Direct Marketing Magazine December 2016

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The price of loyalty Customers can put a price tag on their data; what does this mean for marketers?

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In-store/ event marketing

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Contact Management The Technology Issue

Experiential marketing insights from experts at FUSE, Yahoo and Ryerson PM 4 0 0 5 0 8 0 3

vol. 29 • No. 12 • December 2016

The Authority on Data-Driven Engagement & Operations

Harnessing the hyper-rewards of loyalty programs ❱ 8

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Targeting & Acquisition Vol. 29 | No. 12 | December 2016 EDITOR Sarah O’Connor - sarah@dmn.ca PRESIDENT Steve Lloyd - steve@dmn.ca DESIGN / PRODUCTION Jennifer O’Neill - jennifer@dmn.ca Advertising Sales Mark Henry - mark@dmn.ca CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Leah Hutcheon Mark Basinger Shannon Kelley John Boynton Seung Hwan (Mark) Lee Monique Duquette Peter Lim Melissa Fruend Emily Nielsen Nicole Gallucci Jenn Horowitz LLOYDMEDIA INC. HEAD OFFICE / SUBSCRIPTIONS / PRODUCTION:

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Engagement & Analytics ❯❯5

Loyalty programs: Three trends to target in 2017

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December 2016

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How digital media is changing the car buying experience

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More than mere background noise Understanding how music impacts the retail shopper’s experience

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The price of loyalty Customers can put a price tag on their data; what does this mean for marketers?

Contact Management

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Sustainable disruption

Know your customer— Holiday edition

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In-store/event marketing

The 2016 GTACC Achievement Awards The Technology Issue

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Harnessing the hyper-rewards of loyalty programs

Operations & Logistics ❯❯10

Mobile payments, ordering and loyalty: The perfect combination

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Contact centre trends that make or break customer experience

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What time is it where you are?

To truly meet the needs of customers across multiple timezones, it’s time to give up the world clock for something smarter

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Emerging technology versus public sector processes

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Targeting & Acquisition

Know your customer —Holiday edition

By Monique Duquette

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t’s a brand new world for retail—online sales, mobile payments—but not in Canada. We’ve lagged in adopting online commerce, though we’ve ramped up lately and should hit $34 billion by 2018. As for mobile payments, 90% of Canadians won’t use them.

This is particularly evident during the holiday season. According the SAS Holiday Shopping Trends report, 85% of Canadians plan to do their holiday shopping at bricks and mortar retailers, compared to 59% in the U.K. and 70% in the U.S. The report is based on an October survey of 4,000 adults in the three countries.

We collect data from a number of different touchpoints—point-of-sale, loyalty cards, web searches, email inquiries, call centres—and our customers know this. All they ask in return is to know them.

Know me A majority of Canadians (66%) want more personalized email offers; 48% say they want promotional offers relevant to their lifestyle and interests.

Personalized doesn’t mean simply inserting “first name” or “for you” in the subject line. It’s using that data to create a specific message for a specific customer—a segment of one. And it’s not just about email. It’s about personalizing the customer experience across touchpoints.

Take, for example, suggestions and recommendations. Thirty-two per cent of Canadians said they rarely make a purchase based on recommendations, ❱ DMN.ca

while another 29% called them “slightly accurate.”

How many of us wake up in the morning, pick up our smartphones, check our email, and—swipe, swipe, swipe—delete all the email from brands we do business with? We consume data.

Data consumes attention.

A poverty of attention As economist Herbert Simon puts it: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention… The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.”

As marketers, we set out to create compelling campaigns and elicit certain behaviours—turning a want into a need. Unfortunately, the average Canadian feels bombarded by email offers, retargeting and recommendation tools. As marketers, we’ve trained the consumer that few of these messages are relevant to them. We’ve inadvertently created a field of noise and a culture of apathetic consumers.

Signals in the noise So how do marketers get a signal through the noise? We have to focus on the moments when we have the customer’s captive attention—in front of you at point-of-sale, dialed into your call centre, engaged in your app or visiting your online property.

As marketers, we have to seize those moments.

Seventy-three per cent of survey respondents said they were neutral or unlikely to purchase based on an advertising click-through. That broad-brush approach that leads us to macro-segments is adding to the

noise. We have to use that lake of data to get from a segment of many to a segment of one.

This is where analytics can play a starring role: acquiring, integrating and interpreting data in an agile way across the enterprise—not just by the IT department but by marketers testing hypotheses that inform solid strategy.

What if we don’t have the data? We need to earn it through solid testand-learn strategies and behavioral analysis.

Omnipresent, not omnichannel There’s been an evolution in retail strategy, from multichannel to omnichannel. And retail is not alone in that evolution. But omnichannel has gone the way of big data. It’s a term that’s overused and misused.

As marketers, we must strive for an omnipresent customer experience.

What does omnipresent mean?

It means creating an environment in which customers can traverse all the touchpoints of our brands—online, in-store, mobile, call centre—seamlessly in a manner that’s transparent to the customer.

For industries where that is not always possible—for example, securing a mortgage—we use those moments of captive attention to guide them to the appropriate channel and to support and nurture the customer journey.

