly established. Our good friends at Forrester are starting to unpack the category. You can find a good report here if you are a customer. Selecting the right partners will require a lot of DIY exploration and even some ‘try and learn.’
Connecting marketing to sales and driving action
Ultimately, the promise of ABM is locked up in just how good you are about sharing data with sales and driving the sales force to actions. Without a contemporary and aggressive sales force who get what the marketing engagement with leads can do for their own efforts you won’t be able to go too far with ABM (or any other appreciable marketing and sales integration). And without a good CRM platform to take in the marketing data and trigger other sales actions, you may be paralyzed with too much manual data tracking.
Oh, and don’t forget actual sales tracking and likely control group testing you will need to do to document the benefits of the ABM investment. Not to pile on, but if you have super-long sales cycles with complexity in terms of how many influencers weigh in on a purchase, there is little about ABM that is going to make that much easier.
“ABM requires even greater alignment between sales and marketing, but that doesn’t mean that aligning sales and marketing is harder with ABM. In fact, it's easier. The results from companies adopting ABM back up this. A survey by LeanData in 2015 suggests sales teams using ABM are 20% more likely to trust attribution reported by marketing and 20% more likely to understand marketing’s goals. The marketers also said they found sales followed up on 25% more leads.”
The price of success
What does success look like? More sales? More effective sales? All because of what? Marketing. Who could be against that? Think about it. The tension between marketing and sales is there for a reason. Sales is convinced that they are solely responsible for sales. Marketing purports to assist in ways that are just a chore to document. Ultimately, marketing aims to scale the impact of sales meaning that sales doesn’t have to grow to achieve the same impact, it actually shrinks. Sometimes it’s hard to get the sales force excited about the implications of all that.
Clearly, these three are all connected. They reflect a shift in financial services away from product-centric marketing towards customer-centered marketing. To be customer-centered we must know our prospects and customers and deliver relevant services and experience to them. That means personalized content and services.
But anyone who has wrestled with creating a more personalized Web experience for anonymous visitors (prospects) and creating a personalized omni-channel experience for known customers can speak to the complexity of the task. It challenges even the most mature marketing organization. Then there is financial services, if you know what I mean.
So, is marketing personalization hard? You betcha. How hard? Darn hard.
Personalizing to anonymous users
Someone follows an organic search result about planning for business continuity in small businesses. When they arrive at the site, they should not only get the content they are after but other small business content as they move through the site.
A user clicks and reads a series of home and boat safety content on the site. The next time they visit, they should receive more home and boat content and be spared the chore of clicking past enterprise business content that is not relevant.
We want to pick up on signals from people we don’t yet know visiting our Web sites and draw reasonable conclusions about who they are in order to give them the most relevant experience.
The biggest challenge towards personalizing the experience for someone we don’t yet know is deciding the segments that matter to personalize against and what we do to personalize to those segments. So, pretty much the whole thing is a big challenge.
“Other than showing return visitors product categories they already looked at instead of whatever is on sale that day, the strategy for what you do in response to any data point is highly unclear, as soon as you go beyond basics.
So what if you know that I listen to podcasts, work in Manhattan and just got married? Will any of that help you figure out how to best sell me something? Because I am a man, does it mean I like to see other men wearing clothes? Perhaps I’m shopping for my wife. How can you know? Are you going to rely on my returning to the website after showing interest in something, therefore only personalizing for a fraction of visitors?”
Personalizing to customers
We should know a lot about our customers. Many businesses did not establish central data profiles for their customers and are trying to catch up. There is a terrific example where many companies could have set these up ten years ago. The cost of catching up continues to accrue.
The three big challenges of delivering a strong and increasingly personal experience to customers include:
Integrating multiple data sources to establish an always-contemporary view of the customer
“A Forrester report revealed that while 87 percent of CMOs anticipate the need to integrate customer data into their digital strategy over the next four years, only 16 percent currently do so.
So what makes personalization difficult? Data silos pose the biggest obstacle. The fact that customer activity takes place across so many different platforms — social, web, mobile, email, e-commerce and CRM — makes it extraordinarily challenging for marketers to get a single, coherent view of the customer and understand the context of the interaction with the company.”
Just think about the data that would be the most helpful to know to get marketing personalization right:
All the customer’s sales and service data – what do they own and how have we interacted with them
Their demographic, geographic and household circumstances – what is the context of their daily lives
Key life events like moving, college and more – what disruptive changes do they face
Their stated and behavioral preferences – content, settings, delivery, channels
Their digital and social channel behavior – what they actually do online
Their social media profiles – what they say and do online and how influential they may be
That shopping list of data comes from very different stores, so-to-speak. Getting it all together and relating it in a view of the customer that is always growing is, well, hard.
