How Customer Personas are Helping Businesses

 What is a Customer Persona? 

With the ever-changing needs and wants of consumers, it becomes difficult to keep up with the changing consumer trends and user needs and this is exactly where customer personas pop up. For businesses to stay on top of their A-game it is essential to keep up with such ever-changing consumer trends and user needs. Keeping up with such changes not only e helps businesses adjust to the new trends but also helps them increase their overall profitability in the long run.

Customer personas are fictional and imaginative characters that help represent a particular demographic of customers. There are two types of customer personas firstly the buyer Persona and second - the user persona. The Buyer Persona describes ideal target customers for buyers who are responsible for purchase decisions. Whereas a User persona helps businesses better customize their products and services according to the needs of users. For businesses to thrive and create better products or services, creating fictional representations (digital personas) of ideal customers has become absolutely essential.

 

How Social Media Personas Help Businesses- 

They help businesses improve their target strategies. Businesses employ social media personas on various social media platforms to help them by bringing in valuable audiences in huge numbers. Your day work towards creating a small community for a customer base that is interested in the very product itself. This also helps businesses sell their services to a target audience who already have an interest in the product being sold. This normally helps businesses their services to a target audience but also helps them increase brand awareness on search social media platforms.

Creating social media personas helps businesses better understand their customers and prospects. Manufacturing a product or providing a service that sells and is able to generate profits is a tedious job. Manufacturing a product or providing a service takes a lot of time and involves a lot of effort to understand what exactly the customer needs. Sentences create social media personas there are able to put themselves in the shoes of their customers and understand what exact preferences their customers expect from them. Creating such personas not only helps businesses create needed or expected products and services but also help them connect more effectively with their customers. 

When businesses create customer personas it helps them gain valuable and new insights on customer preferences and customer trends. They tend to gain a better understanding of what is the need of the hour. This helps them structure their marketing strategies and sales strategies according to these valuable insights. Social media personas helps businesses track various trends that are popular in a certain demographic. Businesses reverie a better understanding of how a certain demographic views their services or products. It helps them analyze behavior trends which can later be used for creating more demographic-centric marketing. This not only personalizes the experience being provided but also creates a positive image. 

Various advantages businesses gain when they make use of customer personas -

• Customer personas help businesses improve and increase their conversion rates. 

• Having a proper customer Persona helps businesses better understand their customers. 

• It helps marketing teams understand what specific issues they have to address in their content. 

• User personas help manufacturing teams to design products and services according to customer needs and expectations. 

• Social media personas increase brand awareness and customer engagement levels.

• They help service desk teams provide better customer care services.

• The businesses target interested individuals which increase sales rates. 

To learn more about how you can improve your marketing and sales strategies with the help of customer personas click here for a demo.

Increase customer engagement with an efficient help desk software

Customer support is a flourishing business today and most companies are including this as an integral part of their business intelligence strategy. With the advent of digital transformation, the popularity of CRM software has increased within the market. businesses, especially customer-centric enterprises are leveraging intelligent CRM’s like Kapture to automate their daily operations and enhance customer engagements. 

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement is nothing but all the interactions that happen between your business and your brand. It is not just any interaction but is about inspiring your customers to interact with your brand, making them happily take part in the conversations. An effective customer engagement strategy is the best way to build a good client-customer relationship, create a unique brand name, and thereby drive revenue. 

How to increase Customer Engagement?

Once you are aware of the significance of customer engagement and its benefits, the next step to brainstorm on is how to increase customer engagement. Randomly interacting with your customers and sending them unnecessary emails is not the best way to engage with your customers. In opposite, this will only annoy your customers more for any further interactions. This is why you need a customer engagement strategy. A good customer engagement strategy can indeed drive a good amount of revenue and will help you build a loyal customer base. 

A study by Constellation Research states that “companies who improve engagement can increase cross-sell revenue by 22 percent, up-sell revenue by 38 percent, and order size by 5 to 85 percent.”

