The Trust Issue

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship management Article |Consumer Relationship| The Trust IssueBusinesses want to have strong and long-lasting relationships with their consumers. That relationship is built on trust, but in a post-truth world brands are faced with a serious challenge: so much of modern life is defined by mistrust.

I believe that for brands, trust and truth are the most important games in town.

The ‘trust issue’ is a central theme for organisations in any sector, and it’s one in which I’ve conducted a mass of research into how a post-truth culture is impacting brands, across an array of business sectors, on a global basis. To quote The Economist “consumer trust is the basis of all brand values, and therefore brands have an immense incentive to retain it”.

Why is this so important? Because, if a brand isn’t seen as credible and trustworthy, then when choice is available it’ll be rejected in favour of one that is – by those who view themselves as being ‘informed’ as opposed to ‘passive’ consumers.

This is due to a weakening of the vital trust connection between brands and consumers and is causing enormous problems for businesses. The ramifications for brands in sectors of all description are deeply serious, when ‘reputation capital’ is of such immense importance, regarding our belief in those core questions of ‘is a business honest, competent and reliable?’

But just running an advertising campaign stating that a brand is trustworthy isn’t good enough. This isn’t a marketing issue, this is a business-wide issue, involving every facet of the organisation, hence leadership being so important.

Companies have to be consistent in their behaviour, from top to bottom, and right along the supply chain, from the ‘first hand of production to the final hand of the consumer’.

And this genuinely has to go all the way. Make no mistake, organisations and brands that want to earn and keep our trust have to ‘live it like they say it’. Business has to be about more than just profit. ‘People plus Planet’ and to quote a much-derided word ‘Purpose’ have to be in there too.

The ‘actual’ difference between ethical brands with a moral code and those exposed as being without one, is increasingly a key factor in consumer brand adoption or rejection. This approach very much links to social innovation and indeed conspicuous altruism.

‘Social Purpose’ is a phrase used obsessively by modern, forward-thinking leaders, and links directly to joint value creation where both shareholders and society benefit from business. Yet many still attempt to portray, or indeed dismiss, the demographic most associated with this ideal as being one where, as The Guardian newspaper put it recently “the idea that market activity should have a purpose other than purely profit is roughly where it always was on the spectrum, somewhere between Marx and Jesus – one for the rioters, the subversives, the people with beards, unsuited to mainstream discourse.”

To illustrate that this thinking goes right to the top of hard-headed business thinking, in their ‘Reflections from Davos’ report regarding the meeting of the World Economic Forum, the managing partner of McKinsey was quoted as saying “the next innovation imperative will be social innovation – business’s role will be critical here.” The report went on to note “society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose”.

This is set against research from those such as Deloitte who show how millennials are fast losing faith in business; and against a backdrop where people are scrambling to find solid ground in an era when we’re told that the very notion of truth is subjective, and indeed much of public discourse has become increasingly anti-fact and anti-expert.

Fortunately there are numerous shining examples of organisations that are showing us all ‘how to do it better’ ranging across the business spectrum, in sectors ranging from beauty to finance, and from fashion to beverages.

With good leadership at the core of these businesses, all members of the organisation are enabled to understand and demonstrate ‘why they do it, what they do and how they do it’. And this means leaders of companies taking deliberate and definitive action to ensure that their businesses demonstrate ‘corporate social leadership’.

This will also enable the truism that ‘good business is good business’.

About the Author

Sean Pillot de Chenecey, author of The Post-Truth Business: How to Rebuild Brand Authenticity in a Distrusting World, has over 20 years’ experience as a brand expert, combining marketing consultancy with ethnographic activity and trend research around the world. His clients have included Unilever, Swatch, Heineken, Diageo, General Motors, Beiersdorf, AXA, Costa, Vodafone, Kerrygold and Starwood. He’s collaborated with numerous international advertising, branding, design, media and PR agencies. He is a lecturer at the University of the Arts London, and has written for Dazed, Admap, Brand Strategy, Marketing and Contagious. A public speaker, he’s given speeches for over a decade in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and North America. For more information, please visit www.koganpage.com/post-truth-business

Ways to Impress a Client On a Business Trip

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article | Customer Relationships | Ways to Impress a Client On a Business TripHeavy luggage, lost at reception and boozy business dinners are all regular features of hosting a client who has traveled on business. One of the most important features of impressing a client while they’ve made the effort to travel is to keep them entertained while you get to know them. Spending some time talking over a few beers is great for understanding them on a personal level, but wowing them while they’re visiting can also be hugely beneficial to your company.