Connecting the experience across channels (e.g. what they receive via email relates to their Web experience)
We all want an “omni-channel” world where we can start a conversation or service transaction with a client via phone or email and have it continue via social or a customer portal. Conceptually, we get it. Let customers determine which channels we communicate with them on. It just isn’t that easy. Using marketing automation tools like Salesforce and Maximyser, we can sync up the email with the Web site. But connecting the call center and social channels are chores unto themselves.
Creating the rules to trigger content and services via all channels to the right customer
When does one prospect receive a specific Web experience? When does a customer receive a sequence of emails in response to some behavior (e.g. they showed an interest in smart home technology and would now benefit from some follow-up information)?
Remember, this is 'marketing automation' and we are trying to develop rules or triggers that cause different content or messages to fire based upon what we know about our visitors. Developing those triggers and monitoring how well they work such that we are not inadvertently annoying customers with irrelevant or poorly-timed content or messages is important and hard. And trigger-based marketing is a bit of a blunt instrument.
"In a trigger campaign, a user’s action (such as a click, email open, pageview, etc) triggers the marketing automation software to perform an action – such as send a specific email or show a specific piece of content. This type of marketing requires a marketing automation tool, like Marketo or Hubspot for instance, that uses this basic set of user information to personalize content....
...A reason that trigger-driven personalization can be ineffective is that the content triggered to the visitor is predefined based a persona they may fit, rather than the actual indications of their wants or needs."
There are plenty of other challenges but these seem to be some of the big ones. Its one thing to acknowledge the obvious - that more personalized experiences will serve customers better. It's another thing to break this down into a practical strategy and start to implement i. That part is hard.
Well-designed apps that actually meet an unmet need tend to stand out from the crowd. Countable rises above so many apps out there. If you are a citizen of the United States, I highly recommend downloading it. I have become very active as it has a great alert system, and it answered my big question very early in my use.
Initially, I doubted if my simple input of comments on a particular issue was really visible to anyone. I know that Countable is trying to stimulate a community within the app. I suspect that will be more vibrant over time. Users can follow users and so forth. But that wasnt what I was most interested in. My biggest questions was whether my comments were actually sent to my representatives. Once I voted within the app and entered a few comments, I quickly received an automated email reply from my senator thanking me for my input. The app does deliver the mail.
What it is:
Countable is a mobile app that alerts you to which votes are happening now in Congress and how your Senator or Representative votes on the issues. I gives you real-time access to your government and makes it easy for your POV to be heard. It aims to help make governing more transparent and our congress people more accountable.
What it does well:
Tells you how your congress people are voting on specific bills
Alerts you to pending votes, debates or current topics and solicits your comments to send to your congress people
Increases the value (reach + engagement) of your advocacy by requesting you to create a video of your POV and sharing your POV via social channels
Provides advocacy widgets that can be easily embedded in any Web site
If you are concerned about how your views are represented, the current state of our government, or what can we do to positively affect change and "show up" as citizens, Countable might be a wise download.
What’s your preference – mobile app or mobile web site? If you are like me, I appreciate the quickness and focus of a well-designed app. And I am happy to discover a well-design mobile web site. Both, in other words.
“…32.6% of US mobile device users prefer to use both a mobile app and a mobile browser at different times. Taking a closer look, 19.6% of respondents said they preferred a mobile browser, and 23.1% of mobile device users said they favored mobile apps. Some 24.7% said they had no preference.”
Why do we like both? The Quixley study found:
“When it came to why users liked mobile apps, 28.3% said they provide a better user experience. Additionally, respondents liked that apps offer access to more features and capabilities and that they have push notifications and alerts.
… Some 20.5% of respondents said they didn’t like that mobile browsers weren’t as fast as an app. The fact that the user experience wasn’t as rich and there were no push notifications were other reasons respondents disliked mobile browsers.”
The future of either
With consumer behavior clearly split, what is a major brand to do when forming a sustainable mobile strategy to support marketing and customer experience? No one wants to invest in a costly strategy that may quickly become obsolete. Small, smart devices like phones aren’t going away any time soon. The size of the screen may continue to stretch or squeeze, but the utility of a hand held, pocketable, connected device will not diminish any time soon.
The browser-based Web continues to be a tremendous access point for information. Given ubiquitous connectivity to the Internet, the mobile web will remain important for the foreseeable future.