The best and most efficient customer engagement is to connect emotionally with your customers. Emotional intelligence is a significant marketing technique that can drive a good number of loyal customers who will forever stay with your brand. They will also promote your brand with word-of-mouth, which is indeed one of the best traditional marketing methods. Emotional intelligence plays a major role in enhancing your customer experience as well as engagement. 

Yet another popular way of increasing customer engagement is leveraging the benefits of a help desk software system like Kapture CRM. There are several ways to use help desk software to increase customer engagement and is proven effective for almost every company. 

How To Improve Customer Experience Using Help desk software?

Customer experience is crucial for every business and it is the foundation of a good and stronger customer base. To create delightful customer relationships a helpdesk system helps companies segregate their queries, organizes them based on priority, merges and aligns all the queries based on users and sources. A help desk software is an efficient tool that helps in managing a vast number of customer interactions. It organizes customer interactions seamlessly to help organizations provide better and faster resolutions for their queries. Some of the ways a good ticketing system streamlines customer engagement are:

• Auto-prioritizing tickets: By segmenting tickets based on priority agents can understand their customers more efficiently and provide accurate information.

• Internal Collaborations: Helpful customer resolutions can be turned into useful content using a knowledge portal that is accessible to the whole team, helping in maintaining the thread of customer interactions.

• Round-Robin Ticket Assignment: Tickets will be only assigned to those agents who have marked themselves as available to provide faster and quicker responses. 

• Keyword Based Ticketing: Through an efficient help desk ticketing software, businesses can ensure that arriving tickets or customer queries are prioritized and resolved under the specified time. 

This is how help desk software improves customer retention and engagement scaling your business to heights of success. Leverage all the benefits of an efficient CRM like Kapture and make every interaction worth remembering for your customers. 

Leveraging big data to optimize your customer engagement strategy

  

 

Data has become the core center of customer-centric enterprises today. Understanding customers is of utmost importance for all businesses to optimize their customer engagement strategy to reach heights. And in this digitally driven world, the best way to get to know your customer’s likes and dislikes is to leverage big data. It is important to know how to use big data to improve your customer experience. 

 

 

What is big data?

 

Big data is nothing but data that is very large, unstructured, and time-sensitive. In customer support, the entire data that is collected from all the digital devices and platforms used by your customers such as websites, social media, call centers, chat, etc. are the big data. Enterprises across all industries are relying heavily on this data to enhance their customer engagement strategy as well as experience. 

 

How can Big Data improve customer experience?

 

Customer experience is the fuel of every enterprise today and businesses are striving to enhance their strategies to meet the increasing demands. By leveraging big data, companies can provide them better customer experience which will eventually increase the CSAT rate. By using big data companies can examine the world from the customer’s point of view, organizations get to know their customers a lot better, which helps in minimizing the gaps that needed to be filled in their marketing strategies. Big data helps marketers improve strategy leading to better engagement through more personalized campaigns, communications, and stronger relationships. 

 

So improving customer experience through big data analytics takes a strategic approach. Here are a few ways in which Big data can help leverage customer data. A detailed customer database can be an asset for your business in enhancing your relationship with your repeat buyers too. 

 

1. Help in customer retention: Retaining an existing customer is the best way to boost your company's ROI. By leveraging the big data of your customer's past experiences, pain points, and purchases you can easily build a content engagement strategy. CRM like Kapture helps you in this process with some of its intelligent features like a secured cloud customer database. 

2. Deliver relevant content: Content marketing can drive a huge amount of organic traffic and also helps in enhancing customer experience very well. With big data, companies can extract real-time customer behavioral data. This will help writers in easily curating their content according to the buyer’s journey and in finding the right solution for their problems during the process. Businesses can monitor social media and other platforms to see what challenges their customers are facing and then pull out relevant content to share with them. This is a great way for improving the customer experience through data analytics. 