Don’t just take them to the local bar

If your client would really just prefer to sit in a comfy chair and drink a few beers, then perhaps take them to a quiet bar downtown. However, if they’re really interested in seeing what your town or city has to offer, take them to a restaurant that will show them you’re keen to offer them a high-quality experience. Something such as a Japanese Teppanyaki restaurant will not only offer them some impressive cuisine, but also show them a good time too.

Show them the sights of the city

Does your city have an infamous opera house? A beautiful set of gardens? Changing up where you chat to your clients about business not only gives them some mental respite, but also shows them that you hope they come and visit you again. You want them to get the sense you’re proud to have them in your home city. This also offers another chance to entertain your guests for the evening and make their work vacation have a greater focus on the vacation part.

Show them the best of your country

Some clients haven’t just traveled from one state to the other, they may have traveled from Europe or Asia, and they might be hoping to see a little more of the United States than just your board room. If you’re desperate to win this client’s approval, then showing them the best the US has to offer is a flashy way of keeping them impressed. Taking them to see the all American sights of Texas, by using a specialized transport service, can be key.

You can do this by searching for private jet charters Dallas. This will bring your company one step closer to impressing your international client, and the client one step closer to seeing a real cowboy. It’s even said that doing something silly or fun will lighten the mood and make everyone feel that little bit closer to their colleagues.

Offer them a souvenir to remind them of the trip

At the end of Local Hero, the most poignant moment is when the American lead character takes out a handful of sea shells that remind him of Scotland. Leaving them with something small and significant to place in their luggage that will hopefully remind them of the good time spent with your company, and leave them wanting more.

Clients on executive travel might be keen to be impressed, but they’re also a tired traveler. Finding activities that bring out the human and less of the business person will make the trip not only memorable for them, but also for your team.

Why AI-Driven Sales CRM is Leading the Way in Customer Relations

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article | Artificial Intelligence | Why AI-Driven Sales CRM is Leading the Way in Customer RelationsOver the last several years, AI has become a popular trend for enhancing all areas of business. With the ability of the machine to learn how to perform tasks like forecasting, clustering, text and speech recognition, error corrections, database filling, and other activities that involve human intelligence, AI has become an invaluable tool for sales teams to understand and interpret the behaviours of customers and suggest products for these customers. One of the critical factors, according to SuperOffice, behind the growth of CRM software is its ability to allow businesses to access customer data in real-time. Here are several ways that AI-driven sales CRM is leading the way in customer relations.

Collecting and Filling Data

It is no secret that marketing and various CRM applications require substantial sets of qualified data. Many of today’s new AI-driven sales applications have made it much easier to capture the corporate data that allows users to create and fill in the new information to solutions, as well as cleaning the existing lists. With this new technology, the need for data entry is eliminated with Spiro.

Clustering Contact Details

With AI applications you can structure, clean, and analyze the sales data you collect. After a series of algorithmic executions and iterations, the application can effectively provide you with the best model along with a pattern, which will allow you to group your customers. After the data has been clustered, it can give you a list of all the customers included in each of the groups. It will consider new sales and provide updated reports to improve marketing strategies.

Suggest Products

When a specific product is considered, the AI-driven application will provide you with a list of the various products purchased in the past by the customer. An excellent example of this in action is Amazon. When a customer is shopping at the online retail shop, it provides them with a list of suggested products that they might want to purchase. For B2B companies, the product basket of all their customers is carefully analyzed to interpret details like business sectors, employee’s numbers, address, and the revenues. All of this increases customer relations because the company doesn’t have to waste time suggesting products that the customer won’t be interested in purchasing.

Forecasting and Pattern Recognition

AI-driven solutions play a critical role in the process of the forecasting of sales, regarding production. Through pattern recognition, the trends of the purchase of a product over the years can be determined. Also, the success rate of the product can also be predicted, which can save companies thousands in unused and unsold inventory and can help increase revenue by nearly 41%, according to the site, Big Contacts.

