How to bridge the divide between you and your customer

Your brand uses all the neccessary channels to contact and keep in touch with your customers: a website, all the relevant social media accounts, a callcentre and maybe an app or brick-and-mortar stores. But do you also have a complete overview of all the information you can gather from these different channels?

It happened to me recently: I got a call on behalf of my energy provider. As my contract was about to expire, they wanted to offer me a deal to renew it. Unfortunately the agent was unaware I had received an offer by email months ago, which I ignored, because I wanted to change providers. He also didn’t know that I had in fact already taken the necessary steps to change providers at the end of my contract.

Annoying for me: After multiple calls from an anonymous number I finally decide to answer my phone in the middle of a busy store. But it’s an irrelevant conversation at an inconvenient moment.

Annoying for the call centre agent: He has to deal with my bad tempered reply and would achieve better conversion from customers who haven’t been contacted with an offer and haven’t switched providers. One or more calls to me is just wasting time and money.

What is the Engagement Gap?

There is a discrepancy between your customers’ expectations and how your brand or organization really engages with them. This is what we call the Engagement Gap.
You probably use dedicated teams to handle sales, email marketing, social media, customer service webcare and what have you. Your customers see all these channels as one corporate entity. They don’t care that every channel has a separate team that’s responsible for just that channel. Your customers want to be recognized and valued wherever they choose to contact you

Is it interfering with your business?

• Is every department in your organisation only communicating in it’s own field?
• Are your customers getting frustrated because information is not shared between departments and they have to tell their story over and over?
• Are you ignoring your customers’ preferences? Are you unsure about where they are in the customer journey?
• Are you unaware of customers taking the same conversation across multiple channels? Do you get the feeling you are missing parts of it?

How to bridge the Engagement Gap

How and where do you collect all this customer data from different channels, and how do you make it available across all departments in your organization may look daunting. The good news is, this is getting easier and easier with the help of technology.

AI and Machine Learning will do the heavy lifting for you. What are your goals? Start by defining which information you need to attain them. Be specific: to be compliant with the GDPR, you can only collect the data you really need.. Administrate everything carefully. A EU privacy authority may ask you to give an account of the personal data you process. Divide implementation of your strategy in easy steps, to allow you to review and adjust as you go along.

Start your process with an inventory: which channels do you use and what data can you collect from them?
Find out about the tools that are available and which best fit your brand and organisation, like Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

CloseContact can help you close the Engagement Gap. Contact us and we will help you find and implement the best solution for your organisation.