Customer Insights and why you need them

Customer Insights and why you need them

AI & Data Analytics

Customer Insights and why you need them

In the competitive world of business today, customers expect a lot from businesses. Not only do they demand high-quality goods and services but they want high-quality experiences to accompany them.

Customer insights are the tools forward-thinking businesses use to make sure every aspect of their business delivers on customer expectations. This spans everything from core products and services to the sales cycle, after-sales service, marketing activities and more.

What are customer insights?

At a basic level, customer insights are the ways companies use and interpret customer data, behaviours, and feedback to improve product/service development and enhance customer support.

They are crucially important because they not only help businesses serve their customers better, but they help businesses understand customer behaviour when it comes to purchasing decisions. By understanding how customers think and feel, what their goals and preferences are, and what they’re looking for in the brands they use, companies can make a genuine difference in customers’ lives and be rewarded with loyalty and growing revenue.

At a practical level, customer insights can help brands answer key business questions such as:

  • How is our brand perceived by customers?
  • How can we serve our customers better?
  • How can we better anticipate our customers’ needs?
  • How can we effectively introduce a new product or service to our customers?
  • What can we do to increase the conversion rates of marketing campaigns?

Can customer insights make a difference to the bottom line?

Gallup research shows that organizations that leverage customer behavioural insights outperform peers by 85 percent in sales growth and more than 25 percent in gross margin. And according to Microsoft, “A moderate increase in customer experience generates an average revenue increase of $775 million over three years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenues.”

Benefits of using customer insights

By using customer insights to inform strategic and tactical decisions, you can develop deeper relationships with your customers, better understand the connected customer, and generate meaningful and quantifiable results. Other benefits of using customer insights include:

  • Improved customer lifetime value
  • Reduced customer churn. With the right data, you can identify areas where you can improve customer service to better satisfy your customers
  • The ability to leverage promotions specifically targeted to your customers who are most likely to buy
  • Better optimisation of your product pricing, through better market understanding
  • The intelligence necessary to expand into new markets or leave underperforming markets

Tapping into Customer Insights

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, you can leverage leading technology to better understand your customers and drive your business forward.

Customer Insights allows you to:

  • Measure customer behavior on your digital platforms
    • Track engagement using web analytics
    • Track engagement using mobile app analytics
    • Build custom reports for your specific business needs
    • See how customers progress through the journey
  • Connect data for deep audience insights
    • Bring together all your customer data using prebuilt connectors
    • Streamline data standardization to create comprehensive profiles
    • Enrich profiles with interests and preferences
    • Augment profiles with customer feedback
  • Predict customer needs using built-in AI
    • Identify high-value and at-risk customers
    • Recommend relevant products and services
    • Discover new audience segments
    • Track business performance
    • Extend and customize for advanced insights

And more.

 

If you’d like to find out more about how to leverage Dynamics 365 Customer Insights in your business, get in touch with us and we’ll show you how.

 

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Data, your differentiator in Financial Services

Data, your differentiator in Financial Services

AI & Data Analytics

Data, your differentiator in Financial Services

It comes as no surprise that Covid-19 has been bad for the financial services industry in South Africa.  In March 2021 Standard Bank reported a 51% decline in profit after tax and in October 2020 Nedbank estimated that their profits would drop by 72%.

In the face of this economic reality, financial services organisations need to be extremely selective as to where budgets are allocated.  Never before has it been more important for projects to either improve operations or increase revenue.

 

Where is the focus for financial services for 2021 and beyond?

We would like to answer this question by looking at two research papers that can help determine the focus areas for financial services for 2021 and beyond.

 

Customer experience in the 2021 financial services market

The first is an analysis from Microsoft in conjunction with Future Digital Finance, CXFS and Insights titled: “Customer experience in the 2021 financial services market”.  In the research, it was found that Customer Experience is still a big focus for Financial Services organisations with 86% of organisations either maintaining their CX budget (48%) or increasing it (38%).  It was also found that for the 41% of researched organisations that the CX budget amounted to roughly 50% of the overall budget.

So where is this budget being allocated within CX?  The top three priorities were found to be: “Leveraging customer data for real-time personalization at the branch level”,“Creating a unified customer experience across physical and digital channels” and “Creating more digital self-service options for customers”.

This identified both the importance of the continued digital transformation of financial services as well as the ever-increasing value of data.

