January 2022

CRM Marketing: The Secret Recipe for Higher Engagement and Faster Sales!

Customer retention is cheaper than acquisition.

For example, the success rate of selling to a new customer ranges between 5-20%.

Whereas for an existing customer, it’s 60-70%.

That’s a big difference!

sales probability - new vs. existing customers statistics

Because it’s easier to sell to existing customers, brands can achieve 30-40% of their revenue targets through upselling and cross-selling.

This presents an incredible growth opportunity.

So, it makes sense to market to your existing customers because:

Acquiring new customers is 5 times more expensive than retaining them
5% increase in customer retention may lead to 25-95% higher profits

But, let’s be clear:

Do not discard your customer acquisition plan (that’s how you gain a market share).

What you need is the right balance.

A balance between acquisition and retention.

How do you achieve that balance successfully?

You do it through CRM marketing.

Just another buzzword? Not quite.

Read on to find out more.

What is CRM marketing?

CRM marketing refers to the marketing tactics to acquire customers and increase customer loyalty, retention, revenue, and lifetime value.

Instead of using separate software for sales and marketing, companies prefer CRM for:

Analysing market demand/pain points
Customer journey mapping
Tracking lead activities
Creating trigger-based campaigns
Lead and customer segmentation
Marketing automation and lead engagement
Lead prioritization and scoring
Reports and data analytics

You may have noticed that the above is based on a marketing perspective.

Sales teams also have several use cases for CRM software.

But the point is – by unifying lead and customer data in CRM, teams have better visibility into their market.

It becomes data-driven. No guesswork required!

It also simplifies building customer profiles as marketing teams know the lead attributes that convert, the campaigns that worked, and the number and types of touchpoints that led to conversion.

Insurance Agency Automation - workflow builder

CRM is powerful. In many organizations, it’s business critical.

It’s no surprise that, by 2025, CRM software is set to generate more than $80 billion in sales.

Are you wondering how CRM marketing contributes to new revenue?

Let’s take a look at an example.

With CRM, you can keep track of your website visitors’ activities. If your newest lead has clicked on your ad about red mittens, your CRM will store this information.

In the future, you can send ads that market red mittens to your lead. Thus, helping you transform your lead to a customer with little work on your part.

In short, CRM helps you understand your leads’ specific interests. Your cold call will be a lot warmer with the help of your CRM information.

If it sounds easy, it’s because it is.

But not everyone is ready to adapt and digitally transform their business.

If traditional marketing works, why change?

As the saying goes… “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Yet, traditional marketing has its fair share of challenges.

Especially when compared to CRM marketing.

Let’s take a closer look..

Challenges with traditional marketing

Traditionally, brands used newspapers, telemarketing, broadcasts, and more to reach a broader set of audience.

Today, with digital media, these are not as effective as before.

Traditional ways of marketing now present more challenges than benefits, some of which are:

Traditional marketing results in 50% fewer consumer interactions than online marketing. We can reach our customers much faster when we use the internet and interact with them effortlessly.
The biggest challenge with print ads is our inability to measure the ad’s reach. Sure incremental sales is a way to check the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, marketers still struggle to find the actual conversion source.
“Sales” is the only factor that determines how effective your campaign was in traditional marketing. In CRM marketing, you have a number of metrics to measure the effectiveness. For e.g., new and repeat customers, renewals, upsells, cross-sells, etc.
The next challenge we face is with traditional TV marketing. For many small businesses, TV ads can be costly if not completely out of reach. And these ads reach many people who do not need your product. At the same time, if not done strategically, your ads may not reach your target audience at all. For example, in 2020, the total time spent viewing traditional TV by 18-34-year-olds fell by 23.4%. Which means you won’t be reaching younger generations using television.

Simply put:

It’s high time to get over the traditional tactics.

In the past, US-based marketers used to spend between 7-10% of their company revenues for marketing. This number rose to 13.2% in February 2020.

Fast forward to 2021 and CMOs in the US claim that their digital spending has increased by 14.3% compared to the previous 12 months.

Now, what does it mean?

That it’s time to step up your marketing strategy.

Marketing needs to be more personalized and targeted.

Otherwise, you’ll keep on burning money and generate zero results.

So, what’s the solution?

CRM marketing.

How does CRM marketing compare to traditional marketing?

CRM Marketing Vs. Traditional Marketing

	CRM Marketing	Traditional Marketing
Goals	To engage with buyers throughout their lifecycle. It includes customer acquisition, retention, cross-selling, and up-selling.	The goal is to acquire customers.
Medium	Digital and sometimes offline as well (events, and tradeshows).	Digital, radio, print ads, broadcast, telemarketing, events, and tradeshows.
Tracking conversions	Easy and accurate	Difficult to track actual conversion source.
Customer journey mapping	Marketers can track almost every possible touchpoint.	It’s difficult to track all customer interactions.
Audience segmentation	Marketers can segment customers based on location, interest, language, and more.It is even possible to reach out to a niche audience.	Generally, the focus is focus on a broader set of audience.
Cost	Highly cost effective.For e.g., you can retarget prospects who bought a product through Google Ads for $0.66 to $1.23 per click.	Very costly.For e.g., an ad in a magazine can cost upwards of $20,000, a billboard can cost $2,500/month, and a 30-second TV commercial on a small local station will cost $1,500 (excluding production costs)
Reporting	CRM marketing tools offers several options to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. You can track a range of KPIs to get granular details.	Traditional marketing is much harder to measure. As we do not have any tool that automatically analyzes and reports its progress.
Upcoming trends	CRM Marketing typically uses automation for its marketing processes. By 2023, the global marketing automation technology industry is set to reach $25.1 billion.	Marketers are steadily decreasing their budgets for traditional advertising.

It’s clear that there’s a lot of reasons to switch to CRM marketing.

Getting started doesn’t have to be difficult, either…

3 Simple ways in which you can use CRM marketing

1. Segment audience

A CRM collects and stores information such as:

Customer preferences- likes, dislikes, and attitude towards ads.
Demographics- age, gender, household type, location, and so on.
Purchasing habits- whether they are big spenders or practical buyers.

When you know your customers, you can segment them into different buckets.

For example, if you sell bicycles, you can segment your customers based on their age and gender.

Then, you can send specific campaigns or updates to each segment. Needless to say, your campaigns will be more relevant and targeted than a generic one.

I’ll give you one more example.

Steven Macdonald shared an experiment on the SuperOffice blog where he found that segmented email campaigns are 123% more effective in terms of open rate and 744% more effective in terms of CTR than non-segmented campaigns.

	Segmented email campaign	Non-segmented email campaign
Open rate	94%	42%
CTR	38%	4.5%

So, there’s a definite reason to segment all your campaigns from here on.

And a CRM software helps you do just that.

You can take it a step further by monitoring conversions. For example, instead of a generic overview, you can determine the best day and time to send your email campaigns based on your users and target group.