This demands that customer data, customer analytics and customer decisions be shared across all touchpoints—and all supporting operational functions. Culturally, we’re changing; organizationally, we’re changing; and moreover, marketers

are becoming the orchestrators of customer experience. According to the Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2016-2017, 30% of chief marketing officers are becoming responsible for functions within information technology, sales and customer experience.

Omnipresence isn’t just about channel coordination, it goes to the heart of your customer strategy—a strategy that should define the conditions under which we market to a customer, we service or advise a customer, we educate or inform a customer or when we take our gloves off to retain a customer.

Bringing together these core strategic pillars sets a foundation for omnipresence. Stakeholders can understand the trade-offs, risks and impact of decisions. An organization can become unified around the customer.

And it sets us on a path to recondition the customer from assuming irrelevance to full engagement with the brand. In other words, becoming the signal in the noise.

Monique Duquette is national lead, customer

experience & marketing, SAS Canada. A marketer turned marketing technologist and ‘customer fanatic,’ Monique has spent the last 18 years immersed in all things marketing. For the last decade, Monique has helped leading Fortune 500 brands in North America elevate their marketing to become more relevant in this ever-changing world of the empowered consumer. At SAS, Monique works with marketing and customer experience leaders across Canada to deliver analytically driven strategies and best practices that drive value and superior customer experience.

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Engagement & Analytics

Loyalty programs: Three trends to target in 2017

By Melissa Fruend

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he combination of marketing and customer loyalty is not a new collaboration but it is the strategy behind it that has been evolving dramatically in the past few years and that drive is going to continue through 2017.

Momentum will continue to build in the loyalty program space and, therefore, so will the new ways these programs are positioned and propositioned to shoppers across the country.

Here are three trends to watch for in the next 12 months: Younger shoppers driving a revolution in “word of mouth” marketing As younger shoppers gain greater share of wallet, their expectations of experiences and services differ as does the way they choose to share experiences with peers. A study from LoyaltyOne research found that these younger groups, ranging from 18–24, are shifting towards a more “authentic” lane of sharing information, relying more on alternative sources of content when making a decision to interact with a brand.

No longer are advertising campaigns casting wide nets and reeling in shoppers of all ages; this new generation of shoppers are swaying away from traditional B2C marketing communications and are relying on third party “unbiased” sources such as social media reviews, vloggers, bloggers and inner circles (friends, family) more than the company or retail service itself (retail staff, advertising, celebrity endorsements). Younger generations are looking for an unbiased opinion and recommendation.

An example of a retailer doing it right is beauty heavyweight Sephora using sales associates as their online beauty vloggers—real people telling their real story about using a product carried by the store. These are viewed as authentic opinions by shoppers however are in tandem working as a controlled product message.

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What does this mean for 2017?

Expansion in 2017 includes more active outreach and reward for customers supplying product reviews.

Acknowledging the value of this information to this generation will be appreciated. Continue to see a wider social network focus. Don’t be afraid to ask what special shoppers expect from a brand. Finding out their “friction” points in the experience and addressing them will go a long way to build their trust. Superficial promises will be identified and easily cast aside.

Speak with them via email, social, text 1:1 and learn from their point of view how you can improve their lives/ experience.

Amplification of social analytics, the under used but necessary measurement Whether you are an avid user or fair-weather viewer, social media has become a part of the everyday agenda.

These are not simply channels that stream real time news or allow you to tag and post photos. With digital “Word of Mouth” increasing at an elevated rate, these channels are prime sources for data collection, behaviour mapping and measurement indicators.

Retailers looking to strictly advertise and convert customers on social media are missing a huge opportunity to discover untapped data about consumer trends, purchase intent and what is driving sentiment.

Brands can respond in real-time with hyper-relevant content when analyzing social conversations across platforms. For example, if there’s a noticeable lift in conversation about how much snow has fallen, a retailer could push social notifications promoting seasonal outerwear or ski equipment.

What does this mean for 2017?

Product suggestions focused on helping make life better or easier should be the main objective versus a brand trying to unload over inventoried stock. Loyalty is a two-way street and customers can tell when it is being done “to” them rather than “with” them. Knowing and making

the difference when marketing to customers is key.

importance and usefulness of smart technology will continue to expand.

The Internet of Things play and loyalty programs in 2017 As knowledge and interest continue to grow, the adoption rate of the Internet of Things will steadily increase among Millennials and their parents. These products offer many benefits, with one primary being safety. As the Boomers age, Millennials will increasingly be concerned for their parent’s safety and this will bolster the importance of smart products.

It will be an exciting year for the industry as we look to see shifts in the power of digital, customer experience and innovation. Forecasting what is to come is half the battle, planning strategically is what will have marketers winning in the end.

What does this mean for 2017?

Looking to the past, who would have believed just 10 years ago that today almost everyone, 77% according to a 2016 Colloquy study, would be carrying a smartphone? Likewise, the

Melissa Fruend is a partner at LoyaltyOne Consulting, responsible for the loyalty and CRM strategic consulting focus in our practice.

Her team offers innovative loyalty strategies to improve customer engagement through increased customer identification that impacts revenues for brands. Recent client relationships include Abercrombie & Fitch, Giant Eagle, PetSmart, and Alaska Airlines among others.

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The price of loyalty Consumers can put a price tag on their data; what does this mean for marketers?

By John Boynton

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n a nutshell, it means they have high expectations for value and customer experience from the companies with whom they share their data. In fact, 62% of Canadians expect better experiences with companies who hold their personal data.

