How Social Media Is Transforming the Customer Experience
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When you are trying to reach a potential new customer, how do you do it? Phone call, email, LinkedIn? What you’re probably not doing is using social media data to find out and understand the person you are trying to engage with and their business situation at the time.
Why, then, are we still focused on email blasts? And how can social media transform the customer experience? With so much information at our fingertips, why not use it to spark interactive social relationships and gain insight from customers?
On our original podcast series, Stuff You Should Know About Our Changed New World, Matt Zilli, CEO of Clarizen, the global leader in enterprise collaborative work management, and known for his impressive work as Vice President, Go-to-Market at Adobe and Chief Customer Officer at Marketo joins host Colin Day, Managing Director EMEA at Oktopost to discuss what it takes to transform the customer experience.
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In today’s modern marketing and sales functions, nothing happens in the SaaS industry without the customer.
Putting the customer at the heart of everything you do will transform their experience and help marketing and sales leave a greater impact on the potential customer. Matt Zilli offers insight on how social media and technology can transform the customer experience through a much more focused and unified approach.
Key Takeaways from Matt Zilli
Social Selling is Just Selling
There’s a lot of buzz around social selling and for good reason. With half of the world’s population active on social media, staying ahead of the curve means actively engaging with customers and prospects across LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and even Instagram. But that doesn’t just mean sending a request to connect and growing your network.
Engaging in social selling gives the opportunity to have relevant and meaningful conversations. In fact, Zilli argues throughout the episode that:
personalization IS relevant and staying relevant goes a long way in transforming customer experience
There is so much information at our fingertips from social media that we are able to understand what our customer’s care about, their background, what their companies care about and create a much stronger customer experience.
Bringing all this information together gives organizations the opportunity to raise the bar in personalizing an experience and only once this is done, bringing technology in to help scale these relationships and information.
Put the Customer Experience at the Heart of Everything
As discussed above, social media plays a powerful role in helping an organization understand their customers and potential customers on a more human level.
This understanding gives brands the gateway to continue to stay relevant, useful and helpful to potential customers.
For instance, by spending time talking to customers and making sure teams are doing everything in their power to have a shared view of where the organization will help define the ideal customer.
Once conversations are had and social media touchpoints are gathered, brands may find themselves refining the ‘ideal customer.’ And that is okay. Zooming in on a focused persona will best position a company to learn the most about them in order to provide an incomparable customer experience.
Focus or Fail
A lack of focus at any point in a customer experience can hurt companies in more ways than one. Staying too broad puts everyone across the organization at risk of failure.
It doesn’t matter if a company is big or small, everyone today is asking the same questions that they didn’t have to ask for the last number of years. Questions such as:
- If the world completely changes, what will the business model look like?
- If distribution continues, how much longer does the company have?
- What does the organization need to prepare for?
- How does the company grow from here? Invest in innovation?
- How does the brand continue to best service customers?
All of these questions run parallel to the set of questions based on company runway and how sensitive a business can swing in certain areas. The more focused an organization can be, the greater likelihood they will succeed in transforming the experience of their customers.
