Interview with Julia Morales, Business Development Manager at inConcert, about the most frequent mistakes made by companies in their digital transformation process. In this article, the expert in Customer Experience emphasizes the importance of having a good foundation in digitization, before incorporating more complex technologies. Discover how to diagnose and solve the main inefficiencies in the relationship with your customers.
What are the main inefficiencies that inConcert finds when advising companies in their relationship with their clients?
Although all companies are different, there are a number of patterns and “mistakes” that are repeated in different cases. There are inefficiencies in all phases of a customer’s life, from lead generation to customer acquisition, from day-to-day inquiries to debt. When performing a diagnosis before starting to work with our clients, we consider it key to go back to basics in the customer service strategy, before moving on to more complex technologies. Often what the customer needs is to integrate a CRM before incorporating sentiment analysis, for example.
In this sense, what are the inefficiencies that you detect in the marketing area of companies and how can they be solved with technology?
A problem we see a lot is that marketing investment is not maximized and interactions are not profitable. There are companies that spend a lot of money on campaigns, but after they capture the attention of the leads, the interest is not maintained because they do not manage to give the customer what he really wants.
To reverse this, it is essential to generate tailored content through good segmentation in campaigns, landing pages, pop ups, taking advantage of all the customer data we have. It is also key to provide attention to hot leads, with the right agents for each interaction, aided by automated follow-up. If you get a lead, it takes you six hours to answer and the agent has no idea about the product he was interested in, you probably won’t close that sale.
Another point we recommend is the reuse of leads through nurturing techniques. Nurture our contact base. This is a trend today, companies have been doing it all their lives: sending letters, magazines, gifts, making calls. The advantage of lead nurturing today is that we can do it through different channels and in an automated way.
These points do not require “aerospace” technology. With rapid implementation tools it is possible to greatly enhance sales capability and customer experience.
What treatment do you recommend for the customer service area?
There are companies that still rely on the telephone, because they want to provide a personalized service. But to maintain a good level of service, they must increase their team and resources if the number of customers increases. In addition, the customer is forced to contact only one way, reducing the customer experience.
In these cases we recommend using asynchronous channels, where agents can resolve different interactions at the same time (chat and call, for example) and customers decide how and when to contact each other.
On the other hand, it is common that a percentage of the questions that reach a company are repeated: “I want to modify my order”, “What day do I have an appointment”, “Is there parking at the hotel?” It is possible to automate interactions through voice or chat bots, which do not necessarily require advanced artificial intelligence to meet customer requirements. In this way, agents can focus on tasks that generate much more value, while challenging and growing.
In summary, what recommendation would you give to a company that wants to start its digital transformation journey?
The fundamental thing is to start by getting all the processes in order before incorporating more complex technologies. Start with a good foundation. It is very important to generate new customers; but we must also consider cost efficiency and focus on improving the customer experience of the customers we already have.
Generating macro projects that attack all the pain points of a company can be exhausting for the company (imagine a project that takes years to implement) and also for the supplier. At inConcert we provide integral solutions, and at the same time we develop specific solutions to attack specific pain points in the areas of sales, marketing, services and collections. Making each area more efficient allows us to obtain faster and more visible results in a few weeks. After that, we are able to move on to more ambitious projects or more innovative technologies such as Speech Analytics or chatbots with NLU.