 

Making digital banking more human

The second piece of research that we would like to highlight is a 2020 study by Accenture titled:“Making digital banking more human”.

This research showed that the unprecedented circumstances of 2020 added to the rapid uptake of digital banking.  This is to be celebrated but it also leads to the threat of increased commoditisation and jeopardisation of trust.  Why?  It again comes down to data. On one hand, there is  the use of data to differentiate financial service engagements. On the other, customers need to trust financial services organisations with increasing amounts of their personal information.

 

 

Introducing Microsoft Customer Insights

We have seen from the above research that data has become the new oil for financial services organisations.  Of course, the drive to attain a single view of the customer has been something financial services organisations have been working hard to do for decades.  In response, Microsoft has identified this as an area of importance and has introduced a solution: Microsoft Customer Insights.

 

Why is this product so important? 

As a technology solution, Customer Insights is state-of-the-art.  It is developed as a pure out-of-the-box Software-as-a-Service (cloud) solution, it is easily configurable and extensible, and it can be embedded directly into your CRM of choice.  With over 300 pre-built connectors, it can plug  into data sources.

From an implementation perspective Microsoft Customer Insights can be implemented in weeks – not the months and years of traditional Customer Data Platform solutions.  It is also run by business, often marketing, instead of being controlled and managed by IT.

From a financial services perspective, Microsoft Customer Insights provides the ability to personalise and tailor your products and interactions, to gain a competitive edge and optimise your engagements.  Attaining this single view of the customer will give you near real-time insight into your customer, enabling you to get more revenue from marginal customers and even more from engaged customers.

Where have The CRM Team used Microsoft Customer Insights before?

Sasfin Wealth embarked on a technology drive with a focus on client experience.  In order to provide a digital experience that added real value, they found that they needed to develop a deeper understanding of their clients’ interests, needs, wants and preferences.

Alex Elsworth, Chief Technology Officer at Sasfin Wealth, notes:

‘Our value proposition lies in the personal service and attention which we apply in managing our client portfolios. As a business philosophy, client relationships, client-orientated processes, client retention and superior client value are core to our offering.’

Both strategic and customer-focused elements were key parts of Sasfin’s CRM journey. The company wanted a central view of Wealth client information and the ability to track client interaction effortlessly. Essentially, Sasfin Wealth wanted to bring its ‘hands on’ client experience into the digital age.

‘During our research and evaluation, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution proved to be the platform that would best suit our needs and requirements,’ notes Tinus Verster, Wealth Technology Strategist at Sasfin. ‘Microsoft Dynamics 365 has the capability to integrate into existing backend systems. It is key to our digital strategy.’

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How to use customer insights to your advantage

How to use customer insights to your advantage

AI & Data Analytics

How to use customer insights to your advantage

You know your business from the inside out. But what about from the outside in? Do you know how your customers experience your business? What they feel about your products and services? Whether your customer service works for them? Do you know how you could serve them better?

Many companies use analytics. But few use it as meaningfully as they could. An even smaller proportion use customer insights meaningfully. Yet by developing a deep understanding of how customers experience a product or service – how they feel about it, what they want, need, and desire – can make a massive difference to the present and future of every business.

Using customer insights for better business results

With the right data, companies can take their businesses from good to great – or from great to amazing.

Here are some of the was you can leverage customer insights in your business

  • Market better

By understanding your customers’ wants and needs, you can reach them with messaging that they appreciate, understand and remember. If you’ve been frustrated by so-so marketing results, chances are your messaging is off. Or, you might be trying to reach the wrong people altogether. By knowing who you’re talking to, you can craft the kind of messages that matter.

  • Improve the customer journey

Many businesses’ customer journeys are long and complex. Do they have to be? If the answer is no, customer insights can help businesses find new ways to simplify and streamline the customer experience. If the answer is yes, customer insights can help too – pointing out areas of frustration, drop-off and more, so companies can create the experience that works best.

  • Launch new products and services intelligently

Many new products and services fail. The reason is: customers don’t know about them, don’t want them, or don’t find them valuable. For any company thinking about a new product or service launch, customer insights can help answer key questions such as: whether customers feel a need for the new product; how they could imagine the product fitting into their lives; and what core wants/needs/desires the new product can help fulfill.

Getting the most out of customer insights

To make the most of customer insights data when trying to answer key business questions, it’s important to start out with a few points in mind.

