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At What Channels and How Frequent You Interact with your Customers?
Q & A Session Between G-CEM Advisor and Member
Mr. Paul Ward
Vice President, Customer Experience, YourMusicOn
G-CEM International Partner (US)
www.Pkward.com
Question: I am working in an airline company, do you have any research about the good channel to interact your customer? How frequent do your customers want you to interact with them in order for you to realize customer critical buying intention without annoying customers?
Answers: There are two basic parts to your question, and also a potential for a great deal of relationship innovation.
The first part as I see it is the question of what channels to use when contacting your customers. The general best practice now is to create multiple channels, and to let the customer choose the channels they prefer. This act of choosing makes your communications in that channel more welcome psychologically, and often are more practical for the customer, whose preferences for certain channels may be dictated by their individual circumstances. Thus, you are providing a convenience to them that they will appreciate. Studies have also shown that customers who use more channels tend to buy more often.
This is a correlation -- which is to say, it is unclear to the researchers what causes this buying pattern. For example, it may well be that people who wish to buy from you more often (more flights) want more access to you to find the best prices (more channels). Or it may be that choosing more channels increases the level of communication between you and the customer, which increases their sense of comfort with you, and therefore they are more likely to buy from you. The study results do not indicate which the cause is and which the effect is.
The second question has to do with frequency of communication -- what is effective? With good data, a statistically sophisticated consultant can determine what frequency of communication is correlated with optimal buying behavior. If you communicate less than this amount, then you are not getting optimal sales. And, if you communicate more than this amount, you would not be getting optimal sales. It is very likely that the frequency of communication "threshold" (optimized level) will vary by channel, and by customer type. You will have to see how the data indicate an optimal contact schedule based on customer type. I would make sure that you are able to overlay (join) data from multiple sources via a unique identifier for each customer, so that you can combine their behavioral data (response patterns to communications) and their attitudes, gathered from quick polls or long surveys. So, for example, if you find that some customers prefer to buy on price, and other prefer to buy on routes (which you can determine using factor analysis or decision tree), you will then want to find out whether these customer types (price vs. routes) also have an ideal communications frequency. If so, then the frequency is correlated to their type, and you have a simple job on your hands. If not, then you have (in this example) a 2x2 matrix: Route-influenced customers who like frequent communications, route-influenced customer who like less frequent communications, price-influenced customers who like frequent communications, and price-influenced customers who like less frequent communications.
This is a simple example, but I hope it communicates that frequency of communication may be a preference that varies according to the way people "use" your airline, or airlines in general.
As for relationship innovation, I think this is a big goal that you can pay attention to, particularly in customer experience management, to create a level of emotional engagement that your competitors will envy. This innovation goes beyond the marketing mix (channel mix and frequency) optimizations you asked about. This innovation, in fact, can make your customers want more frequent communications from you!
The way to uncover these innovations is to look at several factors.
1. What economic outcomes do people want from your relationship? A business buyer, or a frugal one, or a wealthy person, each will have somewhat different ways of measuring the economic outcomes (money saved, frequent flyer miles, economical billing, perqs, etc.).
2. What emotional outcomes do people want from your relationship? Alerts when you have deals on favorite destinations, a warm greeting to frequent flyers, the right in-flight movies.
3. How do you want to be different from other airlines? These brand values can help you choose which of the economic and emotional outcomes you want to emphasize.
4. When do your brand values get reinforced or destroyed in the customer's experience? What can you do about making those brand values really obvious and differentiating?
There are more points to consider here, but let me provide a simple example.
1. Economic outcomes: May not matter if the trip is meaningful. So, if you have an organizer tool for "family holidays" or "family reunions", where everyone can organize their trips through your airline, you may not even have to discount any of those trips! Of course, you could, in order to get more of the family to use your airline. But the depth of discount may not matter as much as having that organizer on your website!
2. Emotional outcomes: Considering the family reunion example, you could even include instant cameras for every member of the family, and have they dropped those cameras off for you to develop and put online on your airline site (in a private account). This would be an incremental cost, for sure, but the emotional value of the relationship with the airline happens long after actual flight, and associating your brand with a happy family reunion would be potentially very strong for your positioning. "Getting people together," if that were your tag line, could be easily proven.
3. If "Getting people together" is a tagline, then it must express your brand values -- why people choose you over other airlines. Of course, other airlines get people together, so, you'd look more deeply into how to make this differentiating through your experience. For example, when going on vacation a customer can stay in touch with people they meet, and share photographs and memories, on a vacation organizer site you set up. That organizer can keep family photos and stories in one place, and new friends' photos and stories in another. This creates a social network around the vacation that still respects the privacy of your customer. At the same time, the people your customer meets now have interacted with your website, seen (and posted) pictures about the vacation, and have reasons to believe your tagline "Getting people together." You've turned a trip where your airline was one of many possible choices for the customer into a true facilitator of memories. Plus, you've done some very low-cost marketing to existing and future customers!
4. Determining when your brand values are reinforced or destroyed is essentially determining your customer's moments of truth and measuring the impact at these moments of truth on their feelings about and memories of your brand. It can also be an opportunity to CREATE new moments of truth that are well branded. This is a point of innovation for airlines; serving a deluxe ice cream can help people remember you, as can offering an amazing in-flight entertainment system. But it can also be about doing LESS, such as how Southwest Airlines no longer offers meals. This is replaced by moments of truth (entertaining flight attendants) that are very low cost compared to meals, but just as memorable, if not more so!
Each of these tactics can build an emotional attachment to your company that allows you to communicate more effectively to build revenue, at lower cost, because your communications are welcomed.
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About the author
Paul is a strategist providing customer relationship management (CRM) and customer experience management (CEM) consulting for growth-focused enterprises. Currently VP of Customer Experience at a new high-tech consumer startup. He leads management strategy seminars in Asia, Europe and North America.
Paul is a graduate of the TRIUM Global Executive MBA program (ranked #3 globally by Financial Times) through London School of Economics, NYU-Stern, and Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC). His studies took place in Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Paris, New York, and London. As part of TRIUM he also studied with Hong Kong University of Science & Technology and in Sao Paulo with Funda??o Dom Cabral [FDC]. Currently head of the TRIUM alumni steering committee, Paul is organizing events in Shanghai, Florence, San Francisco and Paris. He lectured at Cornell University on Internet trends, social networks and the impact of the Web on economics and globalization. He also lectured at American University (Washington DC) and Robert H. Smith School of Business (University of Maryland, USA) on customer experience management, competitiveness and brand equity. Paul is also the editorial board member of CRM Today.
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