Highlight Inconsistencies

The ability of a sales team to close sales is dependent on the accuracy of the sales pipeline. An AI-drive CRM application can effortlessly highlight any inconsistencies within the sales pipeline so that it can quickly be addressed. With accurate reports and sales forecasts, companies won’t have to worry about the sales process being slowed down or stopped because of inaccuracies.

The most prominent advantage of AI-driven CRM solutions is the ability to efficiently analyze the data of the company, which can lead to an increase in sales, better customer satisfaction, and better responses to customers’ needs.

Meeting the Needs of the Modern Consumer

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Articles |Customer Service| Meeting the Needs of the Modern ConsumerIt’s 2019, and the power consumers have in today’s marketplace continues to be unparalleled.

In particular, today’s savvy consumers have access to and can communicate with companies around the world at virtually any time of day, allowing them to not only compare the value of products and services, but also determine whether they share the same core brand values.

Indeed, it doesn’t matter if you represent a big corporation or are a solopreneur — your customers are calling the shots. In many ways, your customers expect to be able to engage with you on their terms and on their preferred channels.

Here’s a look at ways many of today’s successful companies are meeting the needs of the modern consumer.

Multi-channel Service

These days, communicating with companies of all sizes is easier than ever. But with a multitude of options with which consumers can communicate with your brand — from phone and email to SMS and social media — you’ll need to employ a strategy that covers these bases and more to be successful.

According to Shopify, more than 85 percent of today’s consumers use at least two communication channels when interacting with companies, albeit to shop or raise a customer service issue. This is true whether they research online and buy in-store or vice versa.

With this in mind, ideally, you will need to ensure your company has — and maintains — a presence on the digital channels most popular with your customers and prospects. The exact combination could be very different depending on your industry.

Ultimately, your best bet is to ask your customers, typically via email or an online survey, the contact methods they prefer and see which channels your competitors use as well.

Social Media Monitoring

When it comes to social media, meeting the needs of the modern consumer becomes more complicated. Your customers expect you to be listening at virtually all hours of the day and respond in kind in a timely manner. That means you can’t create social media pages, monitor the inboxes for those channels and call it a day.

While some of your customers will use those channels to contact you directly, many more are posting about your company, its products and its people on various social media sites. Some of these will include the ones on which you may already have a presence, like Facebook, but there will be others that you might not use, like WhatsApp or Yelp.

With this in mind, it’s a good idea to have a program in place to help monitor mentions of your company and its offerings so you can respond as quickly as possible, to both positive and negative comments.

Calls are Not Going Away

While it’s important to offer a variety of online communications channels for customers and prospects to reach you, you should also realize traditional phone-based customer service isn’t going away anytime soon.
That’s because multi-channel communications typically do not replace the need to speak to a live person. Instead, they enable previously dormant or silent followers to ask questions and otherwise engage with your company.
Phone support is one of the top ways that companies representing all industries provide support. It is efficient, empathetic and responsive.

Personalization

Not all phone support is created equal, though. According to Entrepreneur, roughly 80 percent of consumers say the customer service agents with whom they interact are unaware of any past communication with the brand. The other 20 percent are doing something right.

Some companies have contact center agents standing by who look up information as the caller speaks. Other services, such a cloud call center, take it a step further by integrating a slew of self-service options to direct the call to the right department. The idea is to provide context to the current conversation — and, perhaps more importantly, any future ones — wherever possible.

When these efforts are integrated into a robust customer relationship management solution, it becomes easier for agents to determine whether specific customers have had previous interactions with your brand.

More to the point, keeping a record of what transpired on the previous customer service interaction means customers don’t have to repeat the same information — and become frustrated — over and over again. Customer service then improves, which can bolster consumer loyalty, creating a win-win for both parties.

Letting Customers’ Voices be Heard, Loud and Clear

Today’s modern, savvy consumers expect to have multiple channels to communicate and do business with their favorite brands. They also want their voices heard — and to be amplified when necessary — on social media if their brand experience is anything less than stellar. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t turn to and rely on phone-based customer service.

Oh, but the times are a-changin’ — and it’s up to forward-thinking brands to continually come up with new ways to allow customers to be comfortable and in the driver’s seat when making important buying decisions so these customers become repeat customers.