  • What do you want to learn about your customers? Having a specific goal will always help guide your analysis and investigation.
  • What does it look like your customers trying to tell you, through their buying decisions and interactions with your company?
  • How deeply do you feel you know your customers? Could you know them better?
  • Are you taking into account all available customer data in a holistic and easy-to-access way, or do you have data that’s not being used?

 

Why Dynamics 365 Customer Insights works so well

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights was designed to make it easy to get every piece of customer information you have to work for your business.

With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, you can:

  • Conduct multichannel analysis for a complete 360-degree view
  • Drive meaningful actions using AI-powered insights and measure customer behavior on your digital platforms.
  • Connect all your data easily for deep audience insights using prebuilt connectors
  • Identify high-value and at-risk customers
  • Recommend relevant products and services
  • Discover new audience segments

 And more.

 

To learn more about how Dynamics 365 can make a difference in your business, get in touch with us today.

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How to be a customer-centric company

How to be a customer-centric company

Thought Leadership

How to be a customer-centric company

In the simplest terms, customer centricity is about listening to and learning from your customers. It’s about leveraging the information and knowledge you have about your customers to guide your business in a way that is resonant with and meaningful to them.

Customer centricity is about more than a broad-strokes sense of customer needs. It’s about granular, detailed insight into every customer’s unique preferences, so you can provide the optimal product, service and overall experience.

Making meaningful connections

Decades ago, customers had far fewer choices. This meant that companies could get by with offering only mediocre service and customer experience. That has all changed. With customers in the driver’s seat, brands need to improve the way they serve their customers.

In short, today, no matter the industry you’re in, customer centricity must be at the center of your business strategy if you’re going to drive profit, ensure loyalty and gain a competitive edge.

Want to boost your customer centricity right now? Here are a few key pointers:

  • Strive to know your customers better, every day. The more you know about your customers, the better you can anticipate their needs and preferences. That in turn opens up new business opportunities.
  • Understand your customers’ goals and desires. To forge a deeper relationship with your customers, focus on how your product or service forms part of your customers’ lives. Is it helping your customers achieve their goals? Could a small change make your customers feel more supported, more understood?
  • Prioritise customer retention. Selling to existing customers is far easier and less expensive than selling to new ones. How can you use your data to serve your customers better, so they stay with you for longer? The right data not only gives you insights into how to keep your customers happy, but can also illuminate areas of risk that might be silently damaging your company.
  • Make sure you have the right technology, so that information gathering is a seamless, integrated process of daily business activity.

How Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights can help your business become more customer centric

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is designed to make understanding your customers easier. Leading companies around the world rely on Dynamics 365 Customer Insights for the insights that help keep their businesses thriving.

With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, you can:

  • Get a complete, 360-degree view of every customer with digital and cross-channel analytics
  • Optimize the customer journey with out-of-the-box and custom interactive reports
  • Predict customer needs by unlocking powerful insights using prebuilt AI models, or use custom models for deeper insights.
  • Connect your entire stack to harness data and drive informed decisions, automate processes, and personalise customer engagement across channels.

Today, all sustainable, future-proof brands are building themselves around their customers.  Becoming meaningfully customer centric is not only a necessary strategy for becoming an iconic brand, but a lasting one, too.

To learn more about what Dynamics 365 Customer Insights can do for your business, get in touch with us today.

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Microsoft Dynamics 365 – Ignites with new enhancements

Microsoft Dynamics 365 – Ignites with new enhancements

Dynamics and Power Platform

Microsoft Dynamics 365- Ignites with new enhancements

Microsoft Ignite 2021 took place from the 2nd to 4th March and was attended virtually by over 45,000 people around the world.

Along with dozens of announcements there were a number of exciting enhancements made to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite.

Have a look at what we believe are the four with the biggest impact.

 

Real-time customer journey orchestration

 

Have you shopped on a website, found something you like, left to do something else and then received an email to say that the product you were interested in is now offered to you at a 10% discount?

This is real-time marketing and retargeting that is going to be a feature within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Dynamics 365 Marketing

Real-time customer orchestration

This is a move away from segment-based marketing to real-time interactions.  This allows you to create a personalised customer journey for each individual.

To further increase the effectiveness of this, Microsoft are embedding artificial intelligence into this process so that the right offers, images and videos are displayed within the real-time marketing communication.

These real-time messages can be triggered by workflow and Microsoft Automate within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.

