How To Keep Up With Customers In A Technology-Driven World

At the take-off of any business, the business owner must be aware of how profitable the business will become and come up with strategies to survive and outgrow its competitors.

There are many ways to ensure your business will succeed even before launch. In the coming month, we’ll be launching a platform tailored for business owners to start their business right and grow it.

That said, let’s look at today’s topic.

How Technology is Affecting Consumer Behaviour

Many business owners, more often than not, overlook technology and how it will affect how they carry out their business activities in the long run. Interestingly, technology keeps transforming how brands attend to the needs of their customers and how their customers interact with the brands they do business with.

Technology has given consumers the power to determine how to respond to what brands are doing. As an intelligent business owner, one of your duty is to be knowledgeable on how technological advances are changing your customers and find out ways to improve your business’ marketing strategy to suit the changing needs of your customers.

Here are a few things that you should need to keep in mind as you reinvent your business strategies to keep up with the consumers and their behavioral changes as a result of new technological trends.

1. Acceptance of Artificial Intelligence In A Customer-centric Way

Customers are starting to see the value in technological areas like automation and artificial intelligence. This has resulted in the wide acceptance of this technological trend, and it is fantastic news for business and business owners.

Let’s take a look at the use of chatbots; it is a technological tool that provides instant, automated, and sometimes personalized customer service support. This can benefit the customers by providing answers to questions and resolving their complaints faster, without the need to wait for a human response.

Also, the brands that are adopting this technology can save costs significantly, improve customer satisfaction, effectively communicate with their customers, and lots of other advantages. This technology also means that consumers will expect an increase in the quality of services they get from companies and prompt resolution of their problems.

Plus, some companies, especially though in the clothing and cosmetic industry, are using it to allow customers to test out products even without being in the shop. The whole in-shop experience while online.

So, if you’re not giving your customers this kind of satisfaction, they walk away to your competitor that is doing it.

You wouldn’t want that, right?

Therefore, you ought to ensure as a matter of urgency that they have chatbots established on their social media channels and customer helplines and, most importantly, take customer service as a significant priority.

2. New Communication Channels – The Fast Experience

In the past, companies provided customer service through emails and automated phone calls (some companies still do that though), and that didn’t get prompt responses. These two communication tools have their challenges, but the companies using them benefited more from them than the consumers. It was at the companies’ discretion to decide what information to give out.

However, today’s consumers are very much informed, and they know better now, and many brands also know better than to engage in a one-way communication channel.

Social media platforms and live chat platforms are the new deal both for consumers and brands. They help place you right in front of your customers. You can engage in what is called social listening, which allows you to monitor what people are saying about your brand online.

When you continuously get negative feedbacks concerning your brand and how you do business on social media or the internet in general, you have to look into it and check for what can be done to change the narrative.

Your brand reputation is inconsequential when it comes to attending to the needs of your customers; therefore, you cannot sacrifice your customers to maintain a certain brand position. When you do not respond to query from social media or the internet, you can damage your brand’s reputation because these days, information is accessible to millions of people.

The advantage of these new tools is that you have a wild data collection pool; you can fast track your understanding of customers by utilizing the data and improve the quality of your services. In doing so, you can get and retain more customers.

So, take advantage of it instead of fighting it.

3. Improved Customers Experience

Some years ago, consumers made purchases whether or not they’ve had a good experience with the brand. They focused on their needs. They just wanted to fulfill their needs and not care about their experience with the brand.

That, too, is changing.

A recent report on customer experience showed that 89% of consumers have stopped doing business with a company after experiencing poor customer service.

You can see that what we have right now are consumers prioritizing their experience with a brand above every other factor. Even factors like brand reputation and the price of products mean little or nothing to consumers these days. They want Quality Customer Service! Period.

If you want to remain in business and grow profitably, you’ll need to invest more resources into making sure you have an improved Customers Service Experience.

The good news for you as a business is that technology has made it easier to create the best customer service experience regardless of your budget; there is something you can do to improve your customers’ experience.

Well, the bad news for you as a business is that the same technology is also making it easier for customers to take their business away from you and do business with anyone (your competitors) already implementing quality Customer Service Experience.

As a business owner, it’s not news to you that customers are your key to growing a profitable venture. So, as technology is making consumers change their thinking patterns, behavior, and expectations, you must be willing to accept these changes, adapt to them, and take steps in other to meet their needs and give them the kind of experience they desire.

4. Brand trust and likability

These days, customers are relying on their trust and likability of a brand when making buying decisions.

According to a report by Rare, 86% of consumers say loyalty is primarily driven by likability, and 83% of consumers say trust drives loyalty. They have to trust you before they buy from you.

If you are interested in influencing consumer behavior and making more sales, find ways to become more trustworthy. You can do this by using content in digital marketing to improve your online presence, and social proof to improve your trustworthiness.

In a recent research done by Dimensional Research team, 90% of people who had seen online reviews, said that positive reviews impacted their buying decisions while an astounding 86% said that the same was true for negative reviews.

Have you heard of KLT in Marketing? This simply means that customers either need to Know you, Like you, or Trust you before they can purchase from you. More than ever, the KLT principle now in play as a result of technological advancement.

Therefore, you can improve your trustworthiness and likability by getting your past customers to post reviews and ratings of your products or services. Add them to sections of your website, and more visitors will deem you trustworthy enough to buy from. That’s because you’ve proved that other people had trusted you before and were not disappointed.

5. Decreased Customer Attention On Content

There’s way too much content for people to consume. As of March 2019, over 4.4 billion posts were published daily; there are way too much content and emails for people to consume.

As a result, the attention of people is decreasing. So, you have to find a way to grab the attention of your readers quickly, convince them, and make it easy for them to buy from you.

Getting the attention of your website visitors is vital to increasing online sales.

How do you do this? Take content marketing seriously; start by creating content that stands out amidst the noise in your niche.

Also, create personalized content. With many similar products and services available out there, personalization has become a huge determinant of consumer behavior.

How do you personalize? First, identify the need of your target market and then create products, resources, and contents towards meeting these needs.

This will make it easier for customers to make purchases and increase your chances of meeting their needs before it arises.

Conclusion

Companies, until much recently, haven’t come to understand the brunt from the statement “Customer is King.” Customers know that they are powerful; they have massive information just with one search. What are you doing to quench their instant information thirst and longing for a better quality Customer Service?