Customer Engagement in the Cloud
During the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco recently, George Colony, chairman and CEO of Forrester Research, talked about what it means to be living and doing business in the “Age of the Customer” and how customer engagement is now the driving force behind the success of a brand.
Consumers are more empowered than ever before and will switch service providers due to poor customer service before you even know there’s a problem. So how to remedy those dark spots in customer service and further engage customers? Here’s a look at how MSPs can help their clients optimize customer engagement and customer satisfaction through use of the cloud.
Freeing up time to focus on personalized campaigns instead of daily operations
By helping your customers automate tedious and time-consuming daily tasks in the cloud, your client’s will be able to focus on innovation and deploying applications that further engage and target an audience.
Freeing developers of these mundane tasks allows them to launch creative, new, personalized applications that drive customer engagement. If it’s successful and customers are providing a lot of feedback, time is also needed identify the useful feedback, develop an idea and deploy it. Speeding up this process allows companies to experiment until they land upon an idea that works best.
Pooling Resources
The ability to manage, maintain and secure resources in one centralized location helps companies see the bigger picture into their company’s overall health. For example, software-as-a-service cloud offerings have platforms for email marketing campaigns, social media marketing, SEO optimization and cloud-based analytics all in one place. This allows for targeted campaigns and visibility into areas of improvement and the bottom line.
Simplifying Research
Engaging with customers means understand their wants, needs, preferences and behavior, and finding a place where they can express those to you.
Traditionally, focus groups along with costly and timely market research was involved in creating pilot programs and testing the reactions of customers. Now, MSPs can help clients create a social platform for their customers which streamlines the research process all together. As customers congregate on the platform to share ideas, opinions and advice, clients can analyze and gain deep insights into consumer behavior and preferences, and thereby enhance engagement.
Customizable and Cost Effective
In the past, if a company wanted to scale up and down, they had to purchase an entirely new system. This is not good for business or it’s customers. Now, scalability is instantaneous, and MSPs can help clients customize their infrastructure in a way that works with company goals, needs, and growth.
This is a great incentive for clients to work towards engagement even more, because it eliminates the fear of a client-base growing out of control. Also, with pay-per-use cloud subscriptions, companies are only paying for the cloud resources that they actually use, eliminating wasted money.
All in all, cloud based platforms transform traditional one-way communication into an agile platform where customers and businesses can interact and grow together.
How has the cloud helped you with customer engagement? Leave a comment in the section below.