By using real-time customer orchestration you can reduce cart abandonment by 6,5% (MotoCMS) and increase conversion rate by up to 25% (SocialMediaToday).

 

Real-time action from customer voice surveys

 

By sticking to the real-time theme it was also announced at Microsoft Ignite that Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service will now include real-time action from customer voice surveys.

Have you responded to a customer service survey after a negative experience and had someone contact you days later – or worse – not at all?

Real-time actions will now be available from a customer survey where an agent will get notified directly after your comment and you will get a call moments later.  It can also be configured that a discount be sent to you, or another win-back initiative, be sent directly after the interaction.

 

Customer Self-service field service scheduling

 

Microsoft is really enhancing every aspect of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the two enhancements to Field service are that customers will be able to do their own scheduling and rate the work of the technician.

Scheduling a technician can be a tedious time consuming activity that often involves phoning a contact centre.  Now customers will be able to do scheduling directly from their own device which will provide a more personalised experience, reduce scheduling errors and rescheduling events.

Customers will also be able to get automated service visit reminders, track their engineer in real-time and submit direct feedback on the quality of the work.

89% of customers want an “Uber-like” technician tracking service, with 86% willing to pay more for a better scheduling process. (CSG International)

 

Embedded Microsoft Teams within sales – including chat

 

Microsoft Teams is being tightly integrated to Microsoft Dynamics Sales with sales people now having the ability to chat with customers and colleagues directly within Microsoft Dynamics Sales.

Microsoft Teams embedded directly within Microsoft Dynamics Sales

 

Not only is chat directly within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales but you can also embed a Microsoft Teams dialler experience as well, as well as an extensible video and audio meeting experience.

 

Hundreds of enhancements within Microsoft Dynamics 365

 

Apart from the fantastic enhancements announced at Microsoft Ignite there are also hundreds of enhancements contained within the 2021 Release Wave 1 Plan.

This document is 347 pages packed with new features covering marketing, sales, service, field service, finance & operations, human resources, customer insights, customer voice, industry solutions and Power Platform.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is truly on fire and the aim is to empower your organisation to serve your customers and provide excellent customer experiences.

Find out how you can get these enhancements!
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Drive personalized interactions with real-time customer journey orchestration

Drive personalized interactions with real-time customer journey orchestration

Marketing

Drive personalized interactions with real-time customer journey orchestration

Faced with a historic level of social and business disruption, companies have been forced to respond quickly and strategically to meet the challenge. To help address this challenge, and elevate customer experiences, we are introducing real-time customer journey orchestration capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.

 

Elevate customer experiences

Connecting with people has never been more important, and customer expectations have never been higher. Customer tolerance for disjointed experiences, or even worse, tone-deaf communications is unacceptable. Organizations that deliver better end-to-end customer experiences (CX) are taking share. Despite a decade of discussion about the importance of CX, many companies have failed to elevate their experiences to the level desired.

Beyond the human value of great experiences, elevated experiences are critical to driving business value—enabling growth and driving brand equity, preventing churn, and enabling higher marketing and customer engagement return on investment.

Dynamics 365 Marketing is working to revolutionize how organizations address these challenges to enable teams such as marketing, sales, customer success, commerce, or customer service to create engaging and impactful customer-led experiences.

We are announcing real-time customer journey orchestration capabilities in Dynamics 365 Marketing will be released for preview as part of the April 2021 release wave 1 updates in Europe and North America. This landmark innovation brings together the worlds of customer experience and marketing automation and is designed to help businesses:

  • Engage customers in real-time
  • Win customers and earn loyalty faster
  • Personalize customer experiences with AI
  • Build customer trust with a unified, adaptable platform

Plus, commercial Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 customers will get six months of free access to Dynamics 365 Marketing at no additional cost. We’ll have more details on this offer to share soon, along with eligibility details, and we are excited to see you reap the benefits of these solutions together.

 

Moving from segment-based marketing to real-time interactions

Customer journey orchestration helps you make the next great leap in customer experiences: from segment-based marketing campaigns to moments-based interactions, creating a personalized, holistic customer journey for each individual. This enables you to strengthen your relationships at every touchpoint across both digital and physical, breaking down walls between marketing, sales, commerce, and service organizations. Dynamics 365 Marketing responds to customer actions during the journey.

