Businesses should know a lot about their customers. After all, most companies possess significant data about the people who buy their products and services. But here’s the problem: much of that data remains untapped. Not being able to harness the power of that data means companies face real danger.
Weary travellers who’ve been cooped up since COVID-19 are hungry for adventure in 2023. Despite economic uncertainty, 73% of people surveyed by Booking.com are more optimistic about travel than they were in 2022 and half say that investing in a holiday is a top priority. This travel boom is an opportunity for airlines, cruise companies and rail services to gain a foothold with high lifetime value customers.
Customer experience is more important now than ever before. Today, a staggering 80 per cent of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products. While 60 per cent of customers in the UK expect the customer experience to be connected. And to further complicate matters, we live in an omnichannel world where the average consumer will use as many as 10 channels to communicate with a company.
How many emails will you send today? At a guess, we’d say close to a hundred. After all, there are 4 billion daily email users sending a staggering 370 billion emails each day. Email marketing accounts for a large number of those emails, which is no surprise given that email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways of talking to customers. McKinsey research highlights the fact that email marketing consistently outperforms other forms of promotion with a ROI of $40 for every $1 spent.
In 1966, Eliza was born. The brainchild of Joseph Weizenbaum and a team of computer scientists at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Eliza is widely recognised as the world’s first chatbot. She was pretty basic compared to today’s chatbots but could identify key words in sentences and then ask questions back to the user based on that input.
How do you turn a customer into a fan? Ironically, one of the best ways to trigger word of mouth is to use your own voice and speak one-to-one with customers. Speaking directly to a customer enables you to better understand their needs, which means you can tailor solutions and offer additional services as they become more receptive to cross selling and upselling. Voice interactions can make a customer feel more appreciated as they experience being ‘seen’ and ‘heard’.
