Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

Marketers leaving mobile out in the cold

A recent study sponsored by Genesys highlighted the fact that 48% of companies are investing in social media initiatives, while only 20% are investing in mobile apps. These figures were further bolstered by a recent Multichannel Survey sponsored by Genesys and contact centre technology company ProtoCall One, which that found that the telephone was rated as the most important contact channel for companies to engage with their customers - 41% of the respondents said that the phone is the easiest channel for their customers to use. The survey further revealed that only 17% of the respondents have a mobile customer service app, while the remaining 83% do not.

Gaining insights into customer behaviour
With increasing numbers of customers using mobile technology, customer preferences that are displayed on mobile devices offer a potentially rich source of information about their attitudes and habits. They represent valuable opportunities for companies to gain business insights, observe trends, enhance communication and improve the customer experience. And if businesses optimise their mobile strategy, they can hone their marketing programmes to better target and retain customers.

But while customers are demanding richer and more personalised mobile customer experiences, our research is showing that many organisations' customer service departments remain disconnected from the company's mobile applications.

Mobile transactional apps fall short on engagement
I think the reason for this is two-fold: first, businesses have become pre-occupied with integrating social media into their customer service and, second, in the rush to develop mobile apps, many companies have simply resorted to moving existing marketing or web applications to a mobile platform. Typically these apps fulfil a transactional function and enable users to check a balance or flight schedule, but they offer little in the way of customer engagement.

This is especially frustrating for mobile-using customers who often find that there is no immediate way to contact a customer service agent when they need live assistance. Instead, they have to exit the mobile app and find the correct contact centre number to call for their query. As a result, customers are forced to wait on hold, re-authenticate themselves, navigate through complex phone menus once more, and repeat the nature of their call when they are eventually connected to the correct person. Given this reason, it is unsurprising that one in four mobile customer service apps are abandoned with less than 10% actively used.

Integrating mobile as part of a cross-channel strategy To address the needs of today's consumers, companies must develop an effective holistic strategy, one that incorporates a common set of enterprise capabilities that can be accessed anywhere, regardless of the channel.

Genesys Mobile Engagement, for example, is an end-to-end mobile solution that integrates mobile customer care applications with live service. Using its 'Live Connect' capability, customers push a button and be immediately connected to a customer service agent without leaving their mobile app. The agent can then see information from the customer's app along with full customer history and preferences, allowing them to provide a personalised experience that increases customer engagement as well as contact centre efficiency.

In essence, this kind of technology transforms existing transactional apps into conversational mobile apps, enabling a whole new level of connection between the brand and the customer - which in turn allows businesses to deliver faster, simpler service and a highly personalised customer experience.

Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

Learn the insider's tricks and techniques to turn every customers into a 'super spreader' for your brand. It's better than free advertising. Once you start this ball rolling, your brand can grow rapidly through word-of-mouth, advocacy, influencers, and customer loyalty. Super-charge your company's marketing strategy, build up your market share, and make more sales through repeat business and customer loyalty.

Find out what works - and what doesn't - and who's succeeded, and how they did it. See how the world's top brands keep their competitive edge against all odds.

The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook walks you step-by-step through the techniques, metrics, reporting, analysis, marketing models, technologies, tools and innovations for successful marketing strategies - both traditional and emerging - with expert guidance from thought leaders in every major market. Find out the best ways to gather, analyse, and act on customer data to increase profitability, build your brand, empower your customers, beat the competition, reduce churn, and increase customer profitability. This is a marketing book you simply can't afford to be without.

This book aims to hand you all the facts, figures and research data you need for the best decisions for a more profitable, more engaging marketing strategy. It also highlights all the facts, forecasts and trends identified by our experts from the global Marketing Factbook's vast database of market data, news, studies, research and articles, and presents you with an invaluable library of ideas and practical support you can call upon at will.

With The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook at your side, you'll have instant access to a true goldmine of easily adaptable and up-to-date strategies, walk-throughs, trends, research and market data, plus all the supporting arguments you need to build a solid, profitable marketing strategy.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)