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I recently had the opportunity to deliver the keynote presentation at “Digitizing Your Customer Experience” organized by Traction on Demand.

My topic focused on customer enchantment in a now digital-hybrid world, “Effective, Efficient, Experiential: Building Lasting Customer Loyalty.”

Following my presentation, the team at Traction on Demand, summarized the key points in an eloquent, helpful article. I wanted to share it with you here…

5 Steps to Building Brand Loyalty in 2021

For anyone working in a customer-facing role or customer service organization — the golden rule is “the customer is always right.” It’s our job to make the customer feel valued through personalized experiences and thoughtful touch points along the customer journey. As the world begins to open back up in this post-pandemic era, businesses have the opportunity to connect and cultivate relationships with their customers like never before. In order to do so, they must adapt and explore innovative new solutions.

1. Creating an Immediate, Relevant and Convenient Customer Journey

It’s important to first understand your customers expected experience and work backwards to implement technology to deliver this result. Brian Solis, world-renowned digital anthropologist and futurist, 8x best selling author and Global Innovation Evangelist of Salesforce, said it best:

“Once you’ve felt a truly personalized experience, it becomes the new standard for engagement. You, and other customers like you, don’t go back.”

Given the shift to digital over the past few years, especially in light of the pandemic, customers have heightened digital expectations. As customers, our decision-making process is forever changed. We want things to be immediate, relevant and convenient and we seek consistency throughout every stage of the customer journey.

ONCE YOUR AUDIENCE BECOMES A REAL-TIME, DIGITAL-FIRST CUSTOMER, RETENTION IS OF UTMOST IMPORTANCE.

2. Accelerating the Digital Experience

For organizations, this can be an exciting opportunity to inject new creativity into their daily routine, forcing them to think about their approach around continuous digital transformation and evolution. As Brian pointed out, “88% of customers expect companies to accelerate digital initiatives”, ultimately placing speed at the forefront of digital transformations. Our customers are constantly connected to the digital world and expect businesses to continually evolve alongside their ever changing needs. It’s your job to take a proactive approach in enabling rapid innovation and increased time-to-value for your customers. This mindset will allow for opportunities of growth and innovation around solutions and products that can continually grow to meet your customers needs.

3. Being People Centric, Not Process Centric

Every customer touchpoint is an opportunity to show empathy. Through studying the customer journey, you can provide thoughtful communication to your audience, ensuring you’re aligning your values with those of your customers. Connecting customer insights with company initiatives will help build trust, which is at the core of what we do at Traction on Demand. We strive to deliver meaningful experiences that put people at the center of their digital transformation. Through digitizing the ability to deliver an emotion within the customer journey, organizations are opening the doors to creating untapped value, differentiation, preference and demand, loyalty and greater margins.

4. Re-imagining the Customer Journey

At the end of the day, we’re all in the relationship business, no matter the industry. Brian shared his insights around the ‘ah-ha’ moment that happens right before the inspiration to grow, change and adapt takes place.

“We haven’t gotten to this place before because we made decisions based on past experiences. The prelude is asking different questions: what does the customer want and where is the service failing expectations?”

Innovation has always stemmed from times of disruption. Challenging your past processes or business decisions will allow you to effectively reflect on your current customer experience. Keeping the customer involved and in mind when re-imagining the journey is imperative, in order to provide digital features, products and services that will best meet their needs.

5. Seeking Customer Success through Salesforce

Leveraging Salesforce tools to build and maintain customer loyalty and success will lead to greater customer enablement and overall satisfaction. The following tools can help to strengthen your digital experience from the first touchpoint.

• Sales Cloud – Centralize customer information and log customer interactions to help your company run and improve your customer service experience.
• Einstein Analytics – Uncover success metrics and data insights based on your customer’s activity.
• Chatbots – Powered by AI to answer common questions, chatbots can engage customers with rich content and offer customer support.
• Field Service – Provide virtual customer support that’s tailored to your customer’s needs.

Utilizing technology to meet and exceed customer expectations will provide an experience that is unmet and unknown, giving the customer something to think about and explore.

Build Lasting Customer Loyalty with Salesforce

If you enjoyed our 5 steps to building brand loyalty, and you’re looking to create a customer-focused service roadmap, get in touch with a member of our team. With industry experts well versed in the latest tech solutions to elevate and improve your customer experience in 2021, we can help you provide a digital experience – from start to finish.