Here’s an example of how you can track email metrics in LeadSquared CRM.

email open rate statistics by hours of day

email open rate statistics by day of week

2. Personalize and automate marketing campaigns

How often do you send marketing campaigns to your leads?

Once in a week? Once in a month?

And how often do you update your audience list?

If you’re generating new leads every day, managing and nurturing them efficiently will determine how successful your campaigns will be.

Let’s say you collect leads for a week. Then you apply filters and segment them. And then finally pass them on to the email marketing software to run campaigns.

If this is what you’re doing right now, I must say, there’s a better way to run your campaigns.

Because, my friend, all these could be done automatically through CRM marketing.

Let me walk you through the lead journey in CRM on a high level.

Capture leads
Automatically segment them based on predefined attributes
Add them to a nurturing sequence. Personalize the messaging.
Track their interactions and transactions (purchase)
Gather the insights and tune your future campaigns.

All these things happen automatically in CRM.

Customer journey builder - for all your campaigns

You can, of course, intervene. But CRM marketing helps you automate tasks that could have otherwise consumed a lot of your and your team’s bandwidth.

Now let’s talk about personalization in CRM marketing.

Dynamic Yield Research found that 88% of people prefer personalized emails. And it holds true for any marketing communication.

Won’t you like a brand more if they address you with your first name, instead of “Hey There”?

Now you may wonder, how can CRM help with personalization?

To be honest, there is no one way to personalize your message, but many.

You can personalize your campaigns based on:

Audience
Time of the year
Current events

The CRM will automatically fill the first name with your customer’s name. Similarly, you can personalize other content based on the data you have. The text is personalized for every single recipient – as if you’re sending messages to them individually. Plus, you can send the message through WhatsApp, SMS, or email – the channel your buyers prefer.

You can track the open rates, click rates and purchases made through your campaigns by adding a tracking parameter to the link.

So, this is just one of the ways in which you can personalize your campaigns through CRM marketing.

No grunt work, just a personalized campaign sent to a specific segment of the audience.

3. Triggered campaigns

When you run a business, your interaction with people goes through a lifecycle consisting of multiple stages, from new subscribers to regular clients. Each lifecycle stage warrants a specific response, such as welcome emails, re-engagement emails, or milestone emails.

Triggered campaigns are very helpful here.

Instead of sending promotional campaigns to a bunch of people, you communicate when there’s an activity.

For example, when your customer checks on running shoes on your website, your CRM tracks that activity and initiates a trigger message.

Similarly, the triggers can be opening your emails, buying from you, visiting your website, or interacting with you on social media. Each of these actions will trigger a unique response to that customer.

You can also create triggers for a number of events, such as:

Subscription renewals
Birthdays
Anniversaries
Milestone achievement

Even better, you don’t have to do anything!

The CRM software takes care of audience segmentation, personalization, and trigger-based campaigns. Basically, CRM helps you a great deal with marketing automation.

How does CRM help with marketing automation?

Think about this.

What do you need for personalization?

Data, right?

Now, where do you find your customer data?

You’re right – in a CRM.

CRM that supports marketing automation is a boon for organizations.

It helps:

Segment customers automatically

Run omnichannel campaigns from the same platform

marketing automation - omni channel engagement

Break through the departmental silos (If another team is sending a campaign to a list of customers, instead of postponing your campaign or sending multiple campaigns to the same set of customers back to back, you can suppress that list and still run your campaigns.)

Makes customer information available to marketers

Makes it easy to build customer profiles

Save templates and reuse them

Track conversions based on different parameters – location-wise, campaign-wise, etc.

Derive actionable insights

Now it’s fair to ask about the software that helps achieve the above benefits.

Here’s our recommendation.

The best software for CRM marketing: LeadSquared

With LeadSquared, you can understand your prospects better and build lasting relationships.

Some of the features your marketing team will love are:

Automatically capture leads. Reduce lead leakage to zero with landing pages, connectors, APIs, and more.

Understand intent with 360-degree user profile, behavior, activity tracking, and more.

Spot signals. Identify a user’s intent to buy with tracking and trigger engagement actions.

Visualize user journeys. Use pre-build user behavior and engagement workflows for important actions, like a pricing page view.

Measure performance. Get prescriptive insights across lead sources, engagement campaigns, user journeys, and more.

Connect your systems. If you’re already using other software tools, seamlessly integrate them with LeadSquared. Think of LeadSquared as a single front-end for all your marketing, lead capture, engagement, and conversion activities.

Think of it this way:

The marketing automation and the ability to track leads in real-time as they’re engaging on your website can be of great advantage.

Sarah Holmes, Corporate Director of Admissions, Bellus Academy, California, says so.

Further, she adds:

“Since LeadSquared, we have noticed an increase in our conversion rates from around 15-17% to mid 20%. LeadSquared makes it so much easier to follow up with leads and makes sure no one gets lost in the process. The main addition has been the ability to build consistent enrollment journeys combining admissions, marketing and automation. That has brought a phenomenal change in the process and a reduction in our lead-to-enrollment time by 60%.”
Sarah Holmes, Corporate Director of Admissions, Bellus Academy, California, says so.

The takeaway

CRM marketing is the future.

Marketers have realized that there should be a balance between customer acquisition and retention. And CRM marketing is just the way to do that.

With CRM marketing you can not only improve your customer acquisition methods but also run triggered campaigns to initiate renewals, upsell and cross-sell. Thus, generating revenues from all directions.

If you wish to build long-lasting relationships with your customers, let LeadSquared help you in your pursuit. To see it in action,

January 17, 2022/0 Comments/by Padma Ramakrishna

Marketing HyFlex Courses: 7 Strategies to Engage Non-Traditional Students

Education

HyFlex (Hybrid-Flexible) courses offer immense potential to attract a growing student population: non-traditional students. Non-traditional learners, who are often working or raising families, prize flexibility and choice—two distinctive attributes of HyFlex.

Nearly 40% of U.S. college students are considered non-traditional, a percentage only expected to grow in the era of the Great Resignation. How can schools leverage HyFlex courses to recruit this growing population? We’ve created this guide to help.

What are HyFlex courses?

HyFlex courses fuse in-person and online learning—both live-streamed and recorded. Each class is offered in-person, synchronously (live) online, and asynchronously (recorded) online. Students can choose their preferred format for each class session.

According to Educause, the HyFlex model’s customizable format helps increase accessibility—a benefit that can also grow enrollments.

By offering equitable access and experiences, HyFlex can reduce barriers to enrollment and enable more students to achieve their educational goals

Additional benefits include:

Scheduling flexibility
Technology education
Personalized school—life integration

How do you identify a non-traditional student?

According to the Association of American Colleges & Universities, non-traditional students are 25+ years with one or more of the following life circumstances:

Cares for dependents
Employed full-time
Enrolled in school part-time
Financially independent
Single parent
No high school diploma

Non-traditional learners typically enroll for career advancement and are likely to attend a 2-year vocational school or community college. First-generation students are also considered non-traditional.