We recently released the global findings from the 2016 Aimia Loyalty Lens, a global study produced since 2014. It surveyed more than 15,000 respondents in nine countries to track customer attitudes to brands, opinions on data sharing and privacy, and engagement with technology.

In addition to sharing behavioural trends, the study also provides actionable insights to help companies and marketers inform their customer loyalty programs and activities.

From this year’s edition, we discovered five key insights into consumer attitudes and behaviours.

The value of data is on the rise Across all markets, the percentage of consumers who view their data as highly valuable has risen to 41% this year from 31% in 2014. In Canada, that percentage has climbed to 42% from 28% in that period. At the same time, six in 10 consumers expect better experiences with companies who they know hold their data. In fact, more than half (51%) of consumers worldwide get annoyed when companies don’t use what they know about them to offer better products and services.

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Consumers do not value all types of data equally We asked respondents to put a price on different types of data, and the results across all markets showed differences in attributed values that registered over a wide range. Most respondents valued online behaviour and contact information higher than lifestyle and personal information, but they had different views of how much their data is worth in absolute terms. For example, while Canadians valued online data, such as browsing history and purchases, at an average value of $50 CAD, almost one in four (22%) rated it to be worth $5 or less. At the same time, 30% of Canadians expect a more significant return of value on their data, rating it to be worth more than $100. Comparatively, Americans set a median value of $52 CAD and South Korea registered an average of $120.

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Engagement & Analytics

// 7 Consumers are sharing more data than ever before While 71% of consumers agree that “It is impossible to know who knows what about me nowadays,” their willingness to share data has increased by eight per cent since 2015. Additionally, when companies provide context around why they are collecting certain types of data and how it will benefit consumers, they are actually more likely to share highly valued information. For example, prior to receiving context, half (52%) of consumers will share their mobile number; however, after they receive an explanation, this number jumps to 69%.

Younger consumers have an enhanced willingness to share Across all markets, between 47–67% of 18–24 year olds expect to hand over data in order to access certain free services. This difference in attitude was also apparent in their attributing less value to their personal data than other age groups. However, they also have expectations of receiving great value and customer experience in return.

Consumers are increasingly accepting digital wallets into their lives In Canada, the percentage of consumers who are likely to use digital wallets on their mobile devices has increased to 43% in 2016 from 33% in 2014. Across all markets, the top two reasons for using digital wallets include cashless payments (63%) and the ability to store loyalty cards (58%).

December 2016

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Engagement & Analytics

Harness the hyper-rewards of loyalty programs

By Jenn Horowitz

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sed properly, loyalty reward programs offer a chance to create a dynamic, customized marketing campaign down to the level of the individual and create a more effective message that offers the individual consumer exactly what they prefer at the moment they need or want it.

Market segmentation that divides customers into groups made sense when gathering data on an individual’s path to purchase was nearing on impossible. Now that it’s possible to gather intel on the entire buyer’s journey at the level of the individual, ❱ DMN.ca

both online and offline, why cloud your focus with hazy, imprecise results?

Take the example of two women, both aged 34, with roughly the same income in the $85,000 range, homeowners in the suburbs and both with kids. One woman prefers sporty clothes and spends her time and money on adventure travel. The other prefers wine tasting in the Niagara region, wears modern clothes and spends money on cultural events in the city core.

More general marketing segmentation would lump the two women together in the same group and market to them in the same way and with the same message—and be

not nearly as effective as if they were to know and address their individual preferences.

Create a unified online and offline view of the customer’s behaviour The first step is to create a unified online and offline view of the customer over time. That means gathering data on an individual that is linked specifically to that person and tracks their engagement with businesses across all devices and channels. It’s now possible to track a consumer online with cookies and tracking pixels that link actions to individuals.

The Loblaws reward system is an excellent example of how online

behavior is linked to offline purchases.

The grocery chain offers a points card free to all customers that combines a financial incentive (20,000 points for $20 dollars off a purchase of groceries) with personalized marketing designed to introduce new products and retain customers.

Customers swipe their card at each purchase and receive a weekly email with points offers catered to their individual preferences. Loblaws can control the amount of points it offers at an individual level and customer-wide basis. Even with some of the highest prices, it can appear as if there is a reward for shopping when the points offered, e.g. 500 points for December 2016

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Engagement & Analytics a single purchase, are translated into cash (50 cents).

The rewards system at Loblaws is limited by at least one factor. Even though they have apps, they don’t make use of the phone number or text messaging. If a customer doesn’t click on their email and has not visited their store, they have less power to attract customers back. For this reason and others, it is becoming increasingly critical to gather a customer’s phone number in additional to their email address.

Collect a phone number for better access and data A phone number is the most stable personal identifier of a customer and connects the business to the most under used channel for marketing— text messaging. Text messaging has an astonishingly high open rate of 97% (email open rates pale in comparison with a cross-industry rate of just 20%).

The control customers feel and its unobtrusive presence all contributes to that extremely high open rate. In fact, customers prefer this channel as means of marketing even over social media.

Text messaging to connect rewards programs No other channel has the same 24/7 access to customers as text messaging.

With a penetration rate of nearly 80% in the U.S. for smartphones, more people are connected and take their phone with them absolutely everywhere. This unlimited access to a customer enhances any market research data by leaps and bounds.

