As pressures on profit margins are forcing retailers, banks, insurance providers, and airlines to rethink how they engage with their customers, more and more businesses are looking to improve their loyalty programs. Moreover, because interaction points with consumers have multiplied (phone, tablet, web, etc.), a consistent brand and customer experience has become difficult to maintain.
Building a Customer Relationship
The nexus of these market forces has introduced a new reality, where interactions with customers—both good and bad—happen in real time, or not at all. A missed opportunity to delight or reward the customer or cross-sell or up-sell a product carries a significant cost, as does a missed opportunity to fix a problem before it gets out of hand. All of this, coupled with higher expectations from digital natives and the overall integrated customer experience, means that loyalty and customer relationship management have bubbled to the top of the list for many executives.
Loyalty programs have existed for quite a while, but what’s new is the ability to digitally interact in real time. TIBCO sees this as a tremendous opportunity and strategic differentiator for our customers, whereby the customer experience can be elevated to new levels of interaction. It also means that when using social media, businesses can reevaluate what ties them to their customers. Much like how photos are tagged on social networks, consumers are creating and sharing personal shopping lists and gift registries in these spaces. Leveraging the potential of these types of interactions increases proximity with the customer, and not using them means lost opportunities that could have been monetized. Just as friends communicate openly within a social network, fostering open communication with customers is essential to managing expectations and ensuring they exchange ideas and complaints in an appropriate forum, such as a private social network.
Rewarding a Brand With Loyalty
Customers want, if not expect, to experience new and interesting brand interactions, and are ready to reward the brand and the business with fierce loyalty. (The opposite is customers punishing a business and its brands for not living up to expectations.) Of course, experiential interactions and expectations are different for each customer, which requires targeting the right reward or experience to the right customer at the right time. Doing so requires loyalty automation, but also real-time systems integration and a handle on your data (including customer, inventory, product, etc.).
Beyond this digital foundation is a vision where people make the ultimate decision based on a confluence of factors and data when human interactions take place—such as with a customer service representative—and where systems help shape the decision. Just as each individual has ultimate control over his social network, in much the same way, a business should be able to have better control over interactions with its customers. This moves the experience from mundane and uninteresting to experiential, which fosters fierce loyalty.
TIBCO Loyalty Lab, coupled with TIBCO’s event-enabled infrastructure and TIBCO’s tibbr for private social networking, provides all of the necessary components to make experiential digital interactions happen with your customers. And this is already being done for some of the world’s biggest brands.
What’s preventing you from turning your business into an experiential social network?
