We’re talking about how best in class organizations do CRM. You have got to follow, what I would like to call the “bouncing ball” because if somebody starts out on the Website, and then gets stuck and calls a Customer Service Center, you don’t want the Customer Service Center to say, “What's your name? And what are you looking for?” You want them to say, “Well, let me pick up from where you are on the Web site.”
If the customer then goes into the store, as my wife often does, she starts on the Web site, calls the call center and then goes in to buy clothes for the kids. And she has to start the whole thing over. I want blue jeans with flannel inside, green for the daughter and red for the son.
So she wants them to follow her bouncing ball, and that’s normal for particularly today's type of customer or digital client that really is demanding this type of service. So we have got to capture insights from each one of these opportunities.
Okay, and just a bit of academia for a moment. Why bother, and what's the key concept to make this whole thing happen? Here is just a very interesting insight. So the way you make multi-channel work, and I find this still very interesting, is you have one unified knowledge base, and it has common content, and that content gets shared across the different channels. What you do is what’s called repurposing the information. So you serve it up on the Website a little different from how you might serve it up at the call center or serve it up on a kiosk. But it’s repurposed information.
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And all of this happens behind the scenes so the customer is not aware of this. But it’s happening to them in a friendly customer way. So these are just some recent studies I pulled out. Retail customers on average who use multi-channel on average purchase greater than two to four times the spend, then those are only going to use one channel. So by having multiple channels, they are encouraged to spend more money.
On the banking side, the multi-channel customers are 25% to 50% more profitable than single channel customers. Those channels include online banking, telephone banking, and branch banking. Here is another study. Within three years both B to B and B to C sectors, 50%, half of all customers, it could be the highest value customers will be using these multi channels for shopping and purchasing.
So this is where the industry is headed as a way to deal with managing the relationship with customers. We had best be prepared to set up the multi channel information management system in order to use it effectively, not only for the customer experience side but also, as many companies are doing, as a way extending brand out into various channels.
Last but not least, going back to that profile, the core concept behind good intelligent customer information is integrating a two-way customer dialog. And what I mean by that is leveraging the new social media or social networking capabilities. I am not going to read these statistics, take a quick peek. But the bottom line is, and I just heard this at last week’s conference in New York, 60% of all buyers will prefer or have a desire to listen to a fellow colleague to make a decision versus a company. I mean that really stacks the deck.
So if you look at these statistics of how many people are online once or more a day, visit the site nine times as often and view four times as many pages, you realize that people do like to talk to other people about your company, about your products. Now that’s just the fact of life. That’s our current world. So our job is to incorporate that dynamic information back inside the profile. So when we talk with a customer, it’s not just that we know what they bought from us or what they said in the past, we know what they said last night on the latest blog or forum or social media channel.
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The bottom line, or summary on this, is that the profile is critical for customer intelligence and good interactions. We will explain the reasons in a few minutes. And we enhance the profile by being disciplined, by making sure various factors are in place, by making sure information is available in real time, by capturing information across multiple channels and by making sure we have leveraged today's social media two-way dialog tools so that we can capture information and keep flexible and dynamic as we deal with our customers.