Transform Customers Into Brand Advocates With A Digital Feedback Loop

Learn how to weather any storm and stay afloat with customer engagement and a digital feedback loop – and turn customers into brand advocates.

A quote I saw recently about businesses dealing with recent changes that I think sums it up best is, “We’re all weathering the same storm, we’re just in different boats.”

So what can you do to keep afloat?

The answer is customer engagement. Your customers are your everything right now. It’s your job to find ways of keeping them happy. You do that by engaging your customers in the right way, at the right time.

Let me demonstrate how, using a real life example of a company that I helped to shift their focus from siloed spreadsheets to true customer engagement.

A Real-Life Example of Improving Customer Engagement

I previously worked with a customer who was using Microsoft Excel to manage their customer base. While that can be a fine idea for smaller businesses, this particular company was struggling. They had spreadsheets upon spreadsheets of duplicate and incorrect data.

Every team had their own pot of customer data they kept up to date, but that wouldn’t align with any other team. Phone numbers on certain lists were outdated. Key sales information wasn’t provided to account management, and vice versa.

They simply couldn’t trust their data.

They certainly couldn’t use it to better upsell and cross sell to their customers, or provide them with a better service. It was hard for them to retain customers because they weren’t being effectively engaged or satisfied.

Creating a Digital Feedback Loop

As we’ve all heard by now, data should be at the heart of everything you do. It’s how you understand your customers. It transforms your products and your interactions with your customers and the services you want to offer. The hard part is bringing all of your data together in a way that makes it easy for you to understand and act upon.

That’s the position the company was in. They knew the importance of their data and the benefits of unifying it, but they didn’t know where to start with blending it together into one reliable source.

What is a Digital Feedback Loop?

When engaging your customers, your business process doesn’t start and stop within an individual siloed application, for example finance or ERP or sales. Your business process starts in one system with one team, then has touchpoints with your other teams and systems, and then the process starts all over again.

So why would you want to silo your processes and automations into discrete workflows, like in discrete Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, or disparate CRM and ERP systems?

In terms of customer engagement, what this means is that you need to be able to capture customer data from every touchpoint, bring it all together (like the below image), and use it to gain a deeper understanding of demand and what you can do to improve. Then, you’ve created a Digital Feedback Loop.

That’s what we helped our customer using Microsoft Excel to do.

How to Remove Data Siloes

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a single platform customer engagement solution. That’s what we helped our customer using Excel to implement. We migrated all of their data into their centralised customer engagement platform and they achieved cohesive, reliable and centralised data.

Now, they can find ways to predict customer demand, exceed expectations, and ultimately transform customers into brand advocates.

Connecting all of their data eradicated all of the problems they had been experiencing. Just like that, their siloes, disparate lists, duplication, inaccuracies, errors – gone.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a fantastic way of bringing your data, people and processes together in one connected platform. It’s an easy and effective way of creating a Digital Feedback Loop.

Benefits of Unified Customer Engagement

Once you have unified your people, systems and data into your Digital Feedback Loop, you will start to see benefits very quickly.

Customer service is improved because their demands are being met or exceeded, they are receiving good communication in a method that suits their needs, and they are receiving personalised interactions. Customer satisfaction is given a huge boost.

In real terms what that means is customers are happier to recommend you, they are more likely to engage with you, and they are more likely to spend more with you, because you’re top of their mind when they are looking for a service or product like yours. Data is now at the heart of everything you do, because you have brought it together in one cohesive source.

As the saying goes, the purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers.