The Customer of the Future Webinar Highlights

Summarized by John Chan, ISM Software Lab Director

On February 20, 2013, Barton Goldenberg, president of ISM, presented a Webinar titled “The Customer of the Future: How to Prepare for Success”. Highlights of the Webinar follow:

The keys to succeed in selling and marketing to the Customer of the Future (Generation Y) are:

• Every organization needs to have in place an integrated Social CRM strategy that leverages both public and private social communities to drive customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.
• Mobility and gamification must be a part of that strategy.
• Business value must be identified from the outset of your Social CRM initiative; it cannot be an afterthought.
• Getting the people/process/technology mix right for Social CRM is a new and complex challenge.

The Digital Client

At present, the Digital Client is Generation Y, also known as the Millennial Generation, those born early 1980s to the early 2000s. Generation Y have only known digital technology in their lives. They number 80 million in US, 1.7 billion globally (3 billion by 2015) and will be 45% of world population by 2015. On the average, Generation Y spends 11 hours/day digitally connected (53 hrs/week). A survey of Generation Y found that 90% regularly research and 50% purchase items on Web.

Digital Client’s Impact on Mobility and Gamification

The digital client influence is being felt in the mobile device market. Currently, there are 1.3 billion cell phones sold annually. Forecasters predict that smart phone penetration will be greater than 50% by 2015. The number of mobile subscribers worldwide will reach 8.9 billion in 2017 and the number of application downloads worldwide will reach 98 billion in 2015.

With the growing impact of Generation Y, another leading trend will be increased spending on gamification (the use of game mechanics and game design techniques in non-game contexts). Forecasts are that spending on gamification by the digital client generation will grow from 10% in 2013 to 31% in 2016.

Integrated Social CRM Strategy

ISM recommends the Hub and Spoke model as a method of gaining value from Social Media efforts within an organization. The real question is, “What does an organization want people to do?”. If the organization wants people to buy products, the goal of the Social Media effort should be leading people to the organization’s eCommerce Website. If the organization wants people to sign up for a service/offering to provide information for marketing purposes, the key goal should be to drive customers to a fill-in form on the organization’s Website. The goal of Social Media tools such as Facebook and Twitter is to drive traffic to the organization’s Website, eCommerce Website, database, private community, etc., and bring the relevant information to the organization’s CRM system for storage and analysis.

Today, organizations need tools that pull and filter relevant information from Social Media Websites using massive listening capabilities using free-text data analysis capabilities and conduct effective marketing programs using real-time analysis within a CRM system, to make effective decisions within the Social CRM arena.

A leading CRM vendor, Infor, has an excellent outbound marketing capability module for marketing campaigns and has a Social Media channel with effective email and event management functionality. Infor additionally has a vehicle to take information that comes from the social community, which will allow an organization to create a marketing campaign with key messages for certain segments. Infor also has a real-time interactive advisor that looks at how people are responding to marketing experiments, scores the marketing responses and determines the likelihood of the success of a product.

During the Webinar, participants answered five polling questions. Results are:

1. My organization currently uses Social Media to interact with our customers/prospects?

Yes – 75%; No – 0%; Work in Progress: 25%

2. My organization currently integrates Social Media community insight into our CRM system?

Yes – 18%; No – 64%; Work in Progress: 18%

To comment on Barton’s key highlights concerning the Customer of the Future Webinar, please post your comments on the ISM Blog.

To access an archived recording of this ISM’s Webinar, click here and scroll down to the “The Customer of the Future” Webinar listing.