That leaves mobile apps. Will they be around in 5 years?
There is really no way to know this for certain. When you read the many POVs on line they really fall into three buckets:
The mobile web advocates who believe the feature set of the mobile web will improve and make apps obsolete. These views tend to oversimplify the many types of customer relationships and often ignore the service brand
Those that acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of both native apps and mobile web. These tend to support the notion that both will continue to evolve for some time.
The innovation enthusiasts who see an evolving future for apps with new streaming capabilities, Web interoperability and new app form factors around notifications and alerts.
If you have an enduring relationship with a customer via service like a bank, an insurance company, a credit card company, then you can likely find a compelling business case for a mobile app. It improves your chances of delivering additional value and a superior customer experience. Just notifications makes the app worthwhile. Add the quickness of a well-designed app and the ability to push updates and the strength of the app in a service relationship is clear.
Personally, I wouldn’t get too wrapped up in analyzing the ROI based upon current development costs. Those will go down. Third party app providers will make it even cheaper to deliver white label solutions. If you are a service brand, you no longer have to aspire to become one of the top 50 apps to ever hope that your customers use you. You deliver service that customers need and provided you improve that via a mobile app, they will use you when it matters most. You can even expand the definition of what matters to them.
Create great apps for your customers, it's worth it
Mobile apps will likely evolve and continue to deliver a faster, more focused customer experience. If you are a service brand and want to improve your customer experience, then create and sustain a great app experience even as you improve the mobile web experience. Customers have spoken.
Along with 170,000 other people, I am fresh back from CES 2017. Before I left, I had some idea of what to expect there. I had three missions during the show. One was to shoot some video with our partners at CNET for our continued focus on Smart Home tech. One mission was to look more broadly at trends that may affect our company’s (Travelers) contribution to making a safer world for our customers and communities. That includes new marketing ideas. The final mission was to look more broadly at ideas and how people are pursuing innovations that may matter in small and large ways. And I also get to peek at cool concept cars like the one above from Toyota.
But CES 2017 is a big show - 2.47 million net square feet, traffic slowdowns that make jumping between venues an hour-long adventure, and a ton of hustle that makes recognizing the important ideas in the forest of pitches just plain hard.
Here are three round-ups from different smart sources and what they saw there. Each delivers a different POV that adds value and goes beyond the same old product list.
CB Insights make it easy to see inside the black box of investment and get a sense of where investors are placing their bets. Presuming that many of these venture capitalists, corporate investors and bankers are analytical and thoughtful in their rigor, these choices may reflect where smart money goes. That may include Netatmo and its home weather station.
We would work with the gang at CNET so I have gotten to know their smart insights from Brian Cooley’s view on tech and automotive to Rich Brown’s hands-on knowledge from running the CNET Smart Home. Here is a great POV from Executive Editor Rich Brown on how to think about how “smart” many of the smart home contenders are.
I love that Wired even focuses on design. Here @Lizstins covers products that have some authentic design excellence. That type of curation is hugely valuable as great design is one predictor of user adoption and business success.
(the photo is from Amy Lombard for Wired; she does a terrific job)
We have replaced the marketing and sales funnel with the buyer journey. After three years of re-framing funnel references to buyer journey terms, using key slides consistently in presentation after presentation and sharing outside-in thinking on the customer/buyer journey, we have injected the idea into our lexicon.
And still, there is a long road ahead to fully develop and apply this newer, customer-centered approach to how we market and sell.
We have room to grow in terms of actually analyzing and using journey maps in practical ways. Journey maps can inform the work of several departments within the enterprise. That means it’s key to get buy-in across these groups to create and apply journey maps. Otherwise you risk losing the department IP wars that often spring up as groups look to establish their own way of doing things. That one detail – journey maps used across departments – can mean complex budget negotiations between groups as you decide who maintains the research and creates any derivative materials.
One of the reasons the sales funnel persisted for so long is that it was so generic that no one owned it inside the enterprise. Of course, being generic meant that it wasn’t particularly useful at understanding any customer who wasn’t ready to buy that day.
Integrating the buyer journey in the organization is its own journey. I certainly don’t have it all figured out. Here are some learnings that may make ingesting it in a big organization more successful:
Use research to create a shared understanding of the problem: Buyers are researching solutions earlier and earlier. That means the span of time when they begin research to actually buying something is likely longer than you think. Customer research can reveal this along with the various drivers that help folks make progress in their journey.