Barriers to enrollment

Time and cost are top enrollment barriers for non-traditional students, per a study by Western Governor’s University. Hanover Research also provides a helpful framework for understanding challenges.

Other barriers might include:

Work-study-life balance
Emotional challenges, such as lack of self-confidence
Perceived lack of on-campus support services

For additional insights into non-traditional students, check out our recent blog post, How to Address the Struggles of Non-Traditional Students.

Strategies for marketing HyFlex courses to non-traditional students

Effective marketing campaigns typically address student challenges and needs. When marketing HyFlex courses, consider the following approaches.

1. Emphasize flexibility

Non-traditional learners want to know how their studies will complement their existing commitments. Many are busy raising families or working full-time. Coursework flexibility is key.

HyFlex courses can be flexible in multiple ways, including:

Modality (online versus in-person)
Timeline for completion
Financing
Faculty availability
Overall program flexibility

Consider highlighting different aspects of flexibility in your marketing materials. Student testimonials can be an especially effective tool, as testimonials illustrate personal impact and outcome.

Champlain College does a great job of showcasing the online, non-traditional student experience using testimonials.

Champlain features different nontraditional students’ success stories emphasizing the program’s flexible format.

Champlain also reimagines individual testimonials from the video as graphics. Crystal’s selected quote emphasizes the program’s accessible and flexible format.

Even Champlain’s web page emphasizes flexibility by discussing program technology, scheduling, and financing. Even the URL exudes flexibility: online.champlain.edu/experience/school-life-balance.

2. Highlight successful outcomes

Non-traditional learners tend to enroll primarily for career advancement. Illustrating successful professional and personal outcomes is key.

They’re not only vetting your program; they’re vetting your competitor’s programs. Adult learners are smart and are looking for ROI—just like marketers.
Davia Lassiter, director of marketing at Kennesaw State University’s College of Continuing and Professional Education

Consider demonstrating successful student outcomes by:

Integrating career stats into messages
Illustrating skills and training students will receive
Publishing alumni success stories
Posting career outcomes on website

Check out the career outlook webpage by Western Governor’s University (WGU), an online college in Utah.

WGU illustrates three key alumni outcomes compared to the U.S. average. WGU also provides employer outcomes under the “Happy employers” tab

The digital ad campaign below from Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) is also an interesting outcomes-driven approach.

SNHU targets adult workers in full-time jobs who may be seeking alternative career options. The school draws a direct connection between prospect concerns and SHNU as a solution. The emotional appeal of the ads is also compelling.

3. Highlight affordability and aid options

Finances are top-of-mind for non-traditional students. According to Barnes & Noble College, only 15% of adult students feel financially secure—a challenge that often deters enrollment and graduation.

To mitigate financial concerns, consider emphasizing affordability and providing detailed financial aid information. Offer financial tools and resources as well, such as financial counseling information.

Content might include details on:

Tuition and fees, per course and program
Scholarships and grants
Loan options
Transferable credits
Typical class schedules
Program length

Check out how Gene Juarez Academy, a beauty school in Seattle, structures their financial aid information.

Gene Juarez features a “Funding Your Future” tab on the homepage, which includes separate pages on financial aid, scholarships and tuition payment for current students. The scholarships page is particularly robust, listing 10 different options with funding amounts and deadlines.

Gene Juarez also features a net price calculator to give applicants a sense of what other students pay.

4. Promote support services

Non-traditional learners—especially those primarily online—often aren’t aware of support services like career counseling. For prospects, extracurricular services can be especially important in fostering a sense of belonging and support.

Consider promoting tailored services for HyFlex students. Strategies might include:

Highlighting career and financial services in program brochures
Publishing stories illustrating impact of support services
Linking to services on HyFlex course pages

Check out how Business@American, American University’s online business school, lays out support options on its website.

5. Get emotional

Many non-traditional learners enter school with more apprehension and anxiety than traditional students. According to New Directions for Student Services, prospects often display a “lack of self-confidence” due to negative past academic experiences and concerns for the future.

Schools should acknowledge emotional concerns in messaging and materials. When marketing HyFlex courses, consider the following:

Take a warm, friendly, and inviting tone
Use CTAs to push for personal interactions with staff
Provide multiple engagement options (email, phone, in-person)
Offer low-stakes entry points, like free group info sessions

University of Massachusetts Global, which offers HyFlex, online and in-person courses, does a good job of empathizing with students in their messaging.

UMass immediately identifies with students’ busy lives and schedules. The school positions itself as a solution by emphasizing student support.

6. Segment your audience

After testing general messaging, consider segmenting your audience for a more personalized approach.

Non-traditional students can be comprised of many different audiences. Groups interested in HyFlex courses might include:

Military service members
First generation students
Single mothers
Students aged 65+
Full-time workers

Once you’ve selected your group, determine the value proposition: What matters most to the audience? Each value proposition differs depending on audience needs and will serve as the bedrock of your messaging.

Take the University of Maryland Global Campus, known for hybrid courses and programs for active service members. Active service members value a particularly high degree of flexibility and mobility, which UMGC outlines on its website:

UMGC outlines how hybrid and online classes are flexible, affordable, and efficient—three components servicemembers value. The school also positions itself as an expert by emphasizing its history of running programs for the armed forces.

7. Fine-tune your strategy

Use career-centered imagery
Nontraditional learners typically prioritize career advancement above all else. Try using photos of prospects active in their career fields, rather than in the classroom. Career-centered imagery can help prospects visualize successful outcomes.

Go grassroots
Adult students tend to rely on family, friends and colleagues as top information sources. Consider partnering with local community groups, centers and clubs to expand outreach and form more personal connections with prospects.

Communicate directly
Non-traditional students are often short on time and high on responsibility. Prospects prefer information presented clearly and directly. Consider conducting a website audit to ensure clear communication design, and including a standardized FAQ page.

HyFlex courses—and non-traditional students—are now an essential part of the higher education landscape. By positioning HyFlex courses as a “unicorn” solution for adult learners, your school can leverage this growing population to boost enrollments, for HyFlex programs and beyond.

January 14, 2022/0 Comments/by Jamie McCrary

A No-Brainer: Facebook Ads for Healthcare Practices

Healthcare

At the risk of stating the obvious, nearly everyone is on Facebook. What may be less obvious is that the precise demographics who need your medical, mental health, and other healthcare services are checking their Facebook accounts every single day. If your ads aren’t in front of them, when they need the services you offer, they will likely choose another provider they have seen on Facebook.

Let’s break this down and digest it.

1. The people you need to reach are on Facebook

According to Pew Research Center, about 7 of 10 adults, or 69%, are on Facebook. Aside from YouTube, no other social media platform comes close to Facebook in this demographic. What’s more, is that 7 of 10 of these adults visit the site at least once a day, and nearly half (49%) visit multiple times a day.

This means your prospective patients are spending a lot of time on Facebook and they’re most likely seeing ads from your competitors. At the very least, they need your services and don’t know how or where to find you online. Facebook ads can direct them to your website or provide a button for them to contact you via email, a contact form, or by phone.

2. Both men and women have a significant presence on Facebook

When it comes to adults on Facebook, both men and women under the age of 65 frequent their Facebook accounts on a regular basis. If this is your target audience for medical services and treatments, then you can appeal to 77% of women in the United States and 61% of men through Facebook advertising.

And, even if you’d like to reach people over the age of 65, about half of this demographic spends time on the social media platform, as well.

3. Facebook collects data based on your audience’s preferences

If a person searches for “mental health services near me,” or “telehealth counseling,” Facebook uses the information to show them ads that pertain to this particular interest. Is your ad one of them? As a healthcare organization, telehealth provider, or medical practice, if you’re not advertising on Facebook, you are missing out on connecting with your ideal patients.

I know what you’re thinking: “But, I have lots of content on my Facebook business page, so future patients are finding my organization organically.”

Unfortunately, organic reach is on the decline. So much so that the average reach of the organic content on your business page is only about 5%. This means that less than 20% of Facebook users are seeing your organic, non-promoted content. Ouch.

That’s a whole lot of effort for a very minimal reach. It also makes the case for boosting your practice’s Facebook ad budget and promoting more relevant content to your audience.

So, now that you’re aware how important it is to advertise your healthcare organization on Facebook, where do you start? Do you need to hire a marketing team? Can you do it yourself? Let’s take a look at the process and see if it’s something you or a team member can take on.

A consistent, creative social media presence strengthens your brand, builds trust, and generates new revenue.
Learn more about healthcare branding here.

Organic reach vs. paid reach on Facebook

If you need a little background on the difference between organic and paid reach, learn more on this Facebook page. For our purposes, we’ll say that organic reach is unpaid content on your Facebook page, and paid reach is content you promote through targeted ads.

Reach

Paid ads for your healthcare practice on Facebook enables you to target a specific demographic and reach a much larger audience than you can with a post to your business page. With Facebook ads for your healthcare organization, you decide which parameters to set, including location (i.e. patients within a 10-mile radius of your practice); age groups, gender, and interests.

Target

Essentially, you can target—for instance—men and women, ages 21-55, who are interested in health and wellness, diet and weight loss, healthy living, and mental health, living within 10 miles of your organization. Or, if you want to attract more people to your telehealth services, leave the mileage undefined and apply the other parameters.

Budget

Then, specify a budget and a schedule for your ad. Facebook helps you get your healthcare organization advertisement, including any special offers you want to include, in front of the right audience at the right time.

When you’re first starting out, you or a member of your team can get a Facebook ad campaign going in no time.

Start advertising your healthcare practice on Facebook today

With nearly 3 billion active monthly Facebook users – the largest social network in the world – your healthcare organization needs a presence and an active ad campaign. In a few simple steps, you can be up and running with your first ad.

Use this to your advantage by combining relevant page content that links back to your website, such as blog posts and weekly health tips, with targeted paid ads. Reaching both an organic audience (albeit a small one) and a paid one is an ideal way to strengthen your brand and build trust from your social media presence.

Many practices see an increase of 25% or more reach when they run paid ads and a similar increase in phone calls to the business as a result of paid ad campaigns.

Now is the time to use social media to your advantage to get your services in front of your ideal audience.

January 12, 2022/0 Comments/by Karla Socci Somers

What Is CX? How to Deliver the Best Customer Experiences

Customer Experience

In 2021, customer-facing digital experiences was a top priority for 89% of brands.

But is it still a differentiator?

Perhaps, not.

Almost every brand is now able to deliver the same level of digital experiences.

And yet, 58% of customers state that a brand’s digital experience has little to no impact on what they end up buying.

How, so?

What we sense here is, brands have, to some extent, successfully digitized the pre-purchase experiences.

But there’s more to the definition of customer experience.

Customer experience or CX is a sum of all the cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioral responses during all stages of a buyer’s journey.

A great experience in all the above areas can help build a positive brand perception and impact brand preference by 37%.

Best of all, good CX has a direct influence on purchase decisions.

Customer experience impact on buyers statistics

More purchases, higher revenue and faster growth.

That’s why customer experience matters.

Let’s dive into the various aspects of customer experience.

What is CX?

Customer experience or CX is not a new concept.

In 2007, HBR wrote:

Customer experience is the subjective response customers have to direct or indirect contact with a company. It encompasses every aspect of an offering: customer care, advertising, packaging, features, ease of use, reliability.

At that time, digital technology was still in its nascent stage.

Today, digital experience has become an integral part of the overall customer experience.

So, the definition of customer experience has also evolved.

For some brands, it’s a frictionless journey. For others, it’s a memorable experience.

Similarly, you may find many different definitions and explanations of CX.

But they all point to the same main concept – how customers perceive your brand through the experiences they get from using your product/service and interacting with you digitally.

If this sounds a lot like user experience, you’d be right – they do sound similar.

However, there are several differences between customer experience and user experience. Let’s understand both these terms in detail.

Customer Experience vs. User Experience

	CX	UX
Definition	Customer experience focuses on holistic customer experience. CX deals with a customer’s entire experience with a brand.	User experience concentrates on a single goal- to optimize a product for complete user satisfaction.
Major KPIs	Customer experience KPIs give an in-depth view of what every customer goes through. Some of the well-known CX KPIs are: Customer Lifetime Value, Net Promoter Score, Customer Acquisition cost	UX KPIs solely concentrate on the product and its impact on the user. Some of the major UX KPIs are: Success rate, the margin of error, abandonment rate
Professional activities	CX professionals focus on voicing customer opinions and improving the brand’s image. They conduct market research to understand what customers want from their brand.	UX professionals focus on research to improve the product alone. UX designers create prototypes, user personas and test the product.
Channels of engagement	CX is omnichannel and all-encompassing. It focuses on the larger audience and their every interaction with the brand.	UX is mainly digital, which is a single channel. For example, web or mobile apps.

In a nutshell, customer experience has a lot more to do with the customer than the product. But CX and UX should be of equal importance in any organization.

If usability is bad, customers won’t buy the product no matter how good their experiences are. And vice versa; terrible customer experiences will ensure that a product never shines.

This brings us to another major aspect of customer experience – expectations.

While brands thrive to improve CX, not everyone is meeting the expectations of their customers. For instance, customers look up to brands to exceed their expectations when it comes to:

Personalized communication
Instant issue resolution
Being aware of their needs/concerns
Support, and
Data protection

But do they achieve it?

Let’s find out.

Customer Experience: Expectations vs. Reality

With digitalization, customers want companies to be their best across all platforms.

Customers have high expectations (and rightly so), but reality rarely meets these demands. Some of the significant gaps between customer expectations and reality are:

Personalization:

Expectation: Customers expect a high level of personalization from every brand. 77% of customers tend to recommend and pay more for a brand that offers personalization.
Reality: Only a few companies use advanced personalization tactics. For instance, only 22% of customers feel satisfied with the personalized service they receive.

