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Tag: platform

  • Marketing Automation Can Go Too Far

    Marketing Automation Can Go Too Far

    With as many digital marketing programs, apps, platforms and dashboards as are currently available to the modern marketer, clearly marketing automation is an idea whose time has come. But at what point does all that automation start to mask, hide, obfuscate and cloak the real goal of the marketer – to persuade, influence, elicit emotion and garner a specific reaction by connecting in some emotional way with the individuals who make up the target market. If the machines are deciding the timing, tone, quality, frequency, subject matter and even copy point priority, is there really a relationship being created there?

    While I’m still emotionally a bit of a luddite when it comes to technology, I understand it’s uses and marvel at its potential to make our lives easier, and more productive, alleviating the drudgery of some of the more mundane daily tasks and delegating the type of “step, repeat” activities that make up our daily existence to simple machines. However, there are limits to the level and type of task I’m willing to relinquish to the machines. The little voice in the back of my head that warns “If it can do this, what else could it do if I don’t keep control over it” is running that script more frequently when I take a few moments to fill the que of my social media automation platform. It speeds up knowing that the machine will be totally in charge of what people see, when they see it, how often they see it. Relin       quishing that level of control is a little scary.

    Now, take that a step further. The next generation of software is likely to have wider permissions within your physical and online universe. It’s possible, given the necessary set up structure, for a similar platform to deliver a message to a given recipient, with the ability to search their hard drive and cloud account, dredge up bits of information gauge their reactions to online posts by others, collect viewing habits for photos and videos, and be able to piece these disparate pieces of data together into a coherent letter rife with personal references that only make sense to them. Its invasive, it’s creepy, it gives the recipient a sense of exposure, but if crafted correctly and reigned in appropriately, it would be so personal and so relevant, it would out-pull almost any generic control letter by a factor of 10. Are you scared of the machines yet?

    Currently, the overuse of personalization typically takes the form of using the person’s name or address or other key piece of publicly available information too many times. The only damage there is to the sender, as it pulls back the curtain and exposes the use of data in the letter, destroying the illusion of personal relations and destroying trust. This depresses response, but doesn’t hurt anything. But taken a notch further, say that same letter is riddled with personal information, including images of your home and kids, banking and financial “hints”, information about your mortgage or car loan, the kids’ school names or addresses, extracurricular activities. Looks and sounds personal, right? Now imagine that letter is stolen out of the mailbox, or picked up out of the delivery bin before it even gets to you. The person with ill intent now knows more about you than they could ever discover any other way, and can use that data to do anything they want, unfettered by regulations, legislation, professional ethics or legal restriction.

    Used correctly, personalization and data “injection” can make messages feel relevant, feel familiar, feel comfortable, and lead to a positive response. Used incorrectly, personalization can open the door to abuse, cause damage to both the sender and the recipient, and lead to a range of problems from minor headache to legal action. When employing automation for driving or disseminating marketing messages, best to err on the side of caution and keep your human fingers in the pie at critical points – just to be sure everyone stays on good terms – be careful out there . . .

  • Is facebook Your New Customer Service Department?

    Is facebook Your New Customer Service Department?

    I was speaking with some colleagues at a networking function the other day, and the presenter asserted that some companies have scaled back their customer service phone centers, and some have virtually done away with theirs altogether. The natural extension of this is the assertion that eventually all customer service would be performed through, and customer interaction take place on, social media platforms. Initially, I was astounded at the audacity of such a possible future, but upon further reflection, this might not be such a bad thing . . .

         

    There are some advantages to this strategy, including:

    1) All interactions can be collected, cataloged into a database, and searched for trends later to guide not only marketing, but new product development.

    2) Both parties to the interaction would have a record, held on an independent server, so that the practice of CS takes a more friendly footing, rather that degenerating into a “He said, She said” proposition for long-term issues.

    3) Since CS is often outsourced, and off-shored, having all customer communication be transacted in writing eliminates problems with misunderstandings due to accents and local dialectic usage – spell check and autocorrect should take care of 80% of that problem, anyway.

    4) Having to write down your problem forces the customer to think through the problem from beginning and end, and to actually ask for the action they would like the company to take. So many customer call and say things like “I bought this and it’s not what I wanted” or something else equally vague, and expect the company to not only know what the problem is, but to try and solve it in satisfactory fashion without actually being asked to do so.

    5) Having to write down your issues brings down the tempo of the conversation, makes the customer think about how that problem might sound to others, and gives the customer some time to calm down and remove some of the emotion from the issue before assaulting the CS rep on the phone.

    Those are mostly advantages to the company, but the consumer gains a few benefits too.

    • It’s hard to be given the run-around being transferred to different departments as the company tries to figure out how to deal with you, or tries to avoid it at all
    • No more waiting on hold endlessly to ask a simple question not listed as a choice on the phone tree.
    • Now you have some time to gather your documents, account numbers, invoices and the like and organize your thoughts into something coherent someone can actually act upon.
    • Now there’s a public record of your complaint, available to all your friends! They can steer clear of the company if the problem is severe enough or not handles promptly and effectively – it’s like everyone’s a walking copy of Consumer Reports!
    • Digital interaction is here, the technology is so advanced that “chatting” has taken on an entirely new connotation, all encompassing a digital conversation online with a rep on the other end in real time.

