How using a closed, infinite sales model creates the flywheel needed to forge lasting relationships with consumers.
Delivering experiences that delight customers takes a proactive and holistic approach. One that spans the customer journey and lifecycle of the product they’re using. But a customer experience should not stop after the sale, as the traditional sales funnel shows us. In fact, some of the most powerful opportunities to create loyalty and drive referrals are experiences with service and support after the sale is made. Once that post-sale engagement is in place, you’ve automatically set the tone through an infinite sales loop to draw customers back into a business they trust and look to for future needs.
Timely service is important, but customers are much more likely to remember brands that went above and beyond to solve their problems over brands who forget who you are once you’re home with your new purchase. How do you do that? With Product Usage Data.
Leveraging this real-world data from the product provides continuous knowledge to the Brand, so the Brand can give their customer ongoing, unprecedented customer experiences based on product usage, maintenance, and user feedback. It’s the “brand” that is in constant control of the right messages at the right time.
4 Ways to Engage the Post-Sale Journey With Product Usage Data
1. Facilitate an Extraordinary Customer Experience
Unless you're selling a completely unprecedented product or service, then you'll have to contend with the competition. Of course, customers have the final say on what businesses they'll buy from, but that doesn't mean you can't help to make their decision easier. Creating a customized customer experience positions your company with a leg up on the competition.
The customer experience you create will depend on your industry, product or service, and core customer base. However, high-quality customer experience should always be customer-centric, putting customer satisfaction above all.
2. Connect with Customers
In this digital age, there are more channels to communicate with customers than ever before. Your business should be utilizing every single one, or at least, the few that your customers use most.
We’ve mentioned before that 91% of customers prefer knowledge bases over all other self-service channels. If customers have a resource of information and timely recommendations at their fingertips that aligns with the lifecycle of their product, you’re fostering a line of trust like no other.
3. Track Customer Data with the Product
Who are your customers? How are they enjoying their experience with your product? Understanding the demographic information regarding your customer base is essential. If you know your customers, their environment, and how the product ages, you'll be better positioned to cater to and anticipate their needs.
You can use the information directly from the product to gain insights that create a comprehensive, personalized customer experience. With today’s available real-world-data from sensors, time, the weather, and user-feedback on mobile apps, companies can have an infinite closed-ring relationship with their customers. One that establishes a line of communication providing incentives, updates, and content regularly.
4. Create an Effective Customer Retention Strategy
After-purchase engagement is all about retention and advocacy. The onboarding (unboxing), enjoying, and care for the product creates the closed-loop that creates new tailored selling and educational opportunities.
A successful customer retention strategy never ends. The goal should be to get customers to the end phase of your strategy, where they have attained brand loyalty towards your offerings. Once you’ve earned their business with positive feedback, it simplifies the effort to swing them back around for follow up purchases.
By offering quality product data, it shows the customer that their experience matters. The benefit of dramatically reducing customer churn and increasing retention is measurable; three times the lifetime value, leading to increased profit.
Key Takeaways
A Product Data cloud platform requires a completely different technology approach given the constant influx of data that needs to be evaluated, analyzed, and reviewed against other data. It’s used to enable the right messages at precisely the right time from brands to customers and from customers to brands (how to’s, product needs, recommendations).
Historically, post-sale customer engagement has not been significant or meaningful to customers, so it was difficult to build an ongoing relationship. Once a customer reaches the end of the sales journey, nurturing the after-sale customer experience is what becomes effective in maintaininglong-term customer relationships. You can attain this by gathering the product data needed to help it thrive in all stages of its life cycle.
Blustream leverages the power of after-sale customer engagement best when transforming the sales funnel into a recurring “sales loop” with customers, forming lasting relationships for your business.