Territory managers, customer care and customer service managers are customer ninjas: they get a 360 degree view of the customer so they can be proactive. Customer ninjas seek out a complete view of engagement, outcomes, and customer satisfaction levels in order to provide timely and relevant customer care. They delight their customers, but know that as a territory manager or customer service representative – becoming a customer ninja requires that they constantly raise the bar in terms of customers’ expectations. So how can a customer ninja master the ‘discipline’?
Let’s take Rae, an account territory manager in the tool manufacturing space. Rae knows that seeing what happened – the interaction history in that customer’s landscape– isn’t enough. If the customer information is outdated, it doesn’t have the quality and breadth for Rae to be proactive or mitigate customer dissatisfaction. Now, imagine that Rae has value, loyalty, sentiment, and satisfaction levels – all the freshest most recent information about what is happening in real-time. Rae could then delight her customer when she calls her. And she can also use the information for proactive account management – like service scheduling. Rae can see a real-time social graph of who the influential contacts are in the account. Even better, Rae receives sound business advice on how to retain and grow top customers across segments and products.
How To be a Customer Ninja:
1. Access real time accurate customer 360 degree data
Gaining a single view of recent orders, invoices, shipments, returns, payments, service requests, sales activities, customer pricing, credit, and product availability in one view – in context – without navigating multiple screens is a must for customer service representatives. It’s available automatically when a customer calls the customer service department.
2. Gain real time visibility into the customer relationship
Gaining a real time measure of customer satisfaction, lifetime value, and loyalty for accounts is a must for any customer manager who is incentivized by these indicators. Gaining insight into customer survey “hot topics” and social sentiment helps reps find the right information to delight ones’ customer.
3. Use real time customer engagement as the basis for next best action
Gaining real time intelligence about multi-channel customer engagement allows real time offers at point of contact and allows consistent treatment within constraints.
4. Close the loop from insight to action in a single context
Integrated analytical and transactional views allow actionable insight without needing to navigate to multiple systems.
5. Access a 360 degree view from any device, anywhere
The phone banks of yore are no more enough: customer ninjas can access valuable and highly intuitive visualizations from any device – desktop, tablet, smart phone – anywhere. This provides clarity about the customer relationship throughout customer lifetime to provide the best possible service.
Back to Rae, what is the impact of real time insight on Rae’s customers? Wouldn’t the impact of being proactive and anticipating smart solutions for her customers in turn cause satisfaction levels to increase, as proactive measures are taken? These customer insights and understandings may be attained now – with the ability to visualize more about accounts in real time intelligent ways.
Are you ready to be a customer ninja? To engage and be successful requires listening, monitoring, visualizing various outcomes, and putting forward a real-time decision based on customer direction. If customer management 1.0 was designed around keeping high satisfaction ratings, new account intelligence insight can bring a 360 degree view of customers’ interactions and extrapolate operational outcomes, financials in a centralized view, and alert account managers to risks and opportunities. Account intelligence offers “recommendations” so that customer managers can make focused, better decisions. In the long run account intelligence reduces sales cycles, improve accounts receivable, enables proactive contract management and facilitates smart choices overall.
And isn’t that ultimately what every customer ninja needs to be prepared every day to engage?