Issue resolution:

Expectation: 90% of customers regard issue resolution as the most critical aspect of CX. They expect a speedy resolution to their issues.
Reality: The average time it takes to solve an issue is 3 times longer than what customers expect.

Aware of needs:

Expectation: 70% of customers expect reps to talk on their behalf so that they don’t have to repeat the information.
Reality: Customers often end up explaining the reason for their call to every rep they speak with.

Support:

Expectation: Customer support is vital to 84% of consumers when considering whether or not to buy. They would like different options like self-service and live chat to be available.
Reality: Fewer than 30% of brands offer self-service or live chats to their customers.

Components of good CX customer experience statistics

Data privacy and protection:

Expectation: 79% of consumers state that they are anxious about how businesses use the data they gather. Most customers expect companies to protect their personal information.
Reality: In 2020, cybercrime cost the international economy over 6 trillion dollars. Companies rarely meet customer data protection expectations.

Customer expectations will only increase over time.

But companies still struggle to meet them.

But why is it important?

It’s simple – customer experience is closely connected to overall sales and business growth.

How Do Customer Experience Impact Sales and Business Growth?

Customer experience is at the heart of rapid business growth. It is the best chance you have at helping your brand grow. As Adobe’s 2021 digital trends report* shows the CX-driven organizations outperform their business objectives.

(*Source: https://business.adobe.com/us/resources/reports/digital-trends-2021.html)

CX driven organizations outperforming business objectives statistics

Business growth is often the result of great customer experiences.

An example of how CX impacts business growth is clear with Disney. The “Imagineers” at Disney are master storytellers who engage guests throughout their stay.

We see this in their attention to detail as they design even trash cans that are part of their bigger picture. Disney makes most of its sales by offering customer experiences like none other.

Key takeaway? Sales is another area that profits when customers have positive experiences.

Positive CX is essential to 73% of buyers when related to influencing brand loyalty.

You may wonder why I’ve specifically brought up brand loyalty. It is because 82% of consumers in the United States are product-brand loyal. It also means that they won’t shift to competitors’ products for no reason.

Also, you must have seen that selling is much easier when companies have customers who are loyal to the brand. And by offering stellar CX, you can ensure that your sales forecast stays sunny for days on end.

But what makes up a stellar CX?

Let’s take a look.

How to Deliver the Best Customer Experiences

There are four major components of great customer experiences. They are:

Personalized products and services
Seamless omnichannel experiences
Self-service and live chat options
Loyalty programs and rewards for customers

1. Personalized products and messages from brands

72% of customers state that they only interact with personalized content.

Marketers also claim that tailored and targeted campaigns increased email revenue by 760%.

There are several ways to personalize your offering. Some of the most effective ones are:

Creating offers based on their web browsing behavior (behavioral targeting)
Displaying content and products based on location
Upselling, cross-selling at checkout. If you’re using a CRM, you can also spot signals through website visits, ad clicks, etc.
Personalizing communications using their names in emails, chats, WhatsApp messages, and SMS texts

Call this a mantra of customers’ favorite brands – from Grammarly sending weekly progress reports to individuals to Adidas updating the catalog as per the user’s location – we can see personalization in several forms.

The idea is to offer what customers want.

Pro tip: Create customer profiles across different product categories and utilize that information to tune your messaging.

2. Seamless omnichannel experiences

Omnichannel buying rates are 250% higher than single-channel purchase frequency. Customers are constantly shifting from one device to another every other hour. If your content is only readable on the desktop, know that you’re losing sales.

You must make your content uniform and accessible across all platforms.

Starbucks does a great job of using the power of consistent omnichannel experiences. Customers can order and pay for their coffee using the Starbucks app before visiting the cafe to pick it up.

This technique helps the company in two ways –

One, the customers can avoid the typical in-store wait time.
And two, the company could gather the customer preference data easily.

A recommendation here is to use a CRM that supports omnichannel communication.

Take, for example, LeadSquared.

It allows you to connect with your customers and prospects through several channels like SMS, WhatsApp, chats, email, phone calls, and more.

3. Self-service and live chat options

Consumers want to solve their problems or get solutions without assistance most often. This is why self-service, live chat, and chatbot-powered options are popular.

For instance, 87.2% of customers have had favorable or neutral interactions with chatbots. But this is only as long as they can speak with a human if necessary.

Incorporating these elements into your CX can help separate you from the crowd. Customers are bound to flock to your brand if you offer seamless experiences. But, while incorporating these elements, ensure that you don’t remove the human element.

4. Loyalty programs and rewards for existing customers

No matter which company you approach, all of them will agree that it’s easier to sell to an existing customer.

The best method of keeping customers engaged is loyalty programs.

In fact, Gartner also states that CX strategy has a role to play in customer loyalty more than customer acquisition.

“CX drives over two-thirds of customer loyalty, outperforming brand and price combined.”

However, only 29% of CX leaders believe they have achieved intended results in creating innovative experiences for their customers.

The reason?

A gap between what customers really want to stay loyal, and what CX projects focus on.

Gartner proposes four categories of customer experiences that could impact loyalty.

Interaction experience involving quality, convenience, personalization, uniqueness, and in-experience learning.
Product experience involving utility, usability, alignment with needs, and life enrichment.
Brand perception involving brand leadership and its alignment with the customer’s values.
Value for the price.

Instead of focusing on just app/website experience, considering all the aspects of CX can help win customers for a lifetime.

It’s about tying things together, holistically.

But how do you know if your CX strategy is successful or not?

Here’s 5 of the most significant CX KPIs to track.

Top 5 Customer Experience KPIs

1. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the estimated revenue that a customer will contribute to a company. We calculate the CLV from the beginning to the end of the customer’s journey in the company.

Customer lifetime value is a great indicator of experiences your customer has with your brand. When CLV is high you can rest easy about your company’s retention as well. If not, figuring out the blockers could help.

2. Customer Acquisition Cost

The cost of acquiring a new customer is what we call- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). The formula for CAC is:

Customer acquisition costs show the amount of money you need to invest to bring in new customers.

Creating positive customer experiences can help reduce this cost immensely.

For instance, 72% of customers are likely to talk about a good experience with six or more individuals. It can lead to an increase in overall customer acquisition at little to no cost.

3. Net Promoter Score

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a consumer feedback metric that assesses brand loyalty. We calculate the NPS using a scaled survey that ranges from -100 to +100. The formula for NPS is as follows:

Consumers who are loyal to a brand and recommend it to others are what we call “promoters”. In contrast, unhappy customers who are unlikely to return are “detractors”. Anyone who falls somewhere between these two categories is a passive buyer.

4. Customer Retention Rate

The percentage of consumers who stay with a brand over a period of time is the customer retention rate. The formula to find your company’s CRR is as follows:

Customer retention, like CLV, is critical to a company’s growth. The higher the retention rate, the greater is your customer satisfaction.

5. Customer Satisfaction

We assess customer satisfaction (CSAT) using a customer feedback survey. Only clients who rate a 4 or 5 on a scale of 1 to 5 show high levels of satisfaction.