Win customers and earn loyalty

In the highly competitive technology market, HP’s brand is built on its high-quality products and differentiated service. Loyalty is critical to enabling business performance (Customer Lifetime Value, Gross Margin, etc.) and every support call is an opportunity. HP is working to turn support interactions into personalized engagement moments using Dynamics 365 Marketing with customer journey orchestration. This will allow HP to break down longstanding data silos, better engage customers in real-time with the most impactful messaging, and leverage AI-driven recommendations.

“With customer journey orchestration in Dynamics 365 Marketing, our agents will gain a real-time 360-degree view of each customer and their support experience,” explains Brian Johnston, Business Architect, HP. “We’ll be making the most of our customers’ time and treating them with empathy and understanding. It makes HP feel real to the customer, and it makes the customer feel real to HP”

The result will be an enhanced and highly-personalized customer service experience that improves quality of service, builds customer lifetime loyalty, and also saves the company money by shortening the time spent solving problems.

 

Personalize customer experiences with AI to enable more engaging content

Authoring impactful content quickly and easily is a big challenge. With built-in AI recommendations for content, channels, customer segmentation, and analytics, companies can be sure to deliver the right message. The reimagined email editor helps select and deliver the best image, video, document, or fragment using AI. A new centralized asset library allows you to search, version, manage and use AI to tag your digital assets.

Journey authoring is also assisted by AI with targeted customer segments, channel optimization, and experimentation. As customers engage, the customer journey adapts and responds to interactions with relevant content driving further engagement.

We’re engineering AI throughout Dynamics 365 Marketing to help you create engaging and impactful messages faster. Powerful experimentation capabilities and analytics track progress towards your business objectives, helping you to exceed business goals.

Campari raises the bar for delivering customer experiences

The Campari Group, home to some of the world’s iconic alcoholic spirit brands, knows how to create great brand experiences and is always working to deepen its relationships with customers. To gain a 360-degree customer view and enhance the personalization of its marketing, sales, and customer service efforts, Campari Group deployed Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing. With AI-driven recommendations and customer journey orchestration, Campari Group can now personalize real-time marketing messages for maximum impact across all customer touchpoints.

“Customer journey orchestration enables contextually relevant and consistent real-time conversations with every customer across all interaction points,” explains Chad Niemuth, Vice President, Global IT – Marketing and Sales. “We can more precisely align marketing messages for each communication channel to gain the greatest impact. We see the effects in in-store sales and also in e-commerce, which is particularly important during COVID.”

Within weeks, Campari Group connected all the data points in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and deployed its first email marketing automation campaign against those segments in the United States. Roll-out in the United Kingdom and Australia followed shortly.

Stronger connections with Microsoft Teams

The dramatic shift to online meetings and virtual events has made it even more important for event managers to easily use Teams and Dynamics 365 Marketing.

At Microsoft Ignite, we announced new and updated features that enable you to run rich webinars and events, true to your brand with a professional experience for attendees. We also announced the ability of Teams to easily follow up with event attendees with Dynamics 365 Marketing. This allows you to continue connecting with attendees, nurturing them into loyal customers.

Turn insights into action

Microsoft’s customer data platform, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, makes it easy to unify customer data, identify high-value customer segments, or those likely to churn. When you combine it with Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can engage customers in a personalized way and in real-time to drive meaningful actions. Seamlessly use segments from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to target marketing campaigns. Personalize content with rich profile information, and create individual journeys based on customer history and preferences. With the addition of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, you build custom AI models and improve relevancy with advanced segmentation and targeting that can then be brought to life with Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Learning customers’ preferences and sentiment is critical to personalizing engagement. Today, we are also announcing real-time survey capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice that enable you to adapt customer journeys or trigger relevant communications. For example, if a customer is not satisfied with a specific product feature or service, the response can quickly stop marketing campaigns while also notifying an account manager for personalized follow-up.

Together, these connected applications help companies personalize moments that matter across all touchpoints in a customer’s journey and build deeper customer relationships with more meaningful engagement across both digital and physical channels.

 

Agencies bring customer-first approach to journey creation

Developing highly impactful and personalized experiences across the customer journey requires a fresh approach. We are excited to be working with a number of leading agencies that have expertise in transforming customer experiences to deliver stronger connections to leading brands and measurable business impact.

