Why marketers should care about care: a time to serve
“I love that brand” - the four words that every marketer wants to hear from their customers. But ‘the L word’ works both ways and in order to achieve that level of loyalty and engagement, brands need to invest time by listening and interacting with their audiences on an authentic, human level. Creating a culture of care will build long-lasting relationships and loyalty with consumers.
Creating a culture of care will build long-lasting relationships and loyalty with consumers
After what has been a transformative year across many industries - from CPG to financial services, tech, retail, media, telecoms, travel, hospitality and beyond - the expectations of the digital consumer have been elevated significantly. This has put greater pressure on brands to consistently deliver a world class Customer Experience (CX) that leads with empathy and compassion to show that they care – or risk losing customers to competitors who do a better job with authentic engagement.
When people have a bad experience, social media is the first port of call for many looking to air their frustrations in a public forum; to ensure that brands will stand up, listen and, hopefully, respond in a helpful manner. But CX is so much more than dealing with a product or service complaint; it encompasses everything from marketing and advertising, research and insight, to care and engagement. Presenting a united front between marketing and CX teams requires shared insights and sustained collaboration.
Where brands can often fall short is by not prioritizing and understanding customer needs - whether that’s a lack of transparency, over-eager or unwanted upselling, fulfilment failures or complaints from angry customers. In today’s age of digital immediacy, brands need to be equipped to proactively identify and respond to changing customer expectations with a strong customer support strategy, centred on care, which can only be achieved through listening, learning, understanding and adapting to their needs.
By truly listening to their customers wherever they are talking, marketers can build strategies that improve CX, such as greater transparency around hidden extra costs or restrictions, honest apologies, specific fulfilment pledges, or even simply a human voice at the end of a phone line.
Sharing is caring
Consumer research and social listening ensures that marketing remains in tune with what the consumer wants and stays on the pulse of what’s going on in the world, which is increasingly found in social and messaging platforms.
The recent ‘The beauty in Twitter’ report by Twitter and Sprinklr, a modern CXM platform for the enterprise, analysed the top 400 Twitter profiles and the top 250 hashtags globally in the Twitter beauty space to provide unique insights into who and what drives #BeautyTwitter conversations and the brands, influencers and fans leading the charge in driving buzz around beauty conversations on the platform.
What it found was that the biggest benefit of Twitter campaigns is its role as a platform for brands to spark relevant conversations within their communities; a place to listen to customer experiences, learn about shifts in social trends and behaviours, and tap into culture.
“Our Twitter community was at the forefront of conversation, and forced us as a brand to take an honest look at the content we share,” said ColourPop Cosmetics, as part of the report. “To continue to grow and have more honest conversations, we’ve built a relationship with the Creators who started this movement on Twitter and regularly communicate with them about various topics and upcoming launches. Our biggest tip for other brands is to listen to your community! They play such a big role in our creative process, and catering your content to them will create a more engaged community.”
Going the extra mile for consumers
Technology has empowered consumers to communicate more easily and frequently than ever before; with much of their time spent offering feedback on the brands they encounter and care about - signalling satisfaction, concerns, or friction - at every stage of the customer journey.
The Sprinklr platform applies smart, automated and AI-driven technologies to provide modern customer care for brands at scale; which not only increases customer satisfaction and retention, but can reduce support costs by cutting resolution time in half across all both traditional and modern digital channels, including Social, Messaging, Live Chat, Email and SMS.
By uniting marketing and CX teams with shared insights and sustained collaboration, only then can brands paint a consolidated, personalised picture of their customers, thus empowering their teams to create a seamless customer experience that is centred on care, driving customer satisfaction, expectations, experience and loyalty.
By tapping into transformative technologies such as AI platforms and social listening tools, it’s never been easier for brands to insert themselves into these cultural conversations, uncovering insights in real-time and linking them to historical patterns. Marketers can now come closer than ever to knowing their customers on a much deeper level - showing them that the brands they love care for them by serving their wants, needs and concerns. Relationships are a two-way street; brands who care for their customers will reap the benefits of a relationship built to last.
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Sprinklr is the world’s leading Customer Experience Management (CXM) platform.
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