What To Think About When Giving Corporate Gifts

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management ArticleAs Christmas draws closer, business owners around the world will be starting to think about organizing, purchasing, and giving corporate gifts to their clients, customers, and suppliers. Whether these gifts seem like an expensive and unnecessary thing to do, or they feel like a Christmas tradition that can’t be broken, the point is that, if you want to make a good impression going into the new year, you’re going to need to give at least something to someone.

If you don’t quite know what to offer up as a holiday gift yet, and you’re not sure what to think about when choosing the gift, here are some key pointers that will help you out and ensure that everyone is happy with what they are given.

What Is Your Work Culture?

If you can distill your company’s culture down into one gift, this will certainly help you to be remembered, and it will ensure that whatever you choose to give will be completely unique. To do this, you need to think about the work that you do and the people who work for you. You might be famed for your dress down Friday, or perhaps your office parties are something that everyone talks about. Maybe it’s the fact that you give everyone their birthday off, or you include your employees’ families in everything you do. Whatever it might be, search around for a gift that speak of it, and give this to those important business connections that you want to impress.

Be Inclusive

It is important to find something that you can give to everyone because buying individual gifts will be expensive and time-consuming to find and purchase. If you want to offer up branded t-shirts, for example, think of the cut and the material – will everyone like it? Is it going to work for both men and women? This is an important point but one that will help to set you apart and show how caring you are and how you think of others when it comes to all aspects of your work.

Think Of Presentation

No matter what you are giving and to whom you are giving it, presentation is all-important. Wrapping a gift well in nice paper, perhaps with additional bows and ribbons will always be appreciated, especially when the alternative is a poorly wrapped gift that no time, thought, or effort was put into – assuming the gift is wrapped at all. Although this is a corporate gift, it should be treated no differently to any other that you would give to someone important to you. Make sure it looks good, because first impressions regarding anything county for a huge amount.

Ask Employees

As a business owner, you have final say in what corporate gifts you want to give, but it could be worthwhile to speak to your employees and get their opinions too. If you are completely drawing a blank, then ask your employees to come up with some ideas that you can work with. They might have more insight into what your clients and customers would like because they work with them more closely.

If you do come up with some ideas but can’t decide between them, again, you can ask your employees. They might be able to help you to determine which of the two, three, or more ideas is the most viable, saving you from buying and giving something that just wouldn’t really work.

Ask Questions

Being considerate and asking questions is another important step. You may feel you have discovered the ideal gift, but if there is any doubt then getting in touch with the recipient to determine whether this really is the case will help you – it will show that you are thinking of your clients and customers rather than simply buying the first thing that comes into your head (even if, in reality, you are). For example, if you are thinking of offering a food-related gift, it is a good idea to speak to the recipients and check to see if they have any allergies, or if they prefer beer to wine or red or white wine. You don’t have to tell them what you are buying in detail, either, so the surprise element will still be there.

Make It Local

Something that is always widely appreciated is a gift with some local flavor. This is a great gift whether the recipient lives nearby or far away – it’s always fun to be given something made in a specific place, perhaps in a specific way. You could choose a calendar showcasing your local area, or some food products that a local maker has created. If your area is famous for anything, this is a great gift to give as it will help the recipient get a better idea of where you are based and what the place is like.

This is also a great way to support local small businesses who might be able to help you in return. By doing this, you are enabling the economy to thrive, which is certainly another bonus.

Make It Personal

Whatever you choose to give, you need to ensure that it reflects your company in some way, and the easiest way to do that is to brand it with your logo or company name. Many companies such as Perfect Imprints make this an easy thing to do, and your branding can be added to mugs, coasters, Christmas decorations, t-shirts, pens, and much more.

You should remember not to overbrand, however. You can make yourself remembered with just a small logo, for example, rather than printing your name all over the front of everything that you give away. This can look much more attractive, and will even do a better job of reminding those who receive the gifts about you, as they will be more likely to use items with only small amounts of branding on them.

Give Quality

Whatever it is you choose to give, it needs to be of good quality. If you buy cheap and give items that are poorly made and that break apart quickly, or that can’t be used, worn, or even eaten, this will reflect badly on your company. You don’t need to spend a fortune to find good quality products, but you should take the time to read reviews and even sample the products for yourself if possible, to ensure that you are happy to give them to important clients and suppliers.