The importance of a frictionless customer messaging strategy
- Written by Paul Wilcox, Vice President and General Manager, APAC, Sumo Logic
It goes without saying that without a customer, a business ceases to exist. We have to sell something to someone to make a sale and, in the process, create a customer. This is the most basic and significant relationship in business. Various businesses have diverse ways of communicating to their customers through advertising, product placements and other forms of contemporary marketing. Through this businesses convey the messages of the products or services they seek to sell.
In the past two years, communication behaviour and expectations of customers have changed dramatically. In addition to changing norms, the advent of AI and data analytics that help shape audience data as well as study consumer behaviour is empowering businesses to make data-enabled decisions that can help them reach their target customers – immediately in real-time and communicate to them effectively.
As such, the way businesses approach customers with messages has to transform to respond to the shift in the consumers’ communication behaviour and expectations.
It is all about the messaging
Messaging has two primary objectives. Firstly, it is to introduce the product or service. Then, it is to convince the consumer to purchase it. If the messaging does not cover these two basic objectives, it tends to fall flat and fail.
In this age of information overload, messaging needs to be clear and concise and needs to convey the crucial information of a product or a service to the consumer within a short period with as little word space as possible. As the digital space expands beyond AR and VR, it is getting more challenging to sustain consumers’ attention, if not at all.
Businesses need to seriously assess how they tailor their messaging and the mediums they use to relay the messaging to their target audience. The key here is - What do customers need?
With the plethora of AI-enabled tools at the disposal of many businesses, it is no longer an excuse not to drive messaging empowered by strategic data. Data makes up the difference in how businesses can tailor messaging to target audiences and sell what they exactly need and want to them.
Strategy is significant
We know messaging is important; now, how do we get the messaging strategy right?
What do consumers need? What are they consuming? How are they doing it? Such questions need to be answered for tailored messaging to seamlessly facilitate effective communication with customers. The strategy has to take into the mix the audience and business intelligence targets that need to be set in place. A scalable and secure platform that can process and analyse huge amounts of data and /or memory and run over millions of search and scan records can make the availability of this information possible.
User experience is key
We have gotten the messaging and strategy to the base. However, it does not end there.
User experience is crucial when it comes to getting messages across. We can discuss messaging continuously, but how customers receive them is key. How do they experience this? Do they like it and enjoy it and are able to relate to it? Do they feel a connection to it? If there is no personal relevance to the product or service, the messaging is already lost in the woods and so is the sale.
Messaging is a two-way street and user experience is only one part. Can the customer easily relay this to the relevant teams through the right channels in the quickest possible way if there are glitches? Applications that can provide full-scale visibility of the user experience makes it easier to ensure that the customer’s experience in interacting with the product or service is pleasant and, most crucially, a seamless one, sans minimal hiccups.
Values and more
Generation Z or Gen Z as they are often referred to are those born between 1997 to 2010. They make up a significant portion of customers and are shaping contemporary consumer behaviour. They have some key defining characteristics – they are hyper-connected digital natives in the truest sense, well-informed in social causes spanning climate change, people and communities, having experienced major life-altering changes in the past few years such as the pandemic.
Possessing an affinity for technology as well as empathy for social causes, Gen Z places emphasis on purchasing power that is driven by causes. Messaging without any values will be of little use to them.
Businesses have to incorporate social awareness into their messaging platform and ensure that they are not merely rubbing at the surface. The messaging has to be acted upon in initiatives that benefit the environment or communities and people at the wider level. This goes towards the heart of personalised messaging, to which Gen Z is highly responsive. Transparency is key when businesses weave in social values to appeal to Gen Z.
Undoubtedly, customers are the most important element of a business. Businesses must think of the customer in the front line and work from there in messaging. In a world where one is continuously bombarded with messages, businesses need to prioritise creating a frictionless messaging strategy to reach their customer in the most user-friendly way with minimal hiccups. It is no longer an after-thought. It is a must.
By Paul Wilcox, Vice President and General Manager, APAC, Sumo Logic