Start with simple concepts to articulate a new view: We all know that the influences on a final buying decision and the steps that buyer can take can get crazy complicated. Remember how simple the funnel was? It’s important to introduce a new view that is simple and only tries to make 3-4 initial points (the diagram above is one example of a purposely over-simplified view).
Identify practical and simple applications: No one needs a new academic exercise within the company. How will the journey be used? Organizing a content strategy in marketing? Defining a channel strategy? Informing the user experience of the Web sites? Structuring a sales approach? Pick 1-2 tactical applications and start with those.
Share the IP with no strings attached: Whatever research, slides, frameworks, spreadsheets that come out of journey development and planning, be liberal in sharing them with anyone across the company. The benefits of everyone having these materials outweighs the risks of them misusing them.
Make an efficiency argument to solidify a common approach: Once there is enough familiarity with the buyer journey and at least a couple of success stories (“wow, it really helped us organize and prioritize our thinking around creating marketing content”), try to make it a standard tool/toolbox across the company. It really will save you money and boost your relevance with customers.
Most people who know me understand that I have been a lifelong fan of Nick Cave. Alerted via my Facebook news feed, I bought tickets to “One More Time with Feeling,” the 3D movie that chronicled the making of the latest “album” and the tough, personal story behind it.
I learned of new screenings via email, releases of singles from the album itself via native and targeted ads in both email and YouTube. Facebook ads followed me around (of course, well after I had bought all there was to buy). Nick Cave and his organization have been terrifically forward thinking as they look to activate his base of fans and drive us to some action we are all very willing to take.
I have noticed others following suit at least as it comes to Facebook-specific marketing. Iggy Pop, Drive By Truckers, Pretty Reckless. I know Nick Cave’s marketing team didn’t invent best practices but he was clearly at the forefront of leveraging them to connect with a big, highly distributed, yet still niche audience. We are not talking Beyonce, here.
Can other artists – visual, writers, performance – use a similar playbook to market themselves to those core fans? Is there a new, more efficient model of digital marketing available to artists?
Visual Artists Need Marketing to Connect with Fans & Buyers
Discovery
I love visual arts. I go to museums and galleries. I browse arts magazines. I am no big bucks art patron. But I have bought a few pieces in my life almost always from up-and-comers or more likely, lesser, lesser known artists. I would love to discover more, maybe even buy a thing or two. While I respect many galleries and the job they are trying to do to give artists a commercial chance, I don’t trust the gallery “system.” Just look at the disturbing stories generated about establishment galleries like Mary Boone.
I know there are “digital marketplaces” like artsy.net that aggregate art. Unlike music, there doesn’t seem to be that magic Pandora, iTunes, Spotify relevance engine to aid in discovery in visual arts. How that might exactly work is a bit beyond me. But anyone who can crack the relevant search engine to aid in the discovery of artists is truly doing the gods work.
Following
Once I “know” an artist, I am willing to follow their work and career. Much like I follow Nick Cave, I follow Pure Evil. Charley is both an artist, a gallery owner and a bit of healthy self-promoter. He has used social media prolifically because he knows he has fans and can speak directly to them. He routinely posts new work on Facebook.
Could artists sustain and grow a career of commercially viable art (make enough money to live or even prosper) by embracing the same best practices being used by musical artists to connect directly with fans, sell tickets, drive downloads and more?
Artists would need a steady body of work to feed the “stream.” Banging out a painting every two years won’t do. One of Nick Cave’s strengths is a regular flow of new work. Here are a few samples:
Clearly not every artist has this prolific an output. But think of all those Picasso sketches or the bird prints from famed designer Peter Good. Artists have a lot to share. I realize I am dancing around some clear tension between the role and ambition of an artist and the crass nature of commercialism. But an artist may be more likely to find independence and a sustainable lifestyle with a great digital marketing strategy than to find favor with the art intelligentsia.
Components of a great marketing program for artists
A steady stream of output preferably at multiple price points (not everyone can afford a big painting)
A contemporary Web site that is user-centered and features the work well (and drives people to useful actions like “subscribe” and “follow us” and “share this”)
An email marketing program for subscribers with terrifically designed emails that drive people to action
A paid and earned Facebook publishing program with plenty of save-the-date alerts and timely posts (and great photography)
Mobile opt-in alerts for the rabid fans
If artists used this digital marketing playbook, I would likely “follow” these talented artists among others:
It’s possible that a top product or story will break out at CES 2017. More likely we will witness the slow evolution of some big categories like virtual reality, drones and autonomous vehicles. The size of the show makes finding really interesting needles-in-this-haystack tough. The pace of the show makes it hard to process all that is there. As I get ready to attend, here are a few things I will be on the lookout for:
Exceptional Virtual Reality Content
Last year brought us headsets from Oculus Rift (inside their impenetrable ‘cube’ of a showfloor booth), Samsung and HTC. This year is the year to grab a demo seat to see what content has been created for that experience. The virtual Power Rangers experience showing off Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset could be that go-to experience. Finding that off-hours time to visit the booth and actually get a headset could be the trick.