First, by offering customers the option to receive reminders by text messaging, your rewards program improves the chance it will gather the most data on a customer. Phone numbers also offer access to rich profile data on a customer that outstrips what’s provided by email, including income, pets, children, education, job title, address, home ownership and more. That rich profile data opens a door to more hyper-personalized messaging to the customer that combines online behavior with offline data and actions.

Text messaging to retain customers As an added bonus, by linking an outbound text message reminder to the individual cycle of a customer, the phone number also becomes means to reduce customer churn. When a customer hasn’t visited the story December 2016

within their typical buy cycle, a short reminder via text can be the push needed to bring them back.

Once you have a unified view of all customer behavior, online and offline, through the phone number, online cookies, and a rewards system such as the one by Loblaws, the critical question is: can you act on that data?

Save data for 400 days Gathering and saving that data for at least 400 days becomes an exercise in futility if that data doesn’t provide a direction to act. That direction involves two processes, relevant messaging based on hypersegmentation that delivers timely, cross-channel communications, when the customer needs and wants it.

Create personalized ads on the fly Soon, ad creative per market segment will be the dinosaur in the room and seen as archaic and coarse. There are already companies such as Conversant that can serve up hyper-personalized digital ads built in the moment and based on online behavior in just milliseconds. Combine that with the insights gathered through the phone number identifier, the ads become 10 times more powerful.

Let’s return once more to the example of the two women, one who prefers modern clothes and the other who leans toward sporty wear, but both who shop online and in-store at the same clothing retailer.

Knowing the purchase history of the sporty woman and her browsing history, the clothing retailer could feature items from their collection geared to sporty wear. But if she starts searching for evening wear, the options can be immediately updated to feature options that fit into her needs and wants at the time. The same goes for the woman who prefers modern wear.

The point is that the system needs to be continually updated and reflective of their needs at the time. This is the power of a truly integrated rewards system — it gathers the most data on current customers to speak to them in the right moment and using the right channel.

Jenn Horowitz is marketing manager at Telmetrics. For 15+ years Jenn has created and executed strategic lead generation campaigns, brand creation and conversion optimization. At Telmetrics’ we interpret data that goes beyond the click, to phone calls, text messages and chat. Creating actionable insights from data analysis helps customers gain a competitive edge and increase revenue.

The price of loyalty continued from page 7

So what does this mean for marketers?

Consumers view sharing their data as a cost of doing business and they’re aware of the value their data holds for companies. They expect reciprocal value by way of enhanced experiences.

As such, companies need to start paying attention to this savviness, lest they risk consumers turning off the tap of data and taking their business elsewhere.

With that in mind, here are a few things to consider when evaluating whether your company is delivering on customers’ expectations.

Personalize the value proposition to meet customer expectations If you’re collecting the right type of customer data, you can use it to offer relevant communications and experiences, as well as launch new lifecycle programs. Knowing their previous purchase history or lifestyle information, you can make educated decisions around the types of offers and promotions they’d care about. Otherwise, you risk alienating your customers and leading them to believe that you are not living up to your part of the value exchange.

According to research from Aimia regarding consumer attitudes towards poorly targeted communications, consumers are shutting out brands that send them irrelevant messages.

In fact, 73% of Canadian consumers will close their accounts, 71% will unfollow brands on social channels and 60% will delete apps. The rise of the deletist consumer has underscored that it is more important than ever for brands to show an understanding of their customers by demonstrating relevancy through personalized communications.

Be transparent and responsible about data Customers assume that data being collected will be used to enhance their experiences. We found that 45% and 50% of Canadian and worldwide consumers, respectively, get annoyed when companies don’t use their data to offer better experiences. Companies should only ask for information that will be used to that end. It’s important

to line up the exact use case for the data element with your ability to really monetize it and add significant value to the consumer, before you push hard to collect it. The repercussions for not thinking that through are clear in this study.

Rethink targeting using data Although consumers are more willing to share their information, their behaviour and perception of the value exchange differ widely between as well as within markets. Recently, Aimia teamed up with Columbia University to learn what motivates consumers to share their information. The study uncovered four unique groups of consumers, each with their own attitude and behaviours toward data sharing with brands. With this knowledge, Aimia and our clients can tailor strategy and tactics on how to engage.

Become better custodians of customer data Customer data is an invaluable asset that cannot be taken for granted. The safekeeping of data earns customers’ trust. Here at Aimia, we implement our TACT approach which stands for Transparency, Added value, Control and Trust to foster responsible data management and the ethical use and handling of data, and we encourage other companies to do the same.

Shift focus from “What can we do to our customers?” to “What can we do for our customers?”

Companies are starting to use data to shift from next better offer to next best advice, even if it includes an offer. Additionally, since consumers now interact with companies across various touch points (i.e. online, in-store, on mobile and social media), connecting all these experiences to create a single view of each customer can help companies better understand their needs and respond at each touch point.

John Boynton is chief marketing officer at Aimia, a data-driven marketing and loyalty analytics company. He is responsible for the development of innovative products and marketing and leveraging valuable member insights to ensure a rich and relevant member experience for the Aeroplan program.