“VMLY&R is excited to partner with Microsoft, helping empower organizations to reimagine and transform customer experiences. Harnessing the power of AI, data, and insights to create connected customer and brand experiences have never been more important. We look forward to collaborating with Microsoft and the Dynamics 365 team to deliver amazing customer experiences for organizations around the world,” says David Mitchell, Chief Technology Officer, VMLY&R.

Agencies such as VMLY&R (a WPP company) and Kin + Carta use creativity, technology, and culture to create experiences that engage customers one-on-one across every touchpoint from marketing through service, across both digital and physical experiences.

“As people have more and more ways to interact with brands, it’s never been more vital to deliver a consistent, seamless experience for customers and to look towards the future to find innovative ways to meet their needs,” says Rob McGowan, Managing Director of Edit, part of the Kin+Carta connective. “It’s this challenge that we believe the new customer journey orchestration features in Dynamics 365 Marketing are ideally placed to answer.”

Learn more and get started

To learn more about how your organization can elevate your customer experiences, visit the Dynamics 365 Marketing webpage and contact us to explore all capabilities in Dynamics 365 Marketing.

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A partnership to empower marketing for a brilliant customer experience

A partnership to empower marketing for a brilliant customer experience

Digital Transformation

The CRM Team and Simple join forces!

Empowering marketing, to deliver a brilliant customer experience

London and South Africa, March 04, 2021: The CRM Team, expert implementers of world-leading customer engagement technology, and Simple MRM Ltd, enablers of result-driven marketing and customer experience, announce a favourable partnership.

The alliance is a natural fit between two Microsoft partners focused on transforming the customer experience through technology. Properly coordinated sales and marketing improves engagement and advocacy with a brand, ultimately increasing the lifetime value of the customer.

The CRM Team brings together tons of customer data with AI in Microsoft Dynamics 365, to create a single customer record, providing sales, marketing and service teams with unique insights to take action, automate repetitive processes and engage customers like never before. As experts in project and change management, the team deliver fastest time to value for customers investing in Microsoft technologies.

Simple empowers teams further as the command centre for managing marketing resources, delegating jobs at pace to build campaigns that wow customers, with content that’s brand compliant, consistent and approved by business leaders. This governed material is readily available to the wider team to strengthen all customer engagements, increase productivity and unleash more effective marketing.  

“Our partnership with Simple is designed with our customers’ marketing teams in mind. We consistently heard of specific challenges that marketing teams face, and these were only made worse during the pandemic. The solution from Simple helps us address these challenges. And the insight, expertise and engagement model provided by Nick and his team will ensure that we can instantly transform how marketing teams collaborate, innovate and adapt.”

Paul Slade, CEO- The CRM Team

Simple is your command centre for managing marketing resources, budgets, assets, campaigns and customer experiences. As a single central tool for directing marketing operations, Simple lets you focus on creating brilliant marketing and customer experiences.

 

“Simple is built on Microsoft to empower all things marketing, but the enterprise solution has wide-reaching benefits across all departments, giving stakeholder visibility and enabling marketing, sales and service teams alike. The CRM Team are the perfect partner to support customers in delivering their targeted business outcomes through leveraging technology, to jointly transform business operations.” 

Aden Forrest, CEO – Simple MRM Ltd

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Bill Gates and Chewbacca Believe In The Magic of Software

Bill Gates and Chewbacca Believe In The Magic of Software

Thought Leadership

Bill Gates and Chewbacca Believe In The Magic of Software

It was a Friday. The 27th of June 2008 to be exact.

Bill Gates said, “10100011000” to everyone at Microsoft. That’s “Bye” in binary for all the non-techies among you. It was his last day as CEO at Microsoft, and as Bill took the stage, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.

People cried tears of sadness and tears of joy.

The tears of joy weren’t because Bill was leaving, they were thanks to the video Bill and his team made about his last days at Microsoft.

Matthew McConaughey, Jay-Z, Bono, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Jon Stewart, Al Gore, and even Barack Obama, all played their part. But our personal favourite was when Bill and Chewbacca agree that you should “Never doubt the magic of software.”

Watch the video here:

At The CRM Team, we listened to Bill and Chewbacca: We don’t ever doubt the magic of software! We’re always amazed at what Microsoft’s R&D team delivers. And we get to work with those magical applications every single day.

We use Dynamics 365, Azure and the Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Power Virtual Agent) to make magic for our customers in South Africa, the UK, Holland and the USA.

Have a look at some of our case studies below:

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The CRM Story

The CRM Story

Thought Leadership

What is CRM?

