Engaging with customers in today’s world is multifaceted, spanning everything from generating that initial spark of interest, to closing a sale and nurturing the relationship, to delivering exceptional ongoing service and support. Today, those experiences are often disconnected, and customer relationships are fragmented. On top of that, customer expectations have risen dramatically.
Customers expect that brands know enough about their preferences to provide high-quality interactions. Personalized and consistent communication across every touchpoint is what they find important. However, users are wary about sharing personal information and fear that their data might be misused, or that they will be inundated with a barrage of advertisements, emails, and intrusive outreach.
As we’ve worked with large enterprise customers around the world, their marketing leaders consistently stress the importance of meeting today’s customer expectations and delivering privacy-aware, consent-enabled personalization. Customer insights have greater significance as they are often locked in silos.
Bearing those trends in mind, Microsoft has introduced the Customer Experience Platform that makes it possible to manage customer data to deliver unique experiences. Powered by AI and insights, the platform enables you to better predict customer intent, accelerate your time to market, and deliver the right content through the right channel at the right moment.
With AI-orchestrated journeys, you can engage your customers in powerful new ways, delivering connected experiences across every customer touchpoint.
Own your customer relationships
As the industry faces the imminent deprecation of third-party cookies and the continued fragmentation of digital identities, having a strong customer data platform is essential as never before. Marketers need to build holistic customer profiles and protect them with robust privacy and security controls—all in real time. With Microsoft Customer Experience Platform, you can power customer data unification and understanding, enrich customer data with privacy-friendly insights from multiple sources, and ensure compliance, all while honoring your customer’s consent to data processing.
For instance, in the pharmaceutical sector, data privacy and security are top of mind for companies and customers alike. This is the reason Walgreens and Boots Alliance, Inc. chose Microsoft to gain a unified, 360-degree view of their customers and deliver a world-class digital experience. Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Walgreens and Boots Alliance, Inc. is now able to deliver personalized medical service, while protecting the privacy choices of patients and customers.
Create raving fans
Driving down customer acquisition costs and increasing lifetime value is a top priority for every business. And today’s marketers need granular data, scalable technology, and sophisticated analytics to achieve these goals. AI makes it easier to identify trends and insights to reveal new opportunities, but the average campaign led by data scientists can take months to execute, with a large portion of this time spent collecting data, cleaning it up, and running predictive models.
With the Customer Experience Platform, you can understand the intent, journey, and behavior of customers on your websites and mobile devices, and then optimize your sales funnel. Microsoft provides out-of-the-box capabilities powered by artificial intelligence and pre-built models to predict key customer attributes such as lifetime value, churn, behavioral and interest similarity, to accelerate results.
Let’s take a look at how the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform works using the example of Chipotle, which serves millions of customers a year. The company wanted disaggregated data on customer preferences and how they change over time. To meet this challenge, Chipotle needed a single platform for processing customer data. The solution from Microsoft made it possible to analyze multiple sources of customer data, including a loyalty program with over 17 million members, data from points of sale, customer service center and digital channels. Today, Chipotle can collect and analyze data in a more efficient way and track key metrics such as return visits, lifetime value and customer sentiment.
Engage in new ways
Customers today want real connections with brands that go beyond simple personalization. They want high-quality experiences that improve the way they live and work. To maximize reach and ROI, marketers must think beyond a linear customer journey and connect experiences across marketing, commerce, sales, and service, as well as perform seamless activation across a growing number of customer touchpoints.
The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform provides AI-orchestrated journeys: from interactions across advertising, email, mobile, and social media, to in-person touchpoints.
With the integration between Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Microsoft Advertising, you can easily activate your audience segments, expand your target lists with lookalike audiences and auto-generated remarketing. You can distribute these segments into Microsoft Advertising and other ad platforms without barriers, further extending your reach by meeting customers where they are.
Leatherman, the originator and category leader in high-quality multi-tools, sought a solution to meet their growing D2C (Direct to Consumer) communication needs. Leatherman leveraged customer journey orchestration in Customer Experience Platform to curate a more personalized customer journey and to create user experience continuity with their online store. Setting up multiple touchpoints made it possible to engage customers with real-time custom events.
SMART business views customer service in a comprehensive way, like an ecosystem with multiple processes. This makes it possible to analyze the customer’s business from the standpoint of further scaling and strengthening through the use of modern tools and services.
If you require consultation on improving your relationships with customers, we’re always happy to help you: sales@smart-it.com