Autonomous Vehicle Demonstrations
We all know we are on that long march to fully autonomous sometime around 2025. Until then, we will see promising innovations announced and incremental demos. This CES, I would expect there to be actual driving demos through the streets or parking lots of Las Vegas. Unfortunately, very few beyond the press will get to experience them. Look for demos from Hyundai's Autonomous Ioniq and Delphi.
“Delphi and Mobileye have also announced they'll conduct a 6.3-mile drive in challenging real-world conditions to show off the Centralized Sensing Localization and Planning (CSLP) automated driving system.”
The Connected Home Longtail
The connected home appears held by some marketplace tension. That tension is between the hope that particular “gadgets” like Nest or Alexa will fly off the shelves and drive adoption and the slow growth of “systems” like Apple, Amazon Echo, Samsung Smart Things that promise to seamlessly integrate many smart home technologies. Integrated systems remain the luxury of hobbyists willing to put in the time. That won’t change this CES. What we will see is a long tail of entrepreneurs with quirky solutions in Tech West and the special venue, Eureka Park.
Meanwhile, the French leader in hydrogen fuel cells will show off the hydrogen-powered skateboard. Think of it as a “minimum viable product” that may someday grow up to be a car.
Does the value your customers get from their relationship with your business grow over time? This is one of the killer questions for businesses who want to build a strong value proposition and walk-the-walk of being ‘customer-centered.’ Does the value to the customer – what they get from the relationship – become more valuable over time such that their level of satisfaction increases and they are more likely to remain customers.
The value I get from my bank is the same today as when I became a customer three years ago. The value I get from my mobile provider is equally flat. Oddly, the value I get from my cable provider, one of the most maligned service provider categories, has grown as they have added on demand services, mobile access, download capabilities, new channels, better tablet interfaces and the “killer app” – wifi access via their network in many, many offbeat locations.
Disruption Focused on Simplification
Look at many disruptive contenders, and you will see them focus on making something that has been difficult for far too long, simpler.
Oscar, the NYC health care insurer, has re-imagined health insurance as a simple service with clean Web interfaces and a deliberate mobile experience.
Zillow, the real estate research tool, dramatically simplified what could be gleaned from the several hundred MLS systems available to real estate professionals.
23andMe, the DNA analysis-in-a-box, simplified the process of submitting DNA and then reporting genetic information to consumers.
There is a lot of complexity out there waiting to be simplified. Certainly the awkward Web interfaces, layers of forms, many step processes of health insurance, property insurance, credit card accounts will all benefit as established players and new contenders work to just make it easier and less complex. Amazon has clearly done that with retail. Their model of a grocery store aims to reduce friction and deliver functional simplicity in a big way.
Disruption Focused on More Value
Simplicity is good. By itself, it can boost retention numbers as customers reward providers who make their customer transactions easier and easier. Many clicks to one click. One click to no clicks (“Alexa, order the new Robert Cialdini book, Presuasion….”).
Brands with a service relationship should also rethink how they can deliver increasing value over time to their customers. Personal banks are a prime example. I receive no additional value from my bank today than I first received when joined.
Their online experience is terrible. That means their simple attempts to become my bill paying-hub go nowhere as they do not seem to understand that I am judging that experience against the one I have with Amazon, not the other banks providing sub-optimal digital experiences.
Now, think about your insurance carrier or independent agent, your cell service provider, your dry cleaner, your favorite department store. What are any of them doing to make being a customer grow in value over time? A common answer is some type of affinity card whether that’s a 10-cup get-one-free offer from your local coffee shop to more sophisticated point offers. These are ok but often mismanaged. I have an affinity card with a local restaurant chain. I have no idea what points are good for or how I might ever redeem them for something valuable.
Other brands are succeeding at adding value:
CVS Health added Minute Clinics as well as a store-wide discount system for loyal customers
Uber will deliver takeout meals to customers thus expanding the value of being a regular Uber customer
Xfinity has added Xfinity Home Security to rightly leverage their connectivity services and do more for their customers.