We must measure CSAT consistently to identify a consumer’s pain points. Customer satisfaction is vital for a firm to succeed. As even one unsatisfied customer can result in harmful brand attention.

These metrics help measure customer experiences and areas that need improvement. Once you figure out what needs help, you need the right tools to fix those areas.

To sum up:

If your CX strategy is effective, then acquiring new customers will be a lot cheaper and existing customers will be happy, loyal and do business with you for a very long time.

Tools That Help Improve CX

As Henry Ford says,

If you need a machine and don’t buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don’t have it.

Here are our software recommendations for improving the customer experience.

CRM

CRM stands for customer relationship management. It is one of the most popular categories in the enterprise software segment.

But how does CRM help in improving CX?

Here’s your answer.

CRM tools help extend the depth and breadth of customer relationships
It helps minimize transaction barriers
It helps focus more on customer value and satisfaction
By segmenting customers based on their interests, geography, and more, CRM helps deliver personalized content.
Through omnichannel communication, the customer gets a consistent content experience irrespective of the platform.

The best CRM software to improve customer experiences is LeadSquared.

It bridges the gap between sales, marketing, operations, and support by bringing together all the customer interactions (with marketing, sales, and more) in one place.

Be it your marketing team or sales team – all have the same up-to-date knowledge about the customers. This knowledge helps tune the message, identify pain points, and curate content accordingly.

Another thing: LeadSquared supports omnichannel communication. That is, you can converse with your customers through several different channels while still maintaining a record of all communications.

Customer analytics software

There are several aspects to customer analysis.

For example,

Behavioral analytics. It includes which features they use most, how they interact with your product and marketing messages, etc.
Customer acquisition channels.
Mapping customer journey and analyzing all the touchpoints from the first point of contact to conversion.
Number and types of support tickets

You may find a number of tools to gain insights on individual subjects. Some of the popular tools for these are Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Kissmetrics.

Self-service portals

A self-service portal helps users find answers and resolve their issues through guided information and resources. It is usually a knowledge base with a collection of FAQs, articles, videos, diagrams, and how-to guides.

Below are some of the capabilities that can be offered through self-service portals:

Password reset
Log a service request and track status
Payments
User manuals and help documentation

You can also integrate self-service portals with CRM to get a 360-degree view of your customers. For example, LeadSquared allows you to build portals and unify communications with leads and prospects.

Chatbots

Chatbots are very helpful for instant query resolution.

And there’s no other channel that comes close, in terms of expectations, than Chatbots.

You’ll find two types of chat options – live chat and chatbots.

In live chats, a human agent responds to the customer query. On the other hand, chatbots are software programs that send a canned or automated response to common customer queries.

Depending on your needs, you can select either bots or live chats or a hybrid option – where the bot instantly connects to the human agent if the queries can’t be resolved automatically.

You must have seen how Amazon has automated returns and refunds through bots. In most cases, customers don’t need to get in touch with human agents while also getting their concerns resolved within seconds.

If you’re looking for a chatbot for your website or support portal, you may consider Chatbot, Drift, Acquire.io, Tars, and ManyChat.

Note, the use of chatbots is not limited to the customer support department. Sales and marketing are increasingly using chatbots for lead generation and qualification.

For what purpose do businesses use chatbots - statistics

Feedback tools

As mentioned, customer satisfaction is one of the crucial metrics for evaluating CX.

And what’s better than asking the customers themselves.

Feedback and surveys are the most common methods of understanding what customers feel about your brand. Now, there are many ways to take surveys and feedback. But make sure the system you opt for is easy to use and reliable.

Some popular tools to conduct surveys are Survey Monkey, Typeform, and Qualtrics.

Social media listening tools

When it comes to customer experience, social media is a treasure trove of knowledge. You need to keep an eye out for your brand’s reputation online. Otherwise, you’ll end up feeling unclear about your brand’s reputation.

Social media listening also involves monitoring:

Consumer trends
Brand perception
Conversations related to your brand
Discover potential customers
Customer engagement

Some of the best social media listening tools are Hootsuite and Sprout Social.

In Conclusion

Growth and success are synonymous with positive customer experiences.

Keep customers happy and they’ll continue to buy from you.

Sounds easy enough, right?

Make sure that your company pushes for a positive CX as much as possible. This means taking accountability for mistakes and staying transparent with your customers. Once you successfully do so, you’ll have a customer base who will be ready to stay.

The opportunity to deliver a superior customer experience is unique. Not many companies are doing so, which means any improvement you make will have an impact on your bottom line.

But you have to act now.

Educate your colleagues on what CX is and how it can benefit your organization. Start small, track the right KPIs and use the right tools, and you’ll be on your way to delivering better customer experiences in no time.

Over 1000+ brands globally use LeadSquared CRM software to nurture their customers. LeadSquared is the way to go if you’re searching for tools that help you create the best customer journeys.

January 7, 2022/0 Comments/by Padma Ramakrishna

10 Social Media Strategies for Higher Education

Education

Being active on social media is essential for building brand awareness and cultivating meaningful relationships with prospective and enrolled students, as well as other key stakeholder groups, such as alumni and donors.

But it can be hard to know where to start.

If you’re in the process of setting up your college’s social media accounts or if you’re working on a higher education social media strategy for 2022, you’ve come to the right place. Here are 10 strategies along with examples from colleges doing great things on social media right now.

Think about what makes their content so effective and how you might be able to adapt some of their approaches for your own social media campaigns.

1. Focus on outcomes

Students who enroll in vocational training programs tend to be outcome-driven. In other words, they’ll want to know how studying at your college will help them further their career.

In the post below, Heavy Equipment Colleges of America incentivizes prospective students to apply by outlining, in very simple terms, what they can expect to achieve.

It also links to a website page that includes further information on apprenticeships, and a “Start Enrollment Here” button to encourage those who have tapped through to take their first step to completing an application form.

2. Factor-in finance

A 2021 study by Western Governors University discovered that the cost of attending college is one of the biggest barriers non-traditional students face.

You can help set prospective students’ minds at ease by being transparent about fees and sharing helpful resources on social media, like Porter and Chester Institute does in the post below. Finance isn’t the most exciting topic, but it ranks highly on students’ agendas.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Porter and Chester Institute (@goporterchester)

Stakeholders—including your students—are interested to know what goes on behind the scenes at your college. “Work in progress” posts often gain high levels of engagement because they show that your college values the journey just as highly as the finished work.

HCH Aviation’s Facebook page is well worth looking at. As well as some behind-the-scenes photos of its upcoming location, it regularly shares student success and graduation stories (see number 6 for another example of this approach in a higher education context).

4. Ask a (specific) question

If you’re going to ask your followers a question on social media you could try making it specific like the Automotive and Diesel Institute has done in the example below. You’re more likely to elicit a response this way because it requires less effort on the part of the audience.

You may also want to think about why you’re asking the question. Are you going to use any responses as research to inform, for example, the contents of a webinar or in-person event? Or is your intention to build up a sense of anticipation?

