WHY WEBSITE PERSONALISATION MATTERS
Personalisation is the key to providing a great user experience, but it needs to powered by a system which brings the whole customer lifecycle into a centralised platform. Marketing should feed information to Sales, Sales should feed information to Aftersales, and Aftersales should feed information back around to Marketing to start the cycle again for upsells, cross sells and repeat sells. This, and more, is achievable if you use Sitecore, the world’s most powerful website CMS.
Sitecore connects your sales and marketing systems: It controls your website content, email marketing campaigns, analytics and perhaps most importantly for many businesses, Sitecore feeds all of its information into your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. Integrating these tools (and more) provides a holistic view of your customer, and that gives you the opportunity to provide a very good user experience indeed. In fact, if these tools aren’t connected it can have a negative impact on the performance of your company, commonly due to “negative economies of scale”.
Let me give you a real-life example of a company that lost a lifetime customer because their systems weren’t connected in this way...
A VERY POOR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Last year I signed up for a TV and Broadband package with a very well-known provider. After putting my details in online, and having the hardware physically installed at my house a few days later, I was a happy customer.
A month later I received both an email and a physical letter from my provider, and I was amazed to find that the marketing material within offered the same services that I had signed up for, but at a much lower price. What a perfect example of great customer service, the company had recognised that I could be saving money with them, so they were kind enough to let me know, right?...Wrong! … After reading a little deeper I found that infamous piece of small print, “these prices are for brand new customers only”. How unkind! They knew my address, they knew I subscribed to their services, and they knew how much I paid on a monthly basis. Despite all of this, they had the audacity to send me a better offer, and then tell me I couldn’t switch to the lower cost.
OK…so if I’m honest I fully expected to find the “Brand New Customers Only” small print, but it’s one thing offering these deals, and another thing rubbing them in the face of your existing customers.
I had thought that maybe this was a mailing error, after all, their online systems must have collected information about me when I initially registered. Apparently not. When I returned to their website and logged in, I was further disappointed to find the same offer on their homepage. Surely the least they could have done was recognised that I was already a paying customer and taken the banner down for me, but no, the website only offered the "one-size fits all" banner ad. To me, the ad might as well have read “You're paying more than others for the same service”. What a kick in the teeth. That was the day my loyalty towards that company died, and it was the day they lost a lifetime customer.
If they’d have had a connected system like Sitecore they would have recognised that I was a paying customer. All of my information would be stored in their CRM, and the letters and emails offering these services would never have been sent to me, saving time, money, and a lifetime customer. They might also have used the banner space on their homepage to up-sell some additional products to me, but they wasted the opportunity and damaged their customer relationship.
How easy is it for you to personalise the content on your website for each and every website visitor? When a customer enters your website does your digital rep learn about the customer and adapt itself to be more helpful to the customer?
Sitecore is both the present and the future of digital marketing, and that’s why 3chillies are very proud to be leading UK Sitecore partners. Please get in touch to learn more about the power of Sitecore’s experience platform, and how it can transform your business.
