Digital technology helps protect your most valuable asset – your customers

Once you’ve got over the initial hurdle of acquiring a new customer, the next priority is to ensure you retain them. Competition is fierce and a poor customer experience – at any point in their relationship with you – can quite quickly result in them leaving, never to come back. Using Digital technology well can lead to a better customer experience, increasing their loyalty and lifetime value. You will also gain valuable insight and impetus from having a single view of the customer.

Your customers are the most valuable asset your business has but doesn’t actually own. Customers come to you – and stay with you – because THEY CHOOSE TO. And they can also choose to leave you any point. By giving customers a positive customer experience at every stage of their journey with you, there is a greater chance that they will remain loyal. They will also go on to spend more with your company over their lifetime.

A typical customer journey will include various touch points, from an initial visit to your website to email communications, financial transactions, the delivery of products or services and after care. Digital technology can help to both improve the customer experience at all of these points and provide your team with the right information they need about your customers at the right time.

If you can’t pivot, transform

We’ve heard much reference to businesses ‘pivoting’ to adapt their products or services in order to overcome the barriers to doing business thrown up by the pandemic. Most commonly, businesses have moved from bricks and mortar premises to selling online or developed ‘virtual’ versions of their product. Pivoting may not be possible for certain types of businesses, you may still need sales people travelling the country (or you may do this yourself) but there are many other ways in which digital technology can ‘transform’ how a company operates and its relationship with customers. We provide some examples below.

The company website

You don’t necessarily need an all-singing, all-dancing website but you do need a site that:

• makes it easy for more customers to find you
• is optimised to work well on mobile devices
• provides all the information your customers are looking for
• allows customers to do what they need to do (and what you want them to do)
• can be easily found by the search engines. 

Customer Relationship Management systems

Customer Relationship Management systems give you a single view of all customer interactions and make this invaluable information visible to all sales and customer service staff. 

You may not be surprised to hear that many companies still have their customer information locked away in an Excel file. However, whilst spreadsheets are a step up from a paper file, they are really not the place to store all your Customer Information – notwithstanding the bureaucratic behemoth that is GDPR.

GDPR rules mean that we are all obligated to protect and manage the personal information we gather from customers. This same information is also valuable to your business, allowing you to see the customer relationship at a glance and build on that relationship with targeted and timely communications. If your customer data is locked away in spreadsheets or personal mailboxes – and you’re not making it work for you – it’s definitely time to transform.

Customer Acquisition

We can’t talk about customers without mentioning how you acquire them in the first place. If your sales contacts are made through picking up the phone, knocking on doors or driving up and down the country, digital technology can enable you to reach many more potential customers in a more efficient and targeted way. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and content marketing, online advertising (e.g. Google ads), email marketing and social media marketing can all present your company to customers who might otherwise not know about you. These digital introductions can provide the warm sales leads your team needs to transform your business.

Identifying where you need to transform 

As you can imagine, the opportunities to employ digital technology to transform how you manage, engage and acquire your customers are endless. If digital technology is not your area of specialism, you may be wondering where to start. Should you get a new website? Or invest in SEO? Would Customer Relationship Management software be the best place to start? If so, which package would most suit your needs? 

We can help you identify the areas where digital technology can bring the most gains to your business and what your priorities should be.

SPECIAL OFFER

For a limited time, we are offering clients a FREE workshop with our Digital Transformation specialists. This 1-hour taster session will outline some of the key ways that digital technology can be used to grow and manage your business. You have the option to choose a Zoom/Teams or face-to-face workshop. 

For more information or to arrange your workshop, email Tony Backhouse or call 07969 900864