5 Tech trends for the perfect customer journey

More and more customers are demanding higher customer satisfaction. To be distinguished by operational excellence alone is no longer enough. Your customer expects nothing less. Customer intimacy, knowing your customers inside out is the key. Engagement at the relevant stage in a long-term relationship is what it’s all about.  It’s no doubt that technological developments are helping to achieve this correctly.

Read on for our 5 tech trends for the perfect customer journey:

1. Social selling – A steadily-growing share of the buying process now occurs online, making it invisible to your sales team. Social selling already helps you to map out your prospects right back at this stage. With social media you can already reach your prospects in this pre-selection phase, by expanding your social network and sharing the right information at the right time. You can anticipate your target group’s interests and needs meticulously based on insights into them. This way you provoke your prospects’ curiosity, planting online seeds in their minds. Then when you eventually do approach a prospect for an appointment, it no longer feels like “cold calling”.
2. Data analytics – You collect growing volumes of data: customer data, product data, order data. The challenge is to translate this data into tangible insights and recommendations. Are customers more often pleased by characteristics? How closely are returns statistics related to customer satisfaction? By answering questions like these, based on data, you can make recommendations proactively, adjust your product or service, or get in touch with your customers. In doing so, you are taking that extra step in comparison to your competitors. Your field service operation can also offer automatic recommendations for cross-selling and up-selling, based upon data analytics.
3. Marketing automation – Your first touch points with potential customers are frequent during the early sales process. CRM marketing automation now makes it possible to communicate easily during the early sales phase and decision-making process. Automated nurture campaigns set up to run after the initial contact moment help you to serve your customers and prospects more efficiently with limited effort.
4. Mobility – Being truly mobile from home, office or whilst on the road is also a vital factor with customer intimacy. So much communication is being carried out on smartphones today. However, it’s also important to have continuous access to data and relevant documents, so that your teams can service your customers quickly and efficiently.
5. Chatbots – Data provides enormous insights into the requirements of your (potential) customers. A growing trend is to prime chatbots with this data. The chatbots help you to serve your contacts instantly. With smart algorithms and artificial intelligence, they learn what the best answers will be to frequently-asked questions. No longer is your customer dependent on the availability of your staff.

Discover how to distinguish your company from your competitors with increased customer satisfaction, customer knowledge and service through improved customer intimacy.

Download whitepaper – From Operational Excellence to Customer Intimacy