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Operations & Logistics

Mobile payments, ordering and loyalty: The perfect combination

By Peter Lim

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verywhere you go, people have their heads buried in their phones, either checking Facebook, scrolling through Instagram, glancing at email, sending texts or even catching Pokémon. Businesses cannot ignore this phenomenon if they want to keep pace with consumer behavior and expectations.

Let’s be clear: It’s not just communication and gaming that are keeping people busy: they are increasingly likely to use their smartphones to access crowd-sourced reviews, research products, browse offers and make online purchases.

Sometimes they’re ordering products from Amazon or Zappos with two-day (or even next day) delivery. And, in a growing number of cases, they are also placing mobile orders that they will pick up the same day, sometimes within the hour, whether it’s a cup of coffee or a sandwich. And they’re paying for it on their mobile device as well, via a debit/credit card, e-gift card or a preloaded account.

In fact, a recent eMarketer report predicted that mobile payments will triple in the U.S. in 2016 and nearly one in five smartphone users will use mobile payments by next year. That’s a huge opportunity for brick and mortar merchants looking to enrich their interactions with their loyal customers and drive more revenue.

Retail banking trends over the past ❱ DMN.ca

couple of decades are emblematic of the sea-change mindset of consumers as they moved away from interacting primarily with bank tellers to enjoying the convenience of ATMs… and now heavily relying on smartphone deposits and online banking.

Smartphones are truly changing the way we live and transact and every business across industries is starting to recognize the importance of mobile customer engagement.

Speed, convenience, frictionless transactions + rewards Today’s tech-savvy consumer appreciates speed, demands convenience and wants frictionless transactions—not to mention entertainment, personalized offers and rewards. They are starting to expect their favorite brands to deliver all of the above in an easy to use and expedient way. If it is a hassle, then today’s consumers will turn elsewhere.

To this end, combining mobile ordering, mobile payments and a mobile loyalty program together in one seamless app represents a powerful triple threat for merchants to improve the customer experience, drive more repeat business and increase share of wallet. People want to interact with their preferred brands as easily and quickly and dependably as possible and there’s no greater way to execute on that promise than bundling mobile ordering, payment and loyalty programs. Let’s look at a few examples to understand the true value and

impact of bringing together mobile ordering, payment and loyalty.

Restaurants leading the way Quick Service Restaurants (QSRs) and Fast Casual (FC) restaurants are rapidly embracing mobile ordering and payment. With capabilities such as “order-ahead,” customers can place orders remotely and pick it up in-store while skipping the line or accelerating how fast they get their order when seated. For high repetition purchases like coffee or food, this trend is convenience at its best and keeps consumers loyal.

Two years ago BJ’s Restaurants, an American chain, blazed trails by launching a highly popular app, complete with mobile ordering and payment capabilities, as well as a Preferred Waitlist option to get seated sooner. The app rewards loyal customers not only for mobile orders, but also automatically places them in the Preferred Waitlist. Orders can either be take-out or dine-in.

Another important benefit to the restaurant is that diners can pay and leave the table whenever they want versus waiting for their server—increasing table turnover times for more orders per table.

Of course the app also pushes new promotions in its “What’s New” section so that diners are always up to speed with the latest promotions. And speed is at the heart of the mobile app’s Curbside Delivery. Can take-out get any easier?

The Starbucks standard… and Walmart As we all know, the gold standard for any mobile loyalty and payment program is Starbucks. A healthy 21% of the coffee chain’s orders in Q1 2016—and $6 million in revenue— were attributed to mobile order and pay. The app has more than 12 million active users in North America as well as better penetration than mobile payment apps like Apple Pay. In fact, here’s a mind boggling statistic: the amount of money pre-loaded onto Starbucks’ mobile apps was $1.2 billion in Q1 2016, which exceeds the deposits of many financial institutions! Customers are giving Starbucks money to put in the Starbucks bank, so to speak, to use for future purchases. This is a very savvy way to increase customer loyalty and encourage repeat purchases quickly and easily via the mobile app.

Let us not forget Walmart, who was the first major brick and mortar retailer to launch its own mobile payments solution, a smart move considering the competitive challenges it faces against online retailers like Amazon. The Walmart pay feature simulates an e-commerce transaction at the checkout by linking the consumer’s app to a QR code. It applies promotions, coupons and gift card balances and facilitates the payment.

We’re just getting started There are so many future applications December 2016

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Operations & Logistics of mobile payments that are just now emerging—which applied effectively will only increase customer loyalty to their preferred brand. In Italy, for example, several supermarkets such as Esselunga now offer mobile self-scanners that are literally attached to your shopping cart. You can scan products as you go and make a mobile payment to exit the store (with spot checks every so often by humans to reconcile payment, along with reward points added to your account for the slight inconvenience).

Check us out online dmn.ca

What should you be doing?

