Reaching the 'Marketing Unreachables'

Source: Contact Professional

Today companies have thousands if not millions of customers in databases that represent a tremendous opportunity to drive organic revenue growth. However, according to Forrester Research, more than 65 percent of adults in the U.S. have exercised the option to be added to “Do Not Call” lists which prohibit marketing calls to home or mobile phones.

Customer’s may also “opt-out” from company e-mails which also prohibits companies from sending e-mails to a customer. While these options have helped consumers reduce the number of irrelevant calls or SPAM they receive, it has also placed a great strain on marketers by dictating who they legally can and cannot contact, even within their own customer populations.

These customers have become the “marketing unreachables” - those who may contact a company, but whom a company cannot contact. Within this reality, how does an organization meet its goals for growing revenue and nurturing customer relationships? The answer may be next-generation inbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing – Convert Missed Opportunities into Marketing Opportunities

Traditionally, marketing has placed much emphasis on “outbound” campaigns, where a company directs marketing to the customer via various channels such as direct mail, e-mail, promotions at the point of contact and telemarketing.

Best-in-class organizations have elevated the importance of the “inbound” campaign as a way to re-engage the otherwise unreachable customer. Inbound campaigns enable marketers to capitalize on the contact a customer makes with a company through inbound customer touch points such as service channels, web sites, call centers and IVRs.

The simple and very compelling premise is that customers who contact the organization are already engaged and, according to research by leading industry analysts, are 10 times more likely to respond to an offer. In fact, real-world response rates have been observed to be as high as 40 percent, which are impressive when compared to typical response rates to an outbound marketing program (average one tofive percent).

Intelligent Dialogs Drive Greater Profitability

The inbound campaign challenge is linked to the unpredictability of when a customer chooses to contact an organization; which channel; reason for the interaction and; even the mood of the customer. For some organizations, the temptation is to make the latest product offering irrespective of any of these critical variables. However, this will often do more to drive away the customer rather than drive up revenue. Today’s systems are simply not designed to be customer-centric.

What’s needed is the ability to extend existing systems to create an “intelligent dialog” with each and every customer. Next-generation marketing automation solutions can help organizations achieve this 1:1 customer dialog by putting technology and processes in place that assesses the customer lifecycle, accounts for recent actions, assesses potential needs and incorporates the latest contextual information received at the point of interaction before delivering it all to the call center agent’s screen.

By virtually centralizing all customer data points -- transaction history, demographic information, a complaint, service request or product inquiry, next-generation marketing automation solutions effectively and efficiently recommend the “best-next-action” for the individual customer, at the point of interaction. This means making the right offer, at the right time, and/or even anticipating customer needs. Through inbound campaign management, cost centers (e.g., contact centers) can be turned into profit centers. These new analytically driven real-time decisioning systems, in effect, take the guesswork out of inbound interactions and have the potential to make every interaction as good as your best.

Building Trust Between Customer and Company

Beyond revenue, inbound campaign management also has a profound effect upon the customer experience. Actions such as repeatedly making the same offer to a customer when they have previously declined it or not acknowledging a recent relevant complaint is counter-productive to establishing positive customer experiences. To bridge the gaps between the various ways a customer interacts with a company to deliver relevant and individualized information and offers, builds a sense of trust between customer and company. This trust is invaluable when dealing with a Do-Not-Call-listed or opt-out customer.

Savvy marketers understand that inbound interactions are the best chance to not only impact customer profitability, but deepen the emotional connection with the customer. It is therefore critical to deploy inbound campaign solutions that enable an optimized customer dialog that is relevant and individualized.

Case Study: Inbound Campaign Management Increases Call Center Profitability

Recognizing the potential to incrementally increase the profitability of its nearly one million annual call center customers, a major financial services company instituted a marketing automation system that is poised to significantly improve the customer experience and increase call center profitability.

Background

The call center consists of a group of 250 agents (ISAs) who handle 600,000 to 800,000 inbound calls per year. The inbound customer calls typically involve some form of initial service-oriented questions regarding individual accounts.

The Problem – System Limitations

The company understood that it was missing a selling opportunity by not optimizing the assets that the ISA could have at their disposal to incrementally sell to the customer during inbound contact. The call center sought an inbound campaign management solution to empower its ISAs with a best-next-action decisioning capability.

The call center team focused on the business objectives of increasing the opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell more effectively during inbound calls. The following were identified as “top priorities:”

• Be able to present the right offer to the right customer at the right time
• Optimize every contact with the customer
• Gain insight into customer response behavior to build better marketing campaigns

The Solution – Bridging the Relationship Gaps

After a rigorous selection process, the company selected Portrait Software’s Interaction Optimizer software to integrate with its existing Siebel CRM interface and meet its business objectives. Interaction Optimizer is a next-generation, inbound campaign management solution that dramatically improves the quality and profitability of interactions with customers. The solution extended the current call center and CRM systems as follows:

• Embedded within existing Seibel CRM deployment, minimizing training impact and eases the adoption by the ISAs
• Integrated with the organization’s IVR, allowing for skills-based routing and determination of customer eligibility before delivery to the ISA
• Linked to the call center’s data mart which allows the use of sophisticated predictive models and intuitive business rules for determining eligibility for real-time customer prompts
• Tightly integrated with Siebel Operational Data to allow for a dynamic reprioritization of prompts based on intra-call and intra-day data changes
• Ability to leverage predictive analytics, business rules or both to arbitrate the “best-next-action” that can re-score customers in real-time based upon the progress of interaction as well as interaction history

Results – Increased Responsiveness in Six Months

The company sought an enterprisewide solution that would orchestrate and automate every customer interaction and allow the company to offer its customers the services and products most appropriate to their individual needs. Just six months after going live, the Portrait solution is providing valuable results:

• Automatically able to present the right offer to the right customer at the right time
• Provides important new insight into customer response behavior
• Performance of “what if” analysis upon historical interaction data to tune future strategies
• Agile inbound marketing --- marketing can add/change campaign treatments “on the fly,” reacting quickly to competitive tactics, new regulations, new products or new opportunities
• Offers are synchronized across all managed and unmanaged channels thus avoiding presentation of the same offers
• Minimal change management – solution was embedded into existing screens and applications
• Increased “acceptance” rates

Summary

In a challenging economy, the inbound marketing campaign is serving as a strategy for driving organic growth within customer populations, including the “unreachables,” with the promise of the following:

• Recaptured revenue opportunities via inbound channels
• Connected customer experience, across all customer touch points
• Higher response rates than traditional outbound marketing (up to 40 percent)
• Reinforce the “customer-focused” brand and prevent customer frustration as a result of irrelevant messages

Simply put, inbound campaign management is a critical element of next-generation marketing capabilities. It can create happy customers from unhappy customers, profit centers from cost centers and cannot be ignored.

Learn how implementing companies are reaping tremendous benefits, including 40% campaign response rates. This new approach promises to be a game changer with respect to how your company markets. Don’t miss out - your company may be leaving money on the table right now.

“Front-line staff, who are closest to the customer, need to rapidly improvise, change, innovate and draw-in the customer. The problem is that software from mainstream business… does little to enable innovation or to allow employees to be flexible in adjusting to customers'' requirements.”

“CEOs are turning to customer-centric strategies, and most of the deployed, back-office systems were not optimized for that.”