â–¶ Social Media is Not All That: Brands seduced by the hype around social media risk alienating their customers, says a new report by Pitney Bowes. Marketers investing time and money in social media interaction actually may be out of step as customers prefer that brands focus on the basics of communications. In fact, when asked about social media, just 18% of consumers say that social media activity inspires repeat purchases or brand loyalty for small businesses, and 25% say the method is effective for larger brands. Also “less effective” in driving repeat purchases are personalized Web pages (14% for small businesses; 20% for large) and online customer communities (24% for small; 29% for large).
Some concrete customer service initiatives that customers find attractive include:
• Providing an easy way to contact a company (53%).
• Providing home delivery (52%).
• Giving consumers a say in development of products and services (46%).
• Featuring controls so consumers may select preferred channels and frequency of communications (46%).
Source: Pitney Bowes
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â–¶ Service Providers Need to Engage Sooner, and Better: A global survey from Amdocs and Informa Telecoms and Media highlights the importance of customer retention and loyalty programs. According to the survey, 70% of service providers, including cable and telecommunications companies, cite customer retention and loyalty as the critical factor for driving growth, with a shift in marketing prioritization from customer acquisition and market share to long-term customer engagement.
Due to market saturation and increasing competition, 82% of service providers say that customer loyalty programs would be “very important” or “important” over the next five years to their company’s strategy.
However, there are numerous challenges facing service providers on the path to initiating customer loyalty and growth programs:
• 65% of service providers only initiate a retention program when the customer has started the process of leaving, which might be too little, too late.
• Service providers see service quality (97%), network coverage (95%) and customer care (86%) as among the key drivers behind customer loyalty. Yet in a separate Amdocs survey, consumers say that network coverage and good customer care are not real differentiators.
• Service and knowledge consistency across channels (94%), simple, transparent pricing (94%) and creating one integrated customer profile (89%) are vital for customer retention over the next five years. But only 21% of service providers say they have the necessary collaboration today between IT and customer care departments to enable this.
Source: Amdocs/Informa Telecoms and Media