Did you ever realize that you may be connected to Donald Trump or Robert Downey Jr. or Modi? Relationships are crazy. If you don’t believe, login to your LinkedIn account and check until your 6th connection. You might be friends with a friend of a friend of every celebrity and every person on the earth. Sounds strange, right!
Interestingly, in a 1929 short story entitled, ‘Chains,’ Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy introduced the idea of ‘The Six Degrees of Separation’ – a theory that each and every person on this planet is connected to everyone else by a maximum of six jumps in a friendship chain.
Better Customer Relationships
In today’s increasingly connected world where information flows between companies and customers seamlessly, the sharing of connected experiences is happening in real-time over social media channels. And very few people know that it is these connected experiences are the building blocks to better customer relationships.
See the sequence? A connected world leads to connected experiences and connected experiences lead to better customer relationships. If you look at your business processes, you will see that every customer touchpoint is really the sum total of all “listening” (experiences) accumulated across the connected channels!
However, it’s important to understand that opening the door to better customer relationship hinges immensely on the quality of the ‘listening’ data gathered with the help of intelligent technologies, like AI, Predictive Analytics, Machine Learning (ML) and IoT.
The point is that the critical data collected across all social channels and customer touchpoints must be consolidated and made available for advanced analysis and decision-making. After all, this is the primary reason for investing in listening processes, right?
Business Intelligence
In January 2019, SAP commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate the demand among business analytics teams for leveraging embedded analytics with the aim of discovering, procuring, and provisioning Business Intelligence (BI) data more effectively. Conducting a survey of 219 enterprises IT and analytics leaders, Forrester found that embedding analytics within relevant transactional applications and business processes makes analytics contextual, actionable, and pervasive, thus better supporting business outcomes.
In this age of social media, the fact that we all are evaluated by our customers on the experience we deliver shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. A momentary slackening here and there in your customer service literally means your enterprise is at risk due to ‘customer switching’ (read June 24th Tuesday Thoughts on “Serial Switchers”).
And when your customers switch, they become fair game for any company, regardless of its size, capable of exploiting new and intelligent technologies to its advantage and provide a better customer experience than you did. If and when this happens — and hopefully, it never does — the responsibility for losing those customers falls on your shoulders. That statement should make it clear that now is the time to make sure all your customer-centric processes are collecting the data and information you must have to ensure a quality customer experience for every customer
Let me know your thoughts.
By: Venkat Nanduri