So what should your company be thinking about when it comes to launching a mobile ordering, payment and loyalty app? ❯❯ Create one mobile app, not several. Mobile ordering, payment and loyalty (i.e. offers, rewards and promotions) must be one app. No one wants to download several apps and navigate between them. And if you want to up-sell and cross-sell your consumers, you have to do it in context and in the moment they are browsing and ready to order. ❯❯ Make it incredibly easy and convenient. Offer one-tap or swipe ordering, and/or emulate the “rotate feature” for reordering, for example. ❯❯ Ensure your app is powered by modern technology so you can capture and leverage real-time interactions to target offers. This is how you demonstrate to your customers that you are listening to them and tailoring content and promotions specifically for them. ❯❯ Offer a variety of payment options, including debit, credit and PayPal, as well as pre-loading money (as in the Starbucks case) and even consider personalizing digital gift cards. ❯❯ Take a page from Amazon and personalize and upsell offers (e.g. “other people who ordered this product also bought this”). ❯❯ Take advantage of geolocation. For example, target customers when they are near, or in your store and offer in-the-moment deals. ❯❯ Test, test and test again. In today’s transparent world, there is no better app killer than a series of bad reviews that claim “it didn’t work” or worse. ❯❯ Consider when and how to incorporate engaging experiences that are fun for your consumers—perhaps using augmented reality within the context of a promotion or sweepstakes.

Overall, your goal with mobile ordering, payment and loyalty is to drive higher value interactions with your customers in order to deepen their loyalty and promote their repeat business. Frictionless transactions, coupled with personalized content, offers and entertainment, deliver truly delightful customer experiences. We are witnessing the reinvention of loyalty programs powered by big data and enabling an entirely new mobile experience that blurs the lines between online and in-store. Motivate your customers, reward their loyalty and empower them to browse, order, re-order, pay and pick-up wherever, whenever and however they want.

Peter Lim is co-founder and CTO of Stellar Loyalty. With 25 years in enterprise applications, Lim is a visionary and highly respected veteran who has delivered highly configurable, scalable and reliable missioncritical CRM, finance, and loyalty applications. Peter thrives on using breakthrough technology to deliver enterprise solutions and is the author of 30 granted U.S. patents in the areas of CRM, mobility, and data synchronization.

December 2016

For online advertising opportunities contact

Mark Henry, mark@dmn.ca For online editorial opportunities contact

Sarah O’Connor, sarah@dmn.ca DMN.ca ❰

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In-store/event marketing

Sustainable disruption

By Nicole Gallucci

H

aving just completed another RFP at FUSE Marketing Group, I’m once again reminded that not only is competition fiercer than ever but clients are finding the consumer landscape harder to navigate. As a result, client loyalty is not what it used to be because intrusive, buzz worthy ideas are what clients think their brands need to break through the clutter… or do they? Does disruption win or relevant strategy? Let me share my thinking.

Every brief that hits our desks asks for creative consumer engagements that increase trial and awareness, provide content, encourage sharing/ amplification and of course, drive purchase. Reading between the lines, the ask is for something disruptive that will engage consumer attention so consumers will buy one’s brand. We’ve always had the goal of disruption and sharing. Strategically driven creative is disruptive if it’s relevant.

The challenge is that marketers are confused by the clutter and are reverting to over-the-top disruption, which is flash-in-the-pan, short term, non-strategic thinking. It’s a one night stand versus a relationship.

About 25 years ago I was a brand manager at Nestle, classically trained on strategic thinking, short-term and long-term plans, above and below the line strategies. We believed times were challenging as we tried to identify the right TV or radio stations to advertise on, fulfill a magazine publishing deadline six months out and evaluate forms of outdoor. We pondered and panicked as to how we would ensure consumers would see our ads among the 300 they were faced with every day. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat were a figment of the imagination of their unborn/infant/ toddler founders. Today, the average consumer is inundated with more than 5,000 messages. The volume of media, messages, networks and brands has proliferated to an extent that we are deer in the headlights. We need to take a step back; while much has changed some things need to remain the same. ❱ DMN.ca

Which tactic influences you to purchase a brand that you don’t normally purchase?

4% 20%

EXPERIENTIAL ACTIVATED

52% 24%

TV COMMERCIAL YOU ENJOY

INSTANT WIN PROMOTION

NATIONAL SPONSOR

© IMI International 2013

This is why I wrote Adversperience, why I teach at George Brown College and why I remind everyone that strategic thinking founded in data that drives engagement is the key, and always has been. Let me explain.

One-to-one sensorial engagement is the ideal means to connect to consumers but it is costly, which is why advertising was invented and was so successful for so many years. When there were few outlets and options, advertising was efficient, effective and disruptive. With a great ad, one could resonate with consumers, steal share and drive purchase.

IMI International conducts an annual research survey and every year the results are the same—when asked what tactic most influences the consumer to purchase a brand one doesn’t normally purchase, consumers identify brands that activate experientially, which means they connect to brands that invite them to get up close and personal. Every brand has a story, every consumer is living their story and content support

is appreciated. Storytelling is not new, it’s timeless and strategic. At one time TV advertising told great stories—now the story gets lost because the ad is lost and the viewer literally has seconds to connect.

Marketers think that disruption is the key; but while it can be effective, in order for it to have a sustained impact it needs to be grounded in insights and long term strategic thinking. It needs to be relevant and resonate—this is the litmus test for disruption that is sustainable.

Relevance has been lost or forgotten when marketers think and talk about their brands. Marketers jump too quickly to the finish line: how they want their brands to be used, how they want to gain competitive advantage.

They need to listen to how consumers are connecting to and using brands and build from there. Marketers need to get out of their own head and into the consumer’s head. An example?

Arm & Hammer. What started as baking soda extended to a myriad of products based on what consumers

were doing with the product: laundry and cleaning products, toothpaste. The extensions were relevant.

