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Tracking customer interactions is one of the biggest challenges for businesses today. Especially as the number of relevant marketing channels continues to grow.
There’s no denying the value of investing in numerous marketing channels to find, nurture, and convert leads. According to the 2020 Omnichannel Statistics Report, campaigns using three or more channels perform 287% better than single-channel campaigns.
Most businesses understand the importance of investing in omnichannel campaigns. However, few businesses manage to track all of their customer interactions across these channels. Failing to do so makes it challenging to maximize the true value of omnichannel marketing.
If your company can’t track all customer interactions, you’re missing out on a lot of insights that improve sales, marketing, and overall business processes. Here are a few of the top opportunities you have when you can track all customer interactions:
The most immediate benefit of tracking all customer interactions is learning more about them. You’re able to track how your audience interacts with your website, products, social channels, in-app, across devices, and so on. With detailed behavioral data, you can get a deeper understanding of audience demographics, preferences, which channels they favor, and more. It’s possible to build accurate, in-depth buyer personas, then develop a more relevant marketing message and targeting strategy.
When you prioritize updating your customer information, you ensure your marketing and sales teams have the most recent and relevant information about leads to work with. They can utilize this information to adapt their strategy and convert leads more quickly. Missing even a single interaction in a lead’s profile leads sales teams to make sub-optimal decisions because they don’t have the full history for this lead.
Once you understand how audiences interact with your business across platforms, you can identify user experience issues that you might not otherwise notice. For example, you might discover that people who visit your website on their desktop are more likely to purchase compared to those that use your mobile app. With this information, you can identify potential UX issues with your mobile app and improve it for a better customer experience.
Tracking all customer interactions includes monitoring support tickets and complaints from unhappy customers. It’s common to send complaints to an array of customer service representatives. However, with a complete log of the customer’s complaints, representatives are better prepared to solve problems.
Improving customer service has the added benefit of minimizing negative reviews and publicity for your business. Solving issues before unhappy customers voice their frustration on social media or review platforms is better for everyone.
According to UCToday, 9 out of 10 consumers want an omnichannel experience with a business, no matter their channel of communication. In other words, if someone interacts with a chatbot and gets referred to a sales agent over the phone, they expect that agent to know all about the conversation they had with the chatbot.
Lots of businesses can't offer this kind of seamless experience, which frustrates consumers and makes them want to leave. However, when a business offers an omnichannel experience, consumers are much more likely to stick with the brand and become repeat buyers.
The best way to track audience interactions before and after they become customers is by using customer relationship management (CRM) software. CRM software helps you manage your customer database, regularly updating customer profiles with the latest information.
If you utilize a CRM tool for this purpose, it’s possible to automatically eliminate errors in customer profiles, fix double submissions, and fill gaps. Doing this manually takes a lot of employee time. Automating the process of tracking customer interactions frees up internal teams to work on other tasks, improving operational efficiency and productivity in the process.
Tracking customer touchpoints gives you a fuller understanding of the customer's path to purchase. This makes it possible to better measure and attribute sales back to specific types of content, campaigns, and marketing channels.
When you’re tracking every customer touchpoint, there’s no need to rely on simplistic attribution models like first or last click. You can assign unique value to every important touchpoint on the path to purchase, getting a better understanding of how they impact conversions. Accurate attribution brings key performance insights that can help you make smarter decisions to improve your marketing investment.
It’s possible to track all customer interactions using the right tools. Yet plenty of businesses don’t bother because they don’t have the budget or don’t think they need to. However, the reality is that competitors in every industry are taking advantage of tracking all customer interactions. They benefit from better audience insights, improved operations, better UX, better customer service, and better marketing campaigns. Businesses like yours need to do the same if you want to stay ahead of the competition.
If you don’t track customer interactions on even a small part of the customer journey, you’re missing a huge piece of the customer puzzle. There’s so much you can do to improve your business, marketing, and sales strategy when you have a complete understanding of the customer experience.
The business-customer relationship is so complex that you simply can’t effectively digest it without investing in a marketing intelligence platform. A comprehensive marketing intelligence platform surfaces important insights you can use to improve your business in a lot of ways.