HINT: It’s not just about software.

Many people think that CRM is software. But it’s far more than that. 

Customer Relationship Management is about blending technology and strategy to guarantee great customer experience.

Customers are at the centre of every business. Whether you are B2C, B2B, B2B2C, etc. your business success depends on the experience your customer has with you. In every business this experience is shaped at four customer touch points:

1.  Marketing

2.  Sales

3.  Delivery

4.  Service

It’s not sufficient to be good at two or three of these touch points. Your relationship with your customer is dependent on all four.

A bitter let down

A guy in our office recently ordered a cell phone from a tele-sales company. Their marketing was excellent and they had created a strong brand that he trusted. The salesman on the phone was very knowledgeable. His easy manner made buying a simple process.

But when it came to receiving his phone, he had a different experience. On opening his package, he realised the phone was completely different to the one he ordered. When he contacted the company to correct things, nobody seemed to care. It took him a long time to get the company to deliver the phone he’d actually bought. When they eventually did, he vowed never to buy from them again.

Customers are lost through experiences like this.

It doesn’t matter how good certain teams in your business are, without consistency across the four touch points, you’ll always hemorrhage customers and revenue. This is where Customer Relationship Management comes in.

CRM gives you this consistency. A good, functioning CRM system provides great customer experience – right across your business. And because customers have a good relationship with you, you’ll be able to keep hold of them. This creates up-selling and cross-selling opportunities. Selling to current customers is far easier than attracting new ones.

Great customer relationship management doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a journey. But it’s a journey every company needs to be on.

Let us help you

At The CRM Team, we are experts on this journey. Whatever stage you have reached, we can assist you to get to the next one. See which stage you are at.

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Omni-channel vs Multi-channel. Is there a difference?

Omni-channel vs Multi-channel. Is there a difference?

Customer Service, Popular

Omni-channel vs Mutli-channel. Is there a difference? 

The words multi-channel and omni-channel are often used interchangeably by experts and consultants alike, but is there a difference? We believe there is.

 

Multi-channel refers to the fact that organisations interact with their customers over multiple channels including email, phone calls or social media. The problem with this is the transition between these channels isn’t smooth. As a consumer we find ourselves in a position where we have to explain and re-explain our situation or requirements, wasting time and building up irritation. 

 

Omni-channel, on the other hand, means there is channel awareness that allows for smooth transitioning between interactions. If I receive an SMS recommending a specific product or promotion and call the contact centre to take up the offer, the agent is immediately aware that I’m calling because of the promotion. They would also be aware if I wanted to complain.

 

Being constantly connected on digital platforms has changed how businesses need to interact with customers. Let’s take a look at the benefits an omni-channel solution could bring to your business.

 

1. Increase customer satisfaction

Customers want to interact with your business online, through a call centre, on social media, in-store, and they want these interactions to be consistent and immediate. An omni-channel approach prevents your customer from getting lost in a constant loop of communication with no resolution.

Nothing irritates your customers more than not having their voices heard. This happens when a customer phones your call centre, but they don’t have the information to resolve the call and so they email the service desk and then they might be pushed back to the call centre. With an omni-channel approach your business can make first call resolutions a reality, by having consistent and accurate customer data.

 

2. Make informed decisions with a data-driven view of your client

Understand your customers better, identify untapped market opportunities and make smarter business decisions. Omni-channel is about helping customers at the right time, with the right product and the right advice.

 

Using customer insights will help you track behavioural patterns in how and where your customers find information, and what products or services they want to buy. The data you have on hand will also allow you to ask better questions, and these questions will drive improved processes.

 

3. Reduce operational costs

Consistent and relevant data also allows you to measure operational efficiency where it counts. Omni-channel allows you to automate standardised processes. Automation could reduce call centre agent handling time, help reduce time to resolution and in turn reduce operational costs while increasing customer interactions.

 

4. Improve productivity and collaboration

Remove information silos between departments to encourage collaboration. Omni-channel brings together data from many sources, into one view for client-facing teams.

 

Gone are the days where the person who has been with a company for the longest usually holds all client information. This causes key man dependency and is a business risk. An omni-channel system removes this risk by giving the people in your business a full view of your clients.

 

Give your business the advantage with an omni-channel system that can increase profitability through increased customer satisfaction. Why not get in touch with us to see how we can partner to create a consistent customer experience.

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