August 05, 2014
Marketers have tons of experience with contextual marketing. Contextual marketing techniques are paramount to helping companies acquire new customers. Advertisers in particular have done a great job using contextual marketing and behavioral targeting to find people who are in the market for products. But they’ve dropped the ball when it comes to giving them relevant offers.
Not giving customers relevant offers is not only a struggle for marketers looking to acquire customers but also for marketers looking to cross-sell existing customers. As more and more companies start to invest in channel of choice initiatives - architecting web, email, mobile, social, and contact center channels in a way that the customers’ experience is relevant on a holistic and consistent basis -figuring out how to package, market and promote relevant offers for customers by channel becomes equally important.
How can marketers apply the same contextual marketing techniques for customer acquisition towards the emerging channel of choice initiatives? Marketers may want to consider allocating some marketing spend to Next Best Offer or NBO schemes in service management.
Service management is defined as contact center effectiveness, field service, customer churn management as well as billing and collections. By leveraging contextual marketing techniques with NBO schemes, companies increase the likelihood of moving an unprofitable single product or service customer to a profitable multi-product or service customer. The difference – apply the same contextual marketing techniques to customer acquisition to existing customer behaviors and transactions to determine the right place and channel to offer such NBO’s.
The first 90 days of a customer’s relationship with a company is crucial – a lot can go wrong with the customer experience given the amount of marketing dollars spent to acquire them. The companies that experience high attrition rate during the first ninety days often times are unable to predictably detect customer disengagement or understand how to serve the customer base with relevant offers to make them stick around.
With the amount of analytics, data and marketing sophistication that exist, apply contextual marketing to service management can become a huge competitor differentiator and one that can yield tremendous benefits especially during a customer’s first 90 days.
Art Hall
Art Hall is a Director with Alvarez & Marsal in Atlanta. Mr. Hall specializes in strategy and performance improvement for strategic buyers for corporates and private equity firms. Mr. Hall has more than 18 years of combined practitioner and consulting experience across a number of verticals and disciplines.
Prior to joining A&M, Mr. Hall was Vice President of Sales and Customer Care for NetBank managing and overseeing the online bank’s international contact center operations for dealer financial services, retail and small business banking, mortgage servicing and wealth. Mr. Hall was the interim manager for the bank’s default administration group which included people and process leadership for loan servicing customer service, collections, foreclosure, bankruptcy / reporting and REO. Before joining NetBank in 2000, Mr. Hall worked for eBank and at First Data where he was responsible for multichannel contact center operations.
Mr. Hall earned a B.A from State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the President of the Customer Relationship Management Association (CRMA) Atlanta Chapter. In 2011, Mr. Hall was selected by Gartner and 1to1 Media as a CRM Excellence judge for CRM Efficiency and Customer Experience Management for Americas and EMEA. Mr. Hall frequently serves as a speaker at contact center focused conferences globally; he was also recognized by 1to1 Media, a division of Peppers & Rogers Group, as a 2007 Customer Champion.