 

3. Performance analysis: A major part of the purchase and sales is shaped by support retailers. It is important to check your agent’s overall performance and keep track of their engagement record insights. Big Data will help you in keeping a record of their engagement and work records. 

 

4. Customer Segmentation: By Segmenting your customers based on demographics, age, preferences, purchase history businesses can understand their customers more. With cloud-based customer data management systems segmenting your customers is now everyone’s piece of cake. Harnessing the available big data and analyzing it accordingly it is easy for companies to create an organized customer segmentation strategy. This is the answer to how do you leverage data to develop a strategy and enhance the customer experience.

 

With the advancement in technology the needs and demands of customers also starts increasing at a fast pace. To meet up these high expectations and stand out in the crowd enterprises should ensure an effective customer engagement strategy. By leveraging big data to optimize your marketing strategies and scale your business to heights. 

 

 

 

 

 

Quick Response to Live Feedback: Ensure Customer Satisfaction and Engagement through Social Channels

We all like our issues to be resolved, while complaining to a company’s customer service agent. But, what makes us buy their products again and again? Or what makes us recommend them to our friends? We know that the quality of the product means a lot to us, but there are some additional factors always running in our head, while recommending a brand.

70% of buying experience depends on how the consumers feel they are being treated. Though companies are now investing record amounts of money in customer support operations, what’s regularly missing in our experience is the spark between us and the customer support agent. This spark can help transform a skeptical customer into a committed brand follower.

Statistics given below will help you understand why customers leave a company-

Be where Your Customers are

Since its inception, social media has played an important role in how individuals interact with each other. From a business’s point of view, it contributes to how organizations interact with potential and existing customers. Social media has become a standard platform to share customer experience. Let’s check out some quick facts-

• 84% of the marketers believe that social media can enhance their existing customer relationships.
• Online adults (Age Group: 18-34) are most likely to follow (near about 95%) a brand via social networking sites.
• 71% of the customers, who have good social media service experience with a brand, are more likely to recommend it to others.

The graph given below will give you a better understanding about the statistics of active users for top social networking sites-

Customer Expectations Regarding the Response to Live Feedback

The term ‘expectation’ can easily confuse anyone. Customers choose a brand via a number of channels — word of mouth referrals, company website, online reviews, social media involvement, printed collateral and even the appearance of your storefront. But the most important thing that companies frequently miss out is providing prompt response to feedbacks or enquiries.

Usually customers expect a lot, when they give online feedback or talk about a brand on social media. But unfortunately most of the companies fail to address it at the right time.

• One out of three social media users prefer to reach out a brand on social networking sites for customer service and 63% of them expect companies to provide customer service on social media platform.
• As a matter of fact, 75% of social media users expect to hear a response from a customer service agent within an hour or even less.
• 25% of customers who complain about a product or service on Facebook, expect a response from the company within one hour.
• 53% of people, who tweet about a brand, expect a reply within one hour. That figure rises to at least 72% for those with a complaint.
• Whereas, just 14% of customers anticipate a response will take a full day or more than 48 hours.

Exceed Customer Expectation: Stay Connected

If you want to provide a quick reaction to your customers’ live feedback, you have to connect with them anyway. You need to address each and every notification on time. So under these circumstances, a common helpdesk platform is required to access every notification and respond seamlessly. This endorses the inevitability of employing CRM software in the system.

CRM software enhances the connectivity with your customers in every aspect. It simplifies the customer operation system and ensures better and long term relationships.

It enables you to gather all customer feedback from diverse social networking sites. So, you can reply to all of them, using a single platform.

You can even identify a particular customer enquiry by its ticket number. It makes tracking the status of an enquiry or feedback hasslefree.

Speed up Your Response with Mobile CRM

To explain the importance of Customer Relationship Management software, it is necessary to clarify how ‘speed factor’ effects on customer engagement. For each customer, who bothers to complain or give feedback about a brand, 26 other customers remain silent. But, what is the reason behind this silence?

