Multi-channel Proactive Notification

Customer retention is more important than ever before and offering unique services is one of the most powerful ways to keep customers happy. One of the hottest trends is offering optional proactive messages via a variety of communication channels to customers.

Multi-channel proactive notification is not a new concept. Proactive notification is the act of contacting your customers before they contact you. Multi-channel refers to the different channels that can be used for communication such as: mail, phone, email, text messages, web, fax, and chat.

Who’s doing it?
Have you ever bounced a check, forgotten to pay a bill, or had too much activity on a credit card? If you have, you were probably politely contacted and offered a variety of options to resolve the situation. The majority of these solutions are designed to help businesses resolve issues from their point of view and most customers associate to them in a negative way. The key is to shift the focus to positive value-add services for customers.

The biggest shopping day of the year, the day after Thanksgiving 2005, was an opportunity for Target to try proactive notification. With a major investment in television and web marketing, Target launched a service where customers could register on a website, pick a personality that appealed to them, pick a time and then receive a wakeup call, from their personality, early in the morning so that they could beat all the other people to Target’s unbelievable day after Thanksgiving sales. While Target benefits from the additional sales, their customers love this personalized service.

People love gadgets and the Motorola Razor phone is one of the hottest gadgets available right now. Recently, T-mobile sent text messages to all of their existing customers and offered the Razor phone for the same price that a new customer would pay. Yes, it is an up-sell activity for T-mobile and sometimes people don’t like being sold to, but people do love their gadgets and a good deal.

Amazon is the epitome of workflow communication. The minute a customer presses “Buy,” Amazon communicates with their customers every step of the way. Order confirmation, inventory availability, packing, shipping status and Amazon even follows through with a survey to make sure that everything was perfect.

“Don’t come to us, we will come to you.” Google alerts have shifted how their customers search for information. Instead of customers typing in key words and sifting through search results, customer can now subscribe to updates they are interested in and have the results delivered directly to their email daily or weekly.

What does it take to do it right?
Bottom line – contact your customers before they contact you. Work to identify the common transactions, determine the proper delivery method and let your customers control it.

• Accentuate the positive. Don’t focus on the bill collecting, you owe me solutions of the past. Providing useful and informative services is the key.
• Pick the right channel. Text messages work for T-mobile and email works for Google. Identify the communication channels that work best for you and your customers.
• Opt In/Out. Let your customers decide if they would like you to proactively communicate with them.
• Give your customers control. Allow them to define what triggers communication and how often you will communicate with them. Personalization, Personalization, Personalization.

Proactive communication will continue to evolve over the next decade and will be a driving factor for why customers pick one solution over another. Many of these services will not directly impact the bottom line but will provide the extra edge that attract customers and keep them over the long haul.

SiloBusters provides a web based portal solution that has tools for building websites, creating and managing groups of users, and specifying content for the appropriate group. SiloBusters takes it to the next level by providing administrators the ability to drill down into the user profiles and communicate with users based on personalized profile information and then communicate with them via email, text and the phone in additional to the web. Look for solutions that provide the infrastructure and the tools to make it easy to proactively communicate with your customers.