4. Proactively communicate and sell
Many companies look to shore up their business during an economic downturn,
remaining low key and doing nothing while times are tough. Bold companies look
to survive by taking advantage of a volatile market to ensure their revenues stay up
and their customers don’t leave. At a minimum, we believe that companies need
to proactively deliver impactful communications and offers to their customers in an
efficient and cost effective manner. One key tactic to apply is Event Based Customer
Management (EBCM) initiatives to actively improve both service and sales while
reducing the costs of traditional sales and marketing activities.
Event-based customer management is an innovative capability that matches
customer needs and attitudes with lifecycle information and transactional events
(for example, purchases, service failures etc). Key customer events become the
basis for sales, service and marketing activities, either developed predicatively
by establishing a keen understanding of the customer’s lifecycle and delivering
communications at a likely event, or reactively in response to a customer’s
immediate change in behavior. A rules engine (i.e., a software-driven marketing
system) evaluates customer interactions at the individual level as they occur,
providing a communications process that is timely and relevant to the customer’s
specific needs. (see Figure 3.)