    Now, that’s not to say there’s no downside to all this digital back and forth. Companies gain some great insights from their interpersonal contacts with customer, or at least they should if they are listening. Nothing telegraphs a problem better than watching the phone banks light up and hearing the noise level rise in the Call Center ten minutes after the release of a new version of a piece of software or the launch of a new product, or a new issue of a newsletter or magazine hits the mail stream. That cumulative noise tells you in a collective, aggregate fashion that something is amiss, and it had better be dealt with quickly and effectively to stem the tied of customer defection and mitigate damage to the brand.

    The big loss is the interpersonal connection customers feel with the brands they know and love. Sometimes you just want to talk to a “human being,” not be dealt with in turn by a machine or work through a series of choices on a phone tree. All the kitten pictures and blather about meals on social media will never replace that human connection, and the reassurance that there is “someone” responsible for taking care of your problem. Digital pixels aren’t accountable, and it leads to a distancing and disconnection between customers  and the company, which is what your marketing efforts are designed to avoid.

    What do you think? Will social media replace customer service in the near future? Comment below, or contact me through LinkedIn, facebook, Twitter, or through my automated customer service website . . .

  • Does Social Media Marketing ACTUALLY Drive Customer Behavior and Convert to Revenue?

    Does Social Media Marketing ACTUALLY Drive Customer Behavior and Convert to Revenue?

    Social Media, social media, social media – there, I said it three times into the mirror, now I just have to wait and see what happens . . .

    That seems to be the approach many companies are taking to this relatively new phenomenon. The head in the sand approach might have some advantages in the long run, if recent data on the effectiveness of social media in driving customer behavior is to be believed. It seems that despite all the hype, and press, and sturm-und-drang in the digital media, minting new ‘social media gurus’ by the flock, digital media and it’s permutations don’t drive near as much revenue or even shopping behavior individually than they do when used together. Integration seems to be the real strength behind conversation marketing’s mechanics, and when the reams of data generated are used properly ACROSS multiple platforms, it seems to at least have the ability to drive a solid promotional campaign and boost response levels.

    That said, here are some interesting tidbits of data, excerpted from a recent Gartner Group study:

    • 11% of polled consumers had read a company blog, and only 4% had commented on one.
    • Twice that many, or 23% had viewed a company provided video.
    • 45% said they planned to purchase based on a combination of brick and mortar, digital ads, and mobile marketing, but only 1% said they planned to do so based on mobile marketing alone.
    • Only 26% of consumers said they had clicked on a Search Results page paid ad – irrespective of engine brand.
    • Based on data from another similar study, only 6% said they had purchased based on a facebook ad
    • 40% said they had registered for a promotion or contest based on an e-mail or social media ad

    Clearly, consumers want something for nothing (hence the contest results), but don’t want to work at it (read the blog data, reading a whole blog takes effort)

    Also just as clearly, mobile marketing has not reached the level of credibility, trust or penetration it’s purveyors would have you believe, and while it may be the next big thing, it ain’t there yet, not without massive support from other media to reinforce it’s message and bolster its credibility.

    Video seems to have made substantial inroads, but anyone who recognizes the level of involvement the TV generation needs to engage will see a clear correlation between the aging of the boomer TV generation and the level of importance video has attained. Add in the near ubiquity and availability of high-speed broadband Internet access allowing for video transmission at better fidelity and faster speeds, and video’s effectiveness becomes less mysterious. The fact that consumers would rather watch a video and have their eyeballs babysat rather than read and understand and digest and analyze a company blog to get their information is less than mysterious as well, when the audience is considered.

    The trick with all this is to take the data it generates, and use it to form better customer profiles that can be used to not only drive behavior, but to predict it as well. If you can create a digitally integrated campaign that uses the initial brush with consumers to link to a behavior and transaction based profile, you can then draw that consumer along a continuum toward a purchase after several touch points are hit. That’s how integration beefs up the ROI equation. The development of such campaigns requires broad and detailed knowledge of the target audience, so that it can be set up to account for the wide variety of behaviors possible by consumers. If you can narrow the range of preferences and behaviors, and drive consumers down a narrower funnel, the ROI can be quite lucrative.

    According to Gartner, ‘Companies using in-bound and event-triggered marketing techniques to draw consumers will see a 600% higher response rate compared to traditional outbound push campaigns’. That sounds pretty fantastic. I wonder if that will continue to be the case as more firms start to embrace this practice and it becomes more common. Will this type of campaign reduce the level of trust and credibility across the board, making consumers distrustful? Interesting to ponder, but I think not. To paraphrase W.C. Fields, “no one ever went broke underestimating the gullibility of the American public”.

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