Personalizing It with Phone Conversations

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Personalizing It with Phone Conversations
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• The Internet provides several convenient ways to
  communicate, but the most personal and meaningful
  conversations still take place offline. While you
  can learn a lot about your customers by tracking
  their online habits, the only way to truly get to
  know their interests, opinions, and challenges is
  to talk to them. Speaking to a customer or a
  prospect on the phone reduces the chances of
  misinterpreting what they are really saying. Far
  from being old-fashioned, phone calls remain an
  integral part of the customer service experience.

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Phone Calls Can Teach You if Youre Willing to
Learn

• In addition to being more personal, phone calls
  to businesses are still the most common way that
  people interact. According to a State of the
  Mobile Experience report from Invoca, three times
  as many people reported that they prefer to speak
  to someone at a business directly rather than
  complete an online form. Another report, this one
  from BIA/Kelsey, states that calls initiated from
  a mobile phone to a business will reach 162
  billion annually by 2019. This makes sense when
  you consider just how many people use a mobile
  phone every day.

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• As a digital marketer, its easy enough to
  retrieve mobile data regarding mobile engagement.
  However, youre often left with little to no
  insight about whats happening with telephone
  conversations taking place at your company. The
  result is a lack of personalization that people
  crave. When you dont know what takes place
  during these offline conversations, you will
  attempt to personalize your company website with
  the wrong message or send customers a follow-up
  email that doesnt relate at all to their most
  recent conversation. Call intelligence is the
  solution.

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• With call intelligence, you gain insight into
  the conversations that prospects and customers
  have with representatives of your company. Not
  only does this allow you to understand them
  better, it allows for greater personalization
  based on the customers multi-channel journey.
• Call Sumo has identified the following four ways
  that call intelligence can aid you in taking a
  more holistic approach to personalization based
  on online and offline interactions.

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Improve Lead Nurturing

• Lead nurturing enables you to educate prospects
  and ensure they remain engaged with your company.
  Imagine a prospect calling to learn more about
  your business and how it differs from a
  competitor. When your sales representative can
  answer perfectly and the competitor cannot, it
  makes you look much better to the prospect.

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• Unfortunately, nurturing without personalization
  can come across as spam-like to the prospect.
  That means your sales representatives offers the
  same generic response to everyone that is more
  common at the top of the sales funnel. The lead
  receives an email discussing things that he or
  she has no interest in and writes off your
  organization as irrelevant. It would have been
  better to send a new buyer guide than something
  so generic.

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• When you have the right tools, its simple to
  sync marketing automation with call data. This
  ensures that each prospect travels to the
  appropriate track for nurturing and receives
  relevant follow-up.

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Re-targeting Done Right

• The process of re-targeting turns the prospects
  attention to a highly personalized ad. As an
  example, imagine that a prospect spoke to one of
  your sales representatives extensively at a
  tradeshow. When he or she does an online search
  to learn more about your company, a targeted ad
  appears. It takes the prospect directly to your
  landing page after he or she clicks on it. This
  person doesnt want to complete a form. He or she
  is ready to initiate a phone call to learn more
  and make a purchase right now.

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• Re-targeting with an incomplete picture sends
  prospects the wrong message. This happens when
  your companys re-targeting platform is not up to
  speed enough to know about any offline
  conversations. The result is that the prospect
  receives re-targeting directed at an unconverted
  visitor offering a discount. The potential
  customer realizes that he or she would have paid
  full price and feels misled and angry. Although a
  poor and impersonal customer experience, it
  happens all too often.

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Nail Your Website Personalization

• Static websites just wont cut it anymore. With
  web personalization, your company marketers can
  create a unique digital experience for each
  visitor by creating content for them. This is
  based on the preferences they have demonstrated
  in previous interactions.

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• Personalization can only be effective when it
  considers the multi-channel journey of the
  customer. Disregarding this step means your
  personalization comes out all wrong. A good
  example of personalization is listing a telephone
  number and providing mobile customers an easy way
  to reach you by including a click-to-call button.
  Another good example is making sure that sales
  representatives know about a customers last
  interactions with your business the next time
  that person calls.

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• Combining personalization with call intelligence
  gives your company the ability to show website
  visitors content that relates to the product they
  just discussed over the phone. This spurs them to
  take the next step in the buying journey.

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Include Your Sales Reps in the Process

• Personalized marketing is great, but it
  shouldnt stop after a customer has made his or
  her digital journey. You could quickly and easily
  lose a customer if he or she hears generic
  questions and a general pitch after getting this
  far in the buying process. That means your sales
  reps must have real-time data available about
  each caller and their history of engagement.

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• Call intelligence combined with a strong
  marketing automation platform provides important
  demographic data. This allows you to share
  information about the campaigns each customer has
  interacted with in the past. Having this data
  available in real-time gives sales reps a deeper
  level of insight to make the conversation more
  personal for the customer.

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• We live in an electronic era, which makes it
  easy to believe that online interactions are all
  that matters. However, its essential to draw on
  the information discussed during phone calls to
  understand and personalize the entire journey for
  the customer. People want to feel like they
  matter to the companies they choose to do
  business with, and a personalized experience is
  the best way to ensure that they feel heard.