Throughout the years we’ve activated hundreds of brands through experiential campaigns and consistently been able to prove that XM stands alone in its unique capability to connect with consumers.

Relevant XM, not XM where a brand ambassador is standing on a street corner with a corrugate box of samples. Real engagement. For example, the CIBC Mortgage Bar, or the WestJet Christmas Present arrival at the airport. Both prove that if the experience is relevant, it is shared—and that is the ultimate goal today. Sharing is the new advertising.

EventMarketer conducts an annual survey on XM and its impact and, similar to IMI’s findings, a one-to-one experiential engagement wins the day versus all other tactics: ❯❯ 72% of consumers say they positively view brands that provide quality event content opportunities and experiences December 2016

In-store/event marketing ❯❯

❯❯

74% say engaging with a branded event marketing experience makes them more likely to buy the products being promoted Of these, 98% share, and share with an average of 388 friends (average number of friends on Facebook)

Experiential marketing works; it always has and it always will. It needs to continue to evolve just as advertising evolves. I argue that experiential marketing is the new advertising and believe this so strongly I coined the term, “Adversperience.”

Adversperience is advertising on steroids. It’s the convergence of advertising and experiential marketing. It assumes we create an engagement that tells the brand story but, in the process, it invites consumers to participate causing them to then create their own story within the brand story. The two then become intrinsically linked and immortal.

One cannot unexperience; once one sees, touches, tastes, smells, hears, one cannot unsee, untouch, untaste, unsmell, unhear. One’s physiology is forever impacted. When a brand does it correctly—when the engagement is relevant—it resonates and becomes part of one’s being.

Like relevance, resonance is equally as critical. By definition, resonance means the brand connection is powerful and meaningful—the brand “gets” me. It’s not for the consumer to get the brand but rather for the brand to get the consumer. Years ago, the brand drove the conversation. Today consumers drive the conversation and brands need to find their unique voice amid the noise.

These points on storytelling, relevance and resonance are not new, they’ve simply evolved and this is where marketers are challenged.

In a perfect world we would have a one-to-one conversation with each of our target consumers, but this is not possible and is what gave rise to advertising, which allowed one brand to speak to many. Today’s challenge is twofold: an overabundance of media from which to relay a message and each type with its own unique language (billboard versus 140 characters versus a wall) and consumers now drive the one-to-many messaging, which can be positive and build a brand or can be negative and hurt a brand. What’s a marketer to do?

1. Listen & learn: Before we begin, listen to the myriad of social conversations about the category, December 2016

competitors, usage patterns, search patterns and name it. We combine this with other data and market insights to reach conclusions about consumer behavior.

2. Create a plot: Leverage these insights to create a storytelling platform with a plot, climax, characters and staging. The platform is multidimensional. The brand provides the relevant context: plot, staging and storyline. The consumer is then invited to be the lead character, participate in the climax and create their own story.

3. Encourage a standing ovation: If the brand has crafted their script precisely and the cues are in place for the consumer to rise to the lead role, like all leading characters, the consumer will take a bow, share their performance positively in the hopes of gaining reviews (now known as likes) and both the brand and the consumer will bask in the glow of applause.

4. The pressure/story never ends: With the proliferation of 24/7 connectivity due to the mobile devices that go with us everywhere, we MUST maintain the momentum we start. This is where marketers fall short. Once engaged keep the conversation going and pulse the relationship so that the consumer doesn’t stray. Similar to a relationship, we need to keep the magic alive to ensure the consumer stays loyal.

5. Stay the course: Don’t be distracted by the proverbial “bright shiny object.” Look at it, evaluate it but do not embrace it unless it delivers on the long-term vision for your brand.

More than ever we believe in strategic planning. We believe in a brand vision, objectives and strategies. We believe in the discipline. And with the discipline in place we do believe we can be sustainably disruptive.

Nicole Gallucci, partner, SVP experiential

with FUSE Marketing, is former founder and president of BOOM! Marketing and the author of Adversperience ~ The Convergence of Advertising and Experiential Marketing. With over 30 years in marketing on both sides of the desk, Nicole’s expertise spans from creative to logistics and production to fork lift driver!!!

Leveraging her experience in the industry and all its sectors, Nicole is a prof at George Brown and a sought after speaker on the topics of Adversperience, Marketing, Leadership and Women as Leaders.

// 13 FUSE Marketing Group launches FUSE L!VE Toronto, ON -- FUSE Marketing Group Inc. (www.fusemg.com) is pleased to launch FUSE L!VE, the next step in a strategic evolution in the agency’s XM and digital content practices.

FUSE L!VE is the culmination of these two practices working in unison. Both mediums are substantially stronger together, which signals the agency’s focus for the future.

As FUSE L!VE rolls out, it does so with a proprietary technology that will help clients navigate the dynamic live environment in which their brands try to attract consumer attention and interaction worthy of sharing.

“The basic principle of FUSE L!VE is simple,” explains Nicole Gallucci, partner and XM lead. “A consumer experience offers brands an amazing opportunity to engage and interact with consumers; however, they tend to be oneoff efforts with a minimal amount of social amplification.

While this has been effective to date, we know we can do better by extending the brand impact over a longer period and to a wider audience.”

