The Blog

  • August 18, 2016
  • Contextual interaction

    This is part of a series of posts on modern approaches to customer loyalty aimed at improving it through customer engagement. A fuller discussion is available in my new book, You Can’t Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It.

    keep-calm-and-optimize-28The third of four attributes of customer loyalty programs is contextual interaction and it might not be obvious because it can mean different things depending on the circumstance. Dealing with customers in context can equate to personalization as many people define it. Also, it can refer to enabling customers to jump out of a largely automated customer-facing process to deal with a company representative. xxx, but it can additionally mean getting down in the weeds of some hyper-specific aspect of a customer’s issue.

    Personalizing the interaction

    A lot depends on what the vendor and customer are trying to accomplish. In a high-end setting where the customer is spending a good deal of money, regardless of whether the situation is B2B or B2C, there is a reasonable expectation that the vendor will have details on the specifics such as the customer’s exact use situation, preferred buying and payment approaches, delivery needs, and a lot more.

    In a situation that involves fewer dollars and a commoditized solution the opposite might be true. For instance it takes a lot more understanding of the customer’s context when that customer is buying a room full of servers than when the same person is buying smartphones for all employees. In the latter case especially, the context might come down to design, ease of use, intuitiveness, online tutorials or similar things that deal with a more generic situation.

    Changing the process

    A vendor might on the other hand, have a business process that can be managed completely through automation in the vast majority of cases. But it would still be necessary to have a graceful way to opt out of the automation to get more targeted help. For example, a hotel guest happily consuming services via a smartphone application might need to interact directly with a human for something unforeseen. In today’s environment that could include a gluten-free menu for room service or some similar situation that has just started trending.

    The key to success here is in having some preprogrammed way to connect with a non-machine resource and a good example is the Amazon Kindle’s Mayday button, which users can press to access tech support. According to this article from TechTimes.com, “One person called Amazon for help on an Angry Birds level. Apparently, this person has been stuck on it for over a week, and frustration forced the individual to press the Mayday button. In addition, a group of friends pressed the Mayday button just to ask the tech advisor on which way was best to make a peanut butter sandwich.

    Some Mayday tech advisors even got asked out on dates, while others had to sing happy birthday to some customers.”’

    This suggests that context is largely in the mind of the customer, but no matter. These incidents tell concrete stories of customers actively engaged with their vendors and behaving in loyal ways. Critics might say that these customers haven’t bought anything and they’d be right. But what they miss is that out of a large customer base consuming this kind of interaction, many will buy more because they are engaged. And even customers that don’t buy more will have a positive association with their vendor and are more likely to act as advocates for the brand.

    All of this contributes directly to the idea of the fat pipeline in which automation, proactive personalization, contextual interaction, and journey mapping Contribute to keeping more customers in play than traditional actions that focus on particular groups deemed more likely to transact. These groups can include new sales opportunities, cross and up sell targets in the installed base, and customers in danger of attrition.

    The fat pipeline approach doesn’t wait until potential for attrition exists for instance. It looks for and provides solutions for any opportunity that can engage a customer in a moment of truth thus contributing to future sales and developing brand advocates. Importantly this approach is very light on offering rewards in the form of discounts leaving the vendor with happy customers and healthier margins.

    Contextual interaction plays well in a community setting but you don’t need a community to make this idea work. In You Can’t Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It, I profile Sungevity, a provider of solar panels and services to residential customers. Their contextual interaction strategy is mostly arranged throughout their automated sales process. But it is so successful that once involved with the company, it’s hard for motivated customers to opt out because their needs are so well taken care of.

    However you define it, contextual interaction is a boon to automated customer-facing processes because it provides an optimal amount of service exactly where the customer needs it making the most efficient and effective use of resources for both parties.

    Published: 8 years ago


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