• 43% of consumers do not complain or leave feedback, because they don’t think the companies care about customer feedback.
• Among them, 81% of consumers would be willing to give feedback, if they knew they would get a prompt response.

So, quick response can ensure customer engagement to a large extent. If you want to organize your system of responding to live customer feedback, a mobile CRM application will be the best option for you.

Conclusion

This is the age of customers. Both small and large businesses are dedicated to satisfy their customers by all means. Last year it was seen that the CRM usage increased from 56% to 74% and definitely for a good reason. Prompt responses to live feedback add value to customer experience, hence gives them assurance of dedicated service and excellent customer support.

If you are yet to embrace a CRM software – now is the right time to get it, with the half of your competitors already on board.

How does CRM gamification help in driving customer engagement? - Kapture CRM

Gamification is the application of game techniques in non-gaming environments to effect continuous improvement. In the context of a business application, gamification aims to improve employee as well as customer engagement.

The fundamental concept behind gamification is that it works on the human need for competitiveness and makes an individual want to constantly improve themselves and excel at their activities, and do so in an enjoyable manner. Gamification guides the individual on a desired path by motivating them with more engaging and fun processes, rather than stunting their productivity with dull and repetitive tasks.

Where there’s gamification, there’s a provision for a reward system. For your employees, rewards can be provided as points, badges, or creative titles in order to acknowledge their performance on a continuous basis rather than a quarterly or half-annually period. On the other hand, gamification for your customers can be in the form of exclusive discounts, time-based offers, etc., which may give an incentive to the customers to purchase from your business.

With the advent of the digital age, businesses are increasingly adopting technological innovations to improve their internal workings, and gamification is no different. A well-established and efficient software system allows you to capture your customer data and store it centrally, so that your company’s gamification methods can be aligned with your business objectives.

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software service is one such tool that can be used to effectively implement a gamification strategy. When used correctly and efficiently, CRM-enabled gamification can help convert your loyal customers into the biggest ambassadors for your business.

Identify the Customer

Before engaging with the customer, you need to first identify who they are. Traditionally, marketing teams go through mountains of data to search for the relevant information about their customers, and then manually store and organize it into physical databases. By using CRM, all the monotonous work can now be automatically performed by the system itself, reducing the amount of time that a marketer wastes on the entry of data.

Now, the marketers can focus on the more important part of the process – identifying the leads and ranking them according to their profitability. With gamification, you can create internal competitions by pitting marketing groups against each other and allot rewards for the most productive time, for instance. This will keep them engaged and motivate them to work harder to produce the best results. With the CRM system, you can easily track each team’s progress and visualize it with a leaderboard-style ranking graph.

Interact with the Customer

Once the leads have been recognized and qualified by the marketing team, it’s time for your business to directly engage them and work to successfully convert them into a long-term customer. With the use of the various available communication channels – one popular medium being social networking sites – you can hold contests and raffles and invite your customers to try out your products and share their experiences with their friends and acquaintances on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. This makes the customer engagement process much more lively and paves the way for friendly customer-business relationships.

With CRM integration, you can obtain and share useful information about the progress of the various engagement activities from a single database, facilitating easier access and connectivity between the various teams. By ranking up the progress of each team based on their performance, the teams can see how well they are doing compared to their peers, which may encourage them to work harder.

Retain the Customer

Once the contests have been completed, it is time to analyze and study the results in the CRM database. With powerful CRM analytic tools, you can easily gauge the performance of each individual as well as a team, and train your weakest performers for improvement.

Your sales team can work on this data, and re-align their plans and preparation to effectively change the customer into a long-term, loyal and satisfied customer.

At the end of the day, an engaged customer can only come from an engaged employee. So it is imperative for a business to drive customer engagement with the aid of employee engagement. And gamification is a big help when it comes to achieving this major feat.