Brands should be improving their customers’ lives or they will risk losing them to a competitor.
At every touchpoint along the customer journey, brands need to continue to respect their relationship with consumers, says Salesforce area vice president (AVP) sales APAC Jo Gaines.
“Consumers want to do business with brands that actually respect the relationship,” Gaines told AdNews.
“They want that individual service and a really personalized approach. That needs to go across every channel. That needs to be across every interaction that they have with the brand.”
In today’s world, technology is enabling brands to engage with and enhance immersive experiences for consumers.
Engaging experiences, exclusivity and emotion are some of the ways that Gaines suggests brands connect with consumers.
“We want to feel exclusive. We want to feel individual. We want to feel respected and appreciated and understood,” she says.
“[I’m] going to make sure that I'm getting the best offers, I get the best engagement and I get the best experience when I'm dealing with you.”
The power of an engaging experience can influence a person to not only continue shopping with a brand, but also to become a brand ambassador.
Data is helping brands unlock the ability to create personalised experiences at scale but how it is used needs to be done so respectfully.
“We want to know that by spending our money with you, you're going to do good and you will respect our privacy and our data,” Gaines says.
Re-targeting a product to a consumer that has already made the purchase or is no longer interested in buying are examples of where she says data use has gone wrong.
Instead, brands should be mining through data to ensure it is used to create a truly personalised offering while also respecting the customer’s privacy.
As the whole industry moves towards a world sans third-party cookies, Gaines says the experience customers have will only be improved.
She says the power of first-party data is and has always been the best kind of data for marketers to use.
“It's just about marketers and brands starting to understand what first-party data they have that they potentially haven't realized they've got,” she says.
In addition to data, marketers and brands should be looking to add some form of voice experience (VX) to their business.
Gaines says more consumers continue to expect brands to have a voice service available for them to access information faster and more efficiently.
With the growth in VX and voice-led devices like Alexa, Siri and Bixby, it is becoming a huge opportunity for brands to better engage with customers.
“[Customers] actually just want to be able to speak to someone – whether that is a chat bot or person – but they want to be able to use voice to actually talk to someone and get their problem solved,” she says.
“It's really important for brands to start to be thinking about, ‘how can I create that personalized engagement using voice to deliver exclusive and helpful experience for a customer?’”
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