How to You Start Getting True ‘Insight for Action’?

Build a complete customer picture
Historically, we have worked with our clients on helping them on the outbound aspect of their customer conversations. Typically, that translated to instigating a communication through an SMS or an interactive voice message. The interesting thing is, each and every time we do that, we gain a tiny bit more of a picture of that customer and their conversations; their phone number, how they interact with an SMS compared to an interactive voice message, when they are likely to be around, when they respond and when they don’t.

And what we are able to do today is to take those little micro-insights and use them to make the bigger processes that bit more effective. So if I know, for example, that a customer reads SMSs in the evening, but not during the day, then I’m going to target them in the evening. If I know that if I call between eight and nine in the morning I am going to get a response, but if I called after that I’m not – then I’m going to call in the morning.

Use what you know today, tomorrow
Simple stuff, yes? Well, maybe, but actually highly useful – the application of what we learn from day-to-day customer conversations to drive more effective communication. And before too long, you start to see that as we interact with millions of customers every month, we now have a lot of learnings about those customer conversations that we can apply to the next conversation to make them even more effective. A true virtuous circle!

Don’t just send messages
I can hear you say, “great, but isn’t learning about the customer what all technology is supposed to be about? Isn’t that what I buy computers for?” Well, to a certain extent yes. But all a computer does is what you tell it to. In fact, very few organisations are doing what I am describing here. Most are still stuck at that initial stage of just throwing resource at sending messages. It’s only, I am going to claim, our customers who have taken the critical next step – and started feeding that activity back in to improve the whole business process of customer outreach.

And that is a lot more than just collecting data blindly, I am sure you will agree.

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