Here are some other types of questions you could pose:

Polls and surveys
Reactions to something new at your college
Opinions on a topic or idea
What someone’s favourite _______ is
Choosing between two images/concepts
Ideas for improving a service, program or resource at your college

View this post on Instagram
A post shared by NYADI – Auto & Diesel College (@nyadicollegeofficial)

5. Show people around

In the Instagram post below, Pittsburgh Career Institute inadvertently shows its followers around by sharing an image of its enrolled students visiting a facility they will be working in as part of their program. Could your institution do something similar?

Using your social platforms to help orientate people is always a good idea, particularly at a time when more interviews are taking place online and students might not even set foot on your campus until they’ve started their studies. It’s beneficial for international students too.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Pittsburgh Career Institute (@pciedu)

In this inspiring YouTube video, Angelica “Jelly” Weimer, a 2021 graduate from The Modern College of Design, explains how she saw an opportunity to solve a problem within the mental health community by developing a concept for a new app.

The video forms part of the college’s #PowerOfDesign campaign.

According to research by Wyzowl, 86% of video marketers say video has increased traffic to their website and 84% of video marketers say video has helped them generate leads.

7. Promote your events

What makes the post below so effective is that the college has tagged the speakers and people associated with the event that is being promoted, in this case, a webinar on wellness programs and holistic education in schools. People are more likely to like or reshare your content when they’re tagged, but you should only tag people when appropriate.

The aim of TutorEye’s post is to build momentum: it encourages future engagement by telling followers to “stay tuned” for further details.

8. Celebrate student success

Interestingly, the content was originally posted on the college’s admissions Instagram account and this version is a repost, illustrating how effective reposting across different accounts can be at widening your reach and engagement levels.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by New England College Official (@neconnect)

Social media also lends itself to games and trivia. As part of its “Microscope Monday” series, American College of Healthcare Sciences shares an image of…actually, we’ve got no idea what it could be…do you?

Gamification helps knowledge retention and drives engagement by providing incentives for people to pay attention – even if the incentive is something as simple as the adrenaline and dopamine rush of getting the answer right.

10. Show gratitude

Finally, don’t forget to show gratitude, just like Northern Virginia School of Therapeutic Massage did to their first graduates of 2021. A simple thank you can go a long way, especially at a challenging time like the one we find ourselves in at the moment.

Ideas for people you could thank include graduates, alumni, donors, teachers, newly enrolled students, caterers, cleaners, technicians, your admissions team…the list goes on.

In the words of the famous management consultant, Peter Drucker: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Keeping track of how people engage with your social media posts can help you reflect on what works well and what doesn’t.

A higher education CRM will enable you to capture student inquiries from all your lead generation channels. You can use it to track people’s activities on everything from TikTok to LinkedIn, and curate your content accordingly.

January 7, 2022/0 Comments/by Kate Tattersfield

5 Innovative Ways to Deliver Better Customer Experiences in Insurance

Insurance

The year 2021 came with its ups and downs. While specific industries were still trying to keep their feet strong during the COVID wave, other industries tackled the problem and came out even more substantially. The financial sector saw COVID as an opportunity. They used digital methods to reach out to customers and prospective audiences. As a result, the industry that heavily relied on direct human interaction successfully digitized the customer journey and defined a new customer experience in insurance.

This article covers the insights from a discussion between the insurance industry leaders- Jaimit Doshi, CMO- Marketing & Digital at Aditya Birla Sunlife Insurance; Rishi Mathur, Chief Digital & Strategy Officer at Canara HSBC OBC Life Insurance and Nimish Aggarwal, Senior VP & Head of Marketing at Max Bupa Health Insurance. The discussion revolves around turning customer experience into one that ranks with leaders inside and outside the insurance industry. It also talks about ways to innovate the customer service approach.

But before we dive in, let’s have a deeper look at the statistics. Let us understand what should be the number one priority for insurance companies in the coming years.

Upcoming Trends in the Insurance Industry

The need for insurance to tweak themselves, reinvent themselves, make the process as seamless for the customer as possible, is what you will see the market push itself and drive itself to. And that’s how it will evolve.
Rishi Mathur, Chief Digital & Strategy Officer, Canara HSBC OBC Life Insurance

Despite the challenges brought in by COVID-19, the insurance industry effectively managed its investment in emerging technologies. For 2022, most insurers expect an accelerating economic recovery and an upward trajectory.

Research shows that the pandemic only amplified the importance of digital experience intelligence. Nearly 77% are now more comfortable with digital-only businesses due to the pandemic. And for an equal number of 77% of Indian consumers, a personalized digital experience is now vital to them if they are to return to a brand time and time again.

As a result of low sales and few claims, insurance companies realized the importance of catering to their customers across various platforms. As per a report, 55% of customers prefer digital channels over traditional channels, and 40% of customers won’t do business with a company if they can’t use their preferred channel.

Since inception, the insurance industry has seen a lot of adoption. Earlier insurance was once only bought and sold as a financial instrument. However, today consumers have become a lot more inclusive and look at other benefits of insurance apart from it being a safety net.
Nimish Aggarwal, Senior VP & Head of Marketing, Max Bupa Health Insurance

Customer experience in insurance has fast become a significant priority. And with the organizational benefits that it brings, 2022 will be no different. But why are so many insurers focusing on the customer experience, and why is it critical for insurers to adopt?

Seamless Omnichannel Customer Experience is the New Reality

It is safe to say that a good customer experience is a key to the consistent growth of a company. 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Similarly, another study found that at the end of 2020, customer experience overtook price and product as the key brand differentiator.

Catering to a customer through their channel of preference is what makes an insurer stand out from the rest. This is known as omnichannel customer servicing. It is an approach that allows insurers to provide a seamless experience to their customers. This experience is provided across various channels throughout their insurance journey.

The continuously changing insurance industry allows its customers to obtain and purchase services digitally using any channel on any device. Hence, such an intimate relationship with the customer results in customer loyalty, a better retention rate, increased process efficiency, and lower costs.

A Capgemini report survey highlighted that, on average, more than 50% of customers prefer to use three or more channels to research and purchase insurance coverage. Each channel is valuable in different ways for consumers, and they enjoy a comprehensive set of omnichannel benefits.

Omnichannel engagement becomes even more critical for post-purchase support. More than 50% of customers said they use the chat features offered on their insurance firm’s website, mobile app, or call center, together with traditional channels (branch/agent/broker) to get answers to questions.

Omnichannel approach for defining new customer experience in Insurance

Seamless omnichannel delivery is essential for every insurer – because as many as 75% of surveyed customers said they would switch insurers in pursuit of convenient and seamless policy service options.

Hence, it is valuable to utilize omnichannel marketing to provide a new customer experience in insurance.

Key Elements for Providing New Customer Experience in Insurance

Delivering a superior customer experience is not an easy task. It requires constant research about the new trends, relentless product messaging improvement, and not to forget significant time investment. Improving the customer experience is critical, but it requires a shared vision and a new level of coordination across teams.

