The Four Essential Truths Of Real-Time Customer Engagement: The Fourth Truth

DELIVER.

At this point in our story, we have a connected consumer “damsel in distress” (or “damsel that wants this dress”) interacting with a real-time engagement channel. You know who she is and what she means to you. You know what journey she’s on and what strategic marketing campaigns she’s part of. In that moment of clarity, you have performed real-time rules-based analytics, self-learning predictive analytics and strategic arbitration of our enterprise offers, and you’ve decided specifically which offers to extend and where.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, as much as I hate to stop all that positive momentum, it’s now time for the fourth and final essential truth of real-time customer engagement:

If you can’t get your message delivered at the right time, it doesn’t really matter how good it is.

That’s right. If you can’t get your offers delivered to the consumer in real-time, all that work has been for naught.

This is where the conversation gets channel-specific (and yet more individualized), and as true omni-channel marketers, we should cover all the interactive channels. For sake of argument, let’s consider: customer care, web (paid, earned, owned), kiosk/ATM/POS/self-service, email/SMS, social and mobile. If anyone thinks I’m missing one, tweet me (@TDjtimmerman ) and I’ll publicly issue a mea culpa.

Customer care: Generally regarded as the best prepared channel for getting a message/offer delivered in real-time. As long as your customer care application supports the real-time selection of customer-specific offers, the agent handling the call can easily read an offer in real-time.

Web: The channel with the greatest immediate potential, due to the sheer amount of transactional traffic volume online. Of course, the ideal scenario is a real-time customer interaction on an “owned” website where the customer is easily and uniquely identified and the dynamic content of the website is easily managed. Paid and earned websites are somewhat trickier because you don’t dictate the amount of customer identification data that you’re provided in real-time, and you often have to use technology partners to get your content/offers/messages (however limited they may be) delivered in real-time. Even so, the goal remains the same: to return an offer that ultimately drives interaction on an owned website.

Kiosk/ATM/POS/Self-Service: Essentially, these are instantiations of websites. For the most part, all the applications that drive these devices are web-based client applications, and as such, each may be treated as an owned website. There may be a relatively anonymous “outer layer” to the application, but customer sign-on/identification/authentication must be enabled to realize true one-to-one offer individualization. Therefore, these are the perfect channels to include in loyalty program-based interactional offer decisioning and delivery. With the geo-fencing and beacon technologies available today, you can easily integrate these location-based devices/channels into the real-time customer experience.

Email/SMS: If the content is relevant, an email/SMS can certainly be incorporated into the real-time customer engagement mix. However, while the initial email may have been marketing-driven or transactional in nature, the specific content of the generated message needs to be recalculated at the moment the email is opened (not static from the time the message was originally created) – just in case something has changed with the customer from the time the message was generated until the time the email/SMS was opened by the customer.

Social: If you want to engage with consumers through Facebook Custom Audiences and/or have your own social sites with social teams to monitor them, you can certainly implement real-time decisioning and customer engagement tactics across these channels. Much like with paid or earned web interactions, the customer identification options can be more limited. However, that’s nothing that can’t be overcome with the right technology partners and marketing applications that can help you better understand your customers and better determine what journeys they’re on so you can make a real-time offer decision.

Mobile: Likely the channel with the most future potential. Mobile is here to stay, and it’s only going to get more prolific, with more payment/transactional options. Mobile is, and will continue to be, more than just phones, pads and tablets. Any iOS or Android device needs apps, and when your app is on your customers’ mobile devices, you’ve opened up a brave new world for you… and for them. Apps allow you to push to mobile, which makes them even more interactive and real-time than waiting for someone to access your website from their mobile device. Are all business relationships conducive to a mobile app? Maybe not, but if yours is, you’ve got to be excited about mobile apps for real-time customer engagement.

Each interactive channel brings its own challenges and each brings its own opportunity. But, if you can’t get your message delivered at the right time, it doesn’t really matter how good it is.

This is the final post of a 5-part series. Links to all related posts in the series are presented below.

Read the first post in this series: The Four Essential Truths Of Real-Time Customer Engagement

Read Truth #1: The Four Essential Truths Of Real-Time Customer Engagement: The First Truth

Read Truth #2: The Four Essential Truths Of Real-Time Customer Engagement: The Second Truth

Read Truth #3: The Four Essential Truths Of Real-Time Customer Engagement: The Third Truth

Read Truth #4: The Four Essential Truths Of Real-Time Customer Engagement: The Fourth Truth

The Four Essential Truths Of Real-Time Customer Engagement: The Fourth Truth