With the arrival of lots of new, often disruptive players, as well as the emergence of new alternative business models, companies can no longer take market share for granted. Customers, the real treasure for companies, are at the heart of marketing, customer relations, trade and even operations and logistics nowadays.
But digital technology can help us offer a new approach, creating excellence through differentiated experiences. This spread of innovative digital experiences in all the important parts of everyday life ‘feeds’ the relationships between companies and customers by creating even bigger expectations.
Successful companies in our collective digital transformation are the ones that have demonstrated an ability to adapt very quickly and constantly to their customers’ needs and habits, gaining mastery over relationship excellence. They approach prospects differently and aren’t afraid to open themselves up to new ecosystems in order to win customers upstream in the value chain, being at their side until their intentions or plans come to fruition.
How can we redesign these experiences?
Three fundamental pillars need to be in place before you can create a successful customer experience.
- develop marketing intelligence;
- strengthen your end-to-end customer experience;
- revisit sales and distribution strategies to create value in your business and beyond within the global ecosystem.
Marketing Intelligence
Our beliefs
Listen to the customer to identify each of their real needs. Service design methods invite customers, as well as other stakeholders in your field, partners, etc., to react to value propositions and make them evolve.
Use customer feedback on the ground to:
- ensure promises are kept at all stages of the customer experience;
- personalise the offers and services given to customers. You then need to understand their key life moments and offer suitable services, from end to end. In a context of constant innovation, the ability to market properly is essential. Designing new services must be part of ongoing short-term cycles, focusing on agility and deliveries built to support industrialisation.
Approach prospects with their intentions and life projects in mind as far upstream in the value chain as possible. It’s all about being part of a global ecosystem and identifying the stakeholders who will naturally come to you when they have a project in mind or intend to make a purchase. It’s essential that you gain mastery over the value chain upstream in order to win them as early as possible, as well as downstream, so you can offer them a full end-to-end service. Building end-to-end legitimacy is a complex, long and costly process. It’s therefore essential to be part of an ecosystem that, at the very least, can detect even weak signals of purchase intentions far upstream of third-party partners.
Sopra Steria consultants support large corporations and organisations in reinventing their customer experience.
- Designing B2B and B2C solutions to constantly reinvent the services of tomorrow
- The marketing factory, accelerating TTM in new services
Interpersonal Excellence
Our beliefs
Using on customer feedback on the ground can help you:
Accelerate great customer service and anticipate any tension: machine learning, semantic analysis and artificial intelligence tools are just some innovative ways of absolutely mastering how you can be most reactive and effective... while taking into account your customers’ emotional situations at the same time. These new tools can also help us anticipate any ‘irritants’. For example, some telecoms operators can identify when customers have used up a large part of their data allowance abroad and offer them an suitable package, thus avoiding the trauma of returning to find a huge bill on the doormat.
Simplify customer journeys: this involves understanding the motivations, needs and irritants behind every customer, providing suitable pathways from end to end. As for customer journey development, they must always be part of your short-term cycles, focusing on agility and deliveries built to support industrialisation
Engage customers in the long term and beyond a purely business relationship. To do so, you first need to ensure a certain level of satisfaction above the standard expected, offering a strong promise, as well as tangible evidence of these promises being kept at all stages of the relationship. Then you have to position yourself as a true end-to-end partner for your customers.
Sopra Steria consultants support large corporations and organisations in reinventing their customer experience.
- Constantly reinventing B2B and B2C customer journeys
- Predictive customer experience profiling to anticipate customer needs and tensions
- Making a success of CRM
Trade and Distribution
Turning your sales staff/advisers/agents into augmented professionals. It’s all about rethinking motivations, needs, expectations and tensions your stakeholders may experience within customer relations, at the same time as introducing suitable tools (tablets, virtual or augmented reality, serious games, etc.), allowing all stakeholders involved to develop their position and adapt to increasingly demanding customers.
It’s also about rethinking sales processes and organisations with sales efficiency as the number one priority: helping to discharge advisers from their administrative or initial lead qualification duties, using AI to better prioritise opportunities and actions, moving from close management into more of a sales coach role, and so on.
Becoming the key player in your ecosystem: In the future, there will be less room for the big companies who simply open themselves up and operate entire networks whilst perfectly controlling their areas of expertise all by themselves. Platform organisations, organic companies that operate ‘as a platform’, will instead put their businesses at the heart of their ecosystems (employees, customers, suppliers, partners, applicants, freelancers, start-ups, labs, etc.), allowing them to position themselves on a higher scale than they otherwise could with a more traditional approach. Here, we’re talking about newcomers but, more concretely, for traditional companies, it’s about breaking down barriers amongst their teams, thinking in terms of a much wider ecosystem to create sharing, co-creation of experiences, co-construction and co‑production.
Sopra Steria consultants support large corporations and organisations in reinventing their customer experience.
- Establishing and organising a marketplace
- Making a success of CRM sales
- Transforming banking and insurance networks
- The Data eXperience Platform, accelerating the implementation of new services and customer journeys, whilst opening up to the wider ecosystem (open banking, etc.)
Smart Customer Data
Driving customer satisfaction. Faced with ever greater demands, it’s vital nowadays to develop a rationale for end-to-end customer excellence, ensuring your company is properly aligned at all levels, including amongst employees, your management methods, general governance, technological processes and tools, etc. You need to keep a close eye on all the metrics and KPIs that relate to end-to-end customer excellence that can help you continuously ensure your company is in a state of osmosis with its market and customers alike:
- metrics that prioritise your customers’ needs from end to end, and not just metrics in isolation viewed from an internal process, nor KPIs that simply give priority to the figures;
- metrics that go beyond the company’s boundaries and reflect customers’ real intentions and projects overall, which can allow your entire ecosystem to react quickly and anticipate any frustrations;
- metrics that show the symmetry between customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction, because the digital transformations we’re seeing today are putting people back to the heart of companies, changing what’s possible, altering ways of working together, and challenging organisations and the skills they rely on.
- Acquire and use information available elsewhere. Focussing your company on internal data is becoming increasingly futile in detecting and acting upon purchase intentions upstream. In B2C and B2B alike, giant online platforms can identify profiles and intentions well before the first contact is made between a prospect and a company. Acquisition is spreading far beyond the single parameter of online marketing carried out by the e-commerce players, instead, it’s becoming essential to master acquisition and create a certain crossover between internal and external data.
Sopra Steria consultants support large corporations and organisations in reinventing their customer experience.
- Solving the end-to-end customer satisfaction equation
- GDPR and customer experience