This might sound familiar to you: your digital innovations team has created a pilot product that promotes a new service, however as soon as the product goes live, the number of customer calls increases significantly. Chaos and unnecessary confusion, force your account management team to do overtime.
This time around, it isn’t the case that new prospects keep your team busy, but your own loyal customers feel the urge to pick up the phone. A phenomenon we see ever so often.
Digital products have the possibility to over inform the customer, but “minimalist design thinking” forces innovation teams to focus merely on the bare necessities – neglecting the fact that customers would rather be over-informed than under-informed; a job that is usually done personally (tailored to the customers) by great field agents and account managers.
How to avoid poor communication
It is not easy to build a product that fits all. It is even tremendously hard to cover all customer segments adequately.
Some approaches that can be explored
- Even if the amount of information online is a lot more than the information a regular customer would get from his account manager, it is not as filtered and personalized. Hence, digital products must aim to understand what it is that the customer is looking for, create a personal filter too, in order to tailor the information to his needs.
- Product development should not be done without the involvement of your sales and account management teams. New products are generally developed with a technical solution in mind, but the people on the ground will know how to communicate the product best to their target customers. Internal interviews and getting (sales) account managers involved at an early stage in your development process can help significantly.
- Use performance marketing data to segment your customers before they land on your landing page or product. Understanding the customer intent is the highest form of performance marketing, but incredibly important if you want to offer your customer with information that is relevant to their needs.
- When you know that you would like to start with a lean product, prepare yourself and offer communication tools that help you pre-filter the questions before they end up with the account managers. Live- WhatsApp- and Facebook messenger-chats can make a real difference. These are tools that your customers use on a daily basis already and create very low barriers to communication.
Managing the customer relationship, right
New, digital product integration – especially in financial services – is a communication challenge at its very best. It is a constant battle for innovation teams to get their products integrated in the daily operations; acceptance for change- and innovative products needs to start from within the company.
In reality though, most digitalization products are build without involving those whom the products might affect most in the future. These are the people who currently manage and own your customers relationship.
It needs to be clear from the get-go, how new digital products can be integrated in the current business; who owns the customer relationship.
This topic came up on numerous occasions in our work with our customers in the financial services sector. And this article was triggered by an article in the NZZ regarding the UBS’ customer relationship communication problems they had, after the launch of their new digital product portals.
The article in German (click here) describes how the launch of new products at the UBS have led to significantly more calls from their loyal customers.
Exploring communication solutions together
If you would like to explore some of the above mentioned communication solutions together, feel free to reach out to us.
Together we can explore how we can create a seamless Omni-channel customer experience, that will promote more sales and inevitably raise your customer satisfaction; without impeding on the daily business of your account managers.
