Fueling customer engagement through digital transformation

Every successful business has at least one thing in common: customer engagement — regardless of being in a B2B or B2C market. Companies that have built trusting relationships with their consumer base have all invested extensive time and resources into understanding the ins and outs of how their customers digest information. The reality is that today’s customer engagement is about H2H — Human to Human interaction, regardless of whether they are a business or a consumer. Individuals want highly tailored and personalized experiences at a human level.

Artificial intelligence is becoming more and more integrated into how companies conduct customer service, and this technology can have innumerable benefits. Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement V9 includes several new capabilities to help you keep track of your data. Specific AI built into the Dynamics 365 CE include relationship insights that utilizes context in your emails with your prospects and makes recommendations such as:

• Notifying you when a competitor is mentioned
• Letting you know if a meeting is being requested
• Alerting you if an additional stakeholder has been added to the email thread
• Prompting you for touchpoints if you are out of contact
• Notifying you if an email has been opened or an attachment has been opened

Integrations like an interactive dashboard, activities, accounts, contacts, social profiles, cases, queues, and knowledge articles all help you manage more specific consumer data. More targeted information allows the software to resolve certain issues that would otherwise be addressed by a human. That time is then freed to address more specific customer service issues that cannot be resolved by the software.

Another new feature of Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement is the ability to create interactive customer journeys that will automate personalized interactions with customers from beginning to end of their experience.

 

The customer lifecycle is as follows:

• Listen — This cycle involves building fans, surveys, listening with social media, email, and sentiment analysis.
• Attract — The attract phase includes marketing automation (web, social, and email), with personalized targeting to your audience.
• Acquire —This phase includes lead and opportunity management, quoting, and knowledge base.
• Serve — The often overlooked serve phase includes service management, case management, field service, and portals.
• Expand — The expand phase also includes marketing automation, cross/upselling, and staying up to date with current wants/needs for business.
• Retain — This phase encompasses surveys, follow-ups, touch points, and further nurturing of campaigns.
• Enable — The last step of the customer lifecycle includes portals, self-service, reporting, and feedback, which begins the cycle once again.

 

 

 

 

 

You will need to learn your customers’ desires to create a clear customer service plan. If you are struggling to understand what your customers’ complaints actually are, it will be difficult to address them. Determining who your stakeholders are is an important step, and asking pointed questions to the right audience will help gather relevant information.

You need to be aware of more than just individual aspects of your product and center your focus around improving the entire experience and process. You need to choose a starting point, and overhauling your entire process may not be the most appropriate action. The best option may be implementing just one new touchpoint that will help cohesion of the process.

• 86% of customers say they will pay more if it means a more positive customer experience (Forbes).
• 86% of customers also say they will take their business elsewhere if they have a negative customer experience with a company (Harris Interactive).
• Nearly 90% of companies say their primary means for competing is centered around customer experience (Gartner).
• Remarkably, only 1% of customers actually think their vendors are meeting customer experience expectations (Forbes).

Download e-Book: Why Customer Engagement is Important to Your Organization