Digital technologies have changed the way people share information and interact with brands. Consumer behavior is evolving so rapidly, how can brands keep up and reach these digitally connected customers? This article from B2B.com shows five ways brands can connect with digital customers:
- Embrace the customer’s voice and message. Customers are not shy about sharing their opinions about brands on social sites. Learning from what customers have to say, or even participating in those conversations, helps build relationships between a company and customers and shows that they are being heard.
- Understand the customer’s motivation to buy. By doing so, a company can create engaging content that is relevant and personalized. Creating relevant and personalized content for customers can lead to conversions and, ultimately, increased revenue through point-of-sale and repeat purchases.
- Engage customers 24/7. Customer conversations on social sites doesn’t end when the work day is over (and sometimes it even picks up) so engaging customers shouldn’t end at that time either. Building a better, deeper relationship with customers can require 24/7 attention!
- Be open in the digital world. Companies are often fearful of being open and asking for feedback, because it may lead to dealing with negative light being shed on the company’s shortfalls. But being open creates trust and loyalty among customers. The key is to be prepared for negative or critical feedback and know how to respond, and to do number five…
- Provide a good customer experience. Customer experience directly connects to business performance. Without providing a good customer experience, a company will not result in positive business performance. Especially online with the instant gratification customers often expect, it is even more important to focus on providing good customer experience.
These five ways are great ways to reach your digital customers but they aren’t introduced without a challenge. Many brands don’t have the resources or time to read and process all the customer comments online. The volume of feedback coming from multiple channels can be too much for any one person to read through every day at both a location and a brand level. Furthermore, customer comments are anecdotal by nature, and a single well articulated or particularly strong emotional response can often outweigh the impact of many more muted responses that are more representative of how the majority of customers feel.
3rd Party Feedback and Text Analytics allows you to turn verbatim feedback into business insights. It helps you cut through the noise on social media and find out what’s most important to your customers. With the help of this solution, you will uncover trends which you otherwise wouldn’t find out from regular structured surveys or pure social monitoring.
