The world is filled with opportunities knocking at every which door. In business, opportunities aren’t as easy to come by. As sales teams know, interactions need a little encouragement before they grow into full blown opportunities. Here are a few tips that can help you turn a customer interaction into a business opportunity.
Change the way you communicate
We live in an age where the multi-tasking is the norm. We have more gadgets than pockets, and we can use a multitude of channels to communicate. Thanks to technological advancements, our communication patterns have adapted as well. We have become a culture obsessed with immediacy. 50% of television viewers skip commercials, and 95 million 140 word tweets are sent a day. With so many new channels for communication, businesses must keep up with the times. Siloed businesses will not thrive in world where even cross-channel interactions can’t keep up with the attention span of the general public. In order to stay competitive, businesses must embrace change and upgrade their traditional channels of communication.
Adopting new modes of communication is only one step one, in optimizing business opportunities. Businesses must also understand the transformational changes that are happening, and implement strategies that will leverage new technology/communication models.
Change the way you do business
Another way to turn customer interactions into business relationships is to change the way you organize your business. Customer centricity is a strategy that is more important than you imagine. Businesses must band together to improve the customer experience on cross-unit initiatives, at first, that will eventually turn into structural changes. Creating a model that is founded on customer centricity with coordinated marketing efforts will indubitably optimize conversion from customer to business opportunity.
Prepare your company for message convergence
Message convergence is a strategy used by businesses that involves interacting with customers across a variety of communication channels, where inbox access is earned. Although the concept might seem simple enough, it is no easy task. Message convergence implementation requires a change in organizational mindset and structure. This is yet another step towards achieving customer-centric harmony. To properly prepare the data architecture, data assets and messaging technology must all be in order. This will save you time and energy down the line once you’re ready to implement a message convergence system.
Prepare for message convergence success
Promote inter-company collaboration by working towards the same customer-centric goals. Businesses should use metrics and analytics to ensure that customers are having good experiences and are coming back for more. Businesses should also streamline their customer-centric goals so that they directly relate to business goals. Making everything transparent and simple will help businesses focus on the customer, instead of communication-related problems.
Bask in your customer interaction-turned-opportunity success
After message convergence implementation, continue adding customer-aware practices to your business structure, as you grow your client base. With message convergence in place, customer interactions will quickly convert to business relationships with the proper marketing efforts. The point of implementing message convergence is to facilitate opportunities for customer interaction. If all roads point to customer interaction, businesses will have no problem accessing the customer. Once the customer is reached, the new customer-centric policies will serve to nurture interaction and prompt it to become an opportunity.
… And the rest is history
[Photo courtesy of pintrest.]