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Trade, one of humankind’s earliest defining behaviors, has become astonishingly sophisticated. So far in this century, trade is increasingly a matter of knowledge: who has it, how much they have, when they have it and how they use it.
This four-part series explores knowledge as it applies to interactions between customer-facing organizations and the consumers who buy from them. The focus is on the few seconds or, at most, few minutes between a consumer’s decision to contact a business and the conclusion of that business, whether over the phone, through a Web site or at the point of sale.
The series details the importance of having the right insight at the right time and the dynamic nature of the underlying information, which shifts like quicksand under the businesses that rely on it. There is a heavy toll in neglecting that information.
Even as the knowledge we have about consumers becomes less reliable, consumers are gaining ready access to terabytes of information about the products they want and the organizations they can buy from. This is the focus of part 2. The balance of power has shifted from the business to the consumer. Consumers no longer rely on an in-depth conversation with a salesperson to make a shopping decision. Their loyalty is elusive.
Part 3 describes ways that consumer-facing businesses can surmount these 21st-century challenges and optimize the moment of impact. It describes the value of having verified phone, name and address information for every consumer as well as actionable insights into that consumer’s behavior, attitudes and lifestyle.
Part 4 outlines specific sources for authoritative insights about consumers and powerful applications for customer acquisition, retention, upsell and cross-sell. This combination enables businesses to wield, for the first time, highly actionable insights at the moment of interaction. The series concludes with specific real-life examples detailing how household name companies have successfully brought unknown prospects to life, making them customers.
Are you treating your core information about customers and prospects as the strategic asset it is?
The world is flat. Digital interconnections have toppled boundaries between companies and their competitors, partners, customers and prospects. The instantaneous exchange of information has spawned a marketplace where new products are cloned by rabid competitors even as they are introduced. As products become commodities, consumers are coming to transactions armed with more information than ever. Business is thoroughly unpredictable, and organizations need new ways to compete.
This exhilarating climate has made high-quality interactions with consumers one of the last and most important frontiers of business differentiation.
Recognizing this fact, organizations have agonized in recent years over the selection of technologies, processes, systems and frameworks for orchestrating superior consumer interactions. These systems generate demand, capture leads, convert them to offers, close sales, cross-sell/upsell customers and support a wide range of services. With all the attention paid to these systems, what’s been grossly overlooked is the rest of the equation — the consumer insight that fuels them. Data varies dramatically in quality at least as much as the solutions that consume it, yet too often it is treated as an afterthought in the CRM, ERP, call center mix. Then there is the matter of how to enhance, analyze and apply it.
How good can your consumer interaction solution be if the data that fuels it is faulty? Would you put dirty gasoline in your Rolls Royce? If you do have great data to start with, how do you ensure the quality of the decisions you make on it?
Too many companies are jeopardizing their businesses because they haven’t thought enough about their customers — who they are and what exactly they want. Businesses have fallen behind the curve. As the Internet turns consumers into superconsumers, organizations are quickly losing their grip on consumer identities and expectations.
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