Below are the few ways that can help improve customer relationships in the insurance industry:

1. Understanding the customer needs and behaviour:

One thing the insurance market does need is more understanding and education of the customers. Why is the customer buying a policy and what is the benefit that they will get tells a lot about a customer.
Rishi Mathur, Chief Digital & Strategy Officer, Canara HSBC OBC Life Insurance

If you think closely about it, what does an insurance customer need? A customer doesn’t have complex needs. They want to choose from a wide range of policies at reasonable prices. They want comparisons between policies from different insurance companies. Information on policies and benefits associated with them should be easy to understand. Communication should happen from time to time on their preferred channel. Above all, they should have an easy claim settlement process if needed.

Ways to derive financial value and stay invested in customer relationships in Insurance

All that an insurer needs to do is listen and understand their customer’s needs. This can be done by:

Making targeted sales efforts based on customer’s likelihood to buy
Enhancing purchase process by better connecting customer concerns with insurance’s importance
Reinforcing product’s value with post-sales support
Improving awareness amongst consumers using sources like youtube videos and ads
Generating significant consumer data to identify and proactively predict life events
Training intermediaries so they can educate the consumer about the benefits

Every intermediary is a simple human being with a complete veneer of technology. If you’re able to train your intermediaries and in return train the customer and everything is at scale, that is when digital is most beneficial.
Jaimit Doshi, CMO- Marketing & Digital, Aditya Birla Sunlife Insurance

2. Using a Self-service Approach

Today, every purchase is a finger touch away. Thanks to the likes of Amazon and other online retailers who have made accessing and buying products so much easier. Similarly, as consumers, we expect our policies and insurance resources to be accessible 24/7 and in an understandable format.

This is where self-service portals come into play in the insurance industry. A self-service portal is a way to help users address everyday needs without any external help. As a result, a self-service portal solves most consumer concerns like signing up for a new policy, policy renewal, claim settlement, and access to policy resources. Any complicated issue can be redirected to the service employees. This process not only helps in saving time but also reduces operational costs.

This enables customer data collection so that the insurer doesn’t waste time collecting information in case of a returning customer. Small details like this help build customer trust and loyalty.

A self-service portal complements the human service agents and hence, should not be considered a replacement. The various benefits of following a self-service approach in insurance are:

Allows 24/7 access to services
Improves customer acquisition
Improves customer retention
Enables real-time notifications
Lowers customer acquisition costs
Speeds up the claims process

A large percentage of the D2C (Direct to consumer) sales still has an intermediary and is not completely self-service. Infact, 95-98% of the market still works through an intermediary. When we look at digital, it is not necessarily pure D2C. It is a hybrid model. Hence, in order to improve productivity, we don’t just need to digitise our consumer end but also the intermediary branch.
Jaimit Doshi, CMO- Marketing & Digital, Aditya Birla Sunlife Insurance

3. Delivering Personalized Experiences to Customer

A McKinsey & Company report states that “personalization is the future of insurance marketing.” Subsequently, it defines personalized insurance as reaching customers with targeted messaging, offers, and pricing at just the right time. Data collected from the customers through self-service portals or human interaction helps send out personalized content.

An Accenture survey found that 80% of insurance customers seek personalized offers, messages, pricing, and recommendations from their auto, home, or life insurance providers. Moreover, endless reports suggest the benefits of using personalized marketing as a source of customer acquisition and retention.

Maximise insurance customer loyalty and retention

But personalized experience can be provided in various ways. It isn’t just limited to the content you send out to your customers. It also depicts the messaging and positioning of your content on social media or your website. We cannot stress enough that the simpler the product messaging, the better the conversion rate.

Today, youtube is the answer to all our questions, from operating a mixer grinder to changing Stepney in a car. Insurers should leverage such platforms to reach out to their customers and educate them about their offerings.

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the country. A short video can help you find out so much about insurance and the benefits associated with it.
Nimish Aggarwal, Senior VP & Head of Marketing, Max Bupa Health Insurance

4. Providing an End-to-end Digital Customer Journey

An insurer’s work doesn’t just end once a sale has been made. An insurance company has to take care of the post-sales operations as well. Hence, ensuring an end-to-end digital customer journey. This can be done effectively using Straight Through Processing (STP). This refers to an automated process that can be performed without human involvement.

Benefits of omnichannel engagement in Insurance

The various processes that can be improved using digital intervention are:

Application Processing: Self-serve forms and portal is mobile friendly and ensures a smooth application experience for the insurance applicants.
Customer Onboarding: eKYC and video KYC verification helps in eliminating lengthy verification processes and ensures faster and efficient customer onboarding.
Sales Automation: Automating sales processes like lead capturing from multiple sources, distribution, attribution and prioritization helps sales people focus on important tasks.
Proactive Intervention: Capturing live signals via prospect tracking on website and direct integrations enables automatic intervention via the right channel- email, text etc.
Real-time Reporting: Performance reports for policy sales and renewals for all teams helps in keeping a check on the team productivity.

In short, all these processes help improve process efficiency and enhance the customer experience in insurance.

5. Introducing Technical Enablers to the Insurance Process:

Today, insurers with better technical capabilities have the upper hand than traditional brokers. Technological enablers such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), predictive analytics, intelligent automation, and many more help insurers in agility, better growth, and cost ratios.

Technology enablers for providing new customer experience in insurance

Below are a few IT tools that are constantly evolving and making insurance companies grow faster:

Predictive Analytics: Data is the biggest advantage for an insurance company. Insurers can use the collected data to determine events, information and other factors to make informed decisions and enhance efficiency.
Smart Automations: Automating tasks and worflows for sales people decreases the work load and results in innovative ideas that convert into business value
Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning: AI/ML helps in executing complex computations at a faster speed and provides deeper insights. It is used in processes like claims processising, fraud detection, underwriting and customer service.
Chatbots: Chatbot is a virtual assistant that is capable of completing certain tasks with prospective customers. In addition to answering questions, chatbots are available 24/7 to give basic advice, check billing information, and address common inquiries and transactions.

How can LeadSquared help?

Insurance sales and renewal CRM platform LeadSquared manages multiple processes and teams on a single platform and improves operational efficiency.

In conclusion, from capturing client data from various sources to automating communication across channels and ensuring client retention, LeadSquared solves all end-to-end problems. To understand how LeadSquared can help define the new customer experience for your insurance company and be a digital transformation partner!

FAQs

What is omnichannel customer experience?

Omnichannel customer servicing means catering to a customer through their channel of preference. It is an approach that allows insurers to provide a seamless experience to their customers. This experience is provided across various channels throughout their insurance journey.

Why is customer service important in insurance?

Good customer service is the key to the consistent growth of any company. Therefore, understanding the customer’s needs, simplifying the insurance products, and meeting consumer demands throughout their journey helps improve customer service.

January 6, 2022/0 Comments/by Diksha Sharma