Reaching the right audience a top challenge for marketers

In advertising, consumer love is won and lost on a daily basis, frequently within disparate moments of time.

Battlegrounds are overstuffed newsfeeds within not one but several social platforms or digital channels. Branded content disappears quickly either as a result of platform design like Snapchat or is quickly replaced by new content like in Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. In this environment, simply reaching audiences has become very complex, which is why experiences that drive content are so powerful.

Working with its digital and media teams, the agency has been able to reverse-engineer its events to align with existing and proven content strategies. FUSE takes knowledge and insights gleaned online to help shape and devise plans that enrich live consumer interactions. The real magic occurs when engagement organically drives social amplification causing events to explode far beyond the present experience.

“Basically FUSE L!VE is a multiplier,” added Stephen Brown, FUSE president. “We’re able to amplify our standard XM events to significantly higher rates of impressions and engagements than in the past. This is the marriage our clients love, and why we’ve invested so heavily in top talent such as Nicole Gallucci, Adam Bleau and Laurie DillonSchalk in the past 12 months.”

Initiative rooted in a strategic content plan The entire experience, live and online, requires FUSE do a deep dive on consumer listening to understand what drives a consumer to be engaged and take notice. FUSE L!VE leverages data and insights to drive its strategies and creative, with the goal to deliver impact for its programs.

“There’s no need for a guessing game,” concluded Laurie Dillon-Schalk, partner and VP Strategy & Insights. “The data tells the whole story that allows us to build a content plan that is connected, relevant and scalable.”

DMN.ca ❰

// 14

In-store/event marketing

How digital media is changing the car buying experience

By Shannon Kelley

W

hen my father tells me about his first car purchase, it evokes that classic car buying experience.

It was 1973 and he was living in Saskatoon. He drove to Regina to buy a white 1973 Triumph Spitfire.

When I asked him about his dealership experience, he said he’d wanted this make and model for some time. He went with white—the car in the showroom—because the only other option the dealer had on the lot was red. He didn’t want red.

It’s exactly what you would expect from that era. You walk into a dealership, listen to the pitch, ask some questions, negotiate on price and drive off the lot with the options they have. Forty years later, the path to purchase for car buyers is dramatically different.

For many, buying a vehicle is one of the biggest investments they’ll make ❱ DMN.ca

in life, making the process of deciding which car to lease or buy both exciting and stressful, and rarely simple.

It is often a lengthy process that requires intensive research, financing discussions, test drives and price negotiation. Understanding that this can be a complicated and unpleasant process, marketers and automakers have been working together for years to improve the customer car buying experience—and it’s paid off in part because of the development of targeted digital marketing.

Personalizing the path to purchase There was once a day when automakers and dealerships only focused on half of the population—men. Now, with women being key decision makers in the household, the profile of an auto buyer has become much more complex. Luckily, for marketers, access to consumer insights through big data has also grown substantially and given us the tools to understand consumer

psychology and, in turn, personalize the experience.

The top motivator for purchasing a new vehicle is the need to replace an old one, according to a recent Yahoo study that examines the preferences and habits of Canadian car consumers.

Consumer insights like this present an opportunity for marketers to customize their marketing approach by making the most of clues left by potential customers. For example, using anonymized email data, dealerships can target a segment of the population who are receiving emails from other dealerships or SUV makers can target consumers receiving emails from ski clubs as this could mean they are in the market for a larger vehicle.

Search data is also powerful, as it allows marketers to retarget specific messaging to consumers based on where they are in the purchase funnel; those at the beginning phase of research will use different keywords than those who are narrowing down

their decision to two models.

Likewise, analyzing consumer behavioural habits, such as media consumption, can help inform a dealership’s marketing strategy.

For example, say consumption data indicated that the majority of visitors to a dealer’s website clicked on a piece of video content but only viewed a few seconds of the clip; however, when they viewed an infographic on the website, they stayed for a full minute.

This would indicate what type of information consumers are hungry for and where the brand should invest their content marketing dollars.

But, unlike most other industries, auto sales do not primarily take place online… yet. Customers spend hours conducting their own research and comparing prices; but, when it comes time to make a final decision, the role of the dealership is still very influential and integral to completing the process.

December 2016

// 15

In-store/event marketing

Dealership experience 2.0 How does a dealership sell a car to a consumer who may already know all the technical specs on this year’s newest model before they step foot in a showroom? This is a reality dealerships are facing with more informed consumers.

Our study indicates that the dealership’s site is a decisive tool in the decision process with 30% of car purchasers confirming that dealers were the most influential source in their decision-making process.

However, it also indicates that almost half of respondents feel there was still room for improvement and, even more notably, 78% identify areas for improving the actual in-person dealership experience. Consumers want access to as much data as possible, so it makes sense that four in 10 want more visibility into actual prices without having to call or visit the dealership, and one in four would like to see dealerships’ inventory online. The traditional dealership practice of concealing prices in order to elicit negotiation is no longer going to be effective. Consumers want dealers

December 2016

to provide more transparency and let them make a decision based on value as much as quality.

Consumers may be more autonomous when it comes to information gathering but most still turn to the dealership when it’s time to test drive the vehicle they’re contemplating (60%) or narrow down their selection if they’re considering more than one option (40%). At the end of the day, it is still the dealership experience that can make or break the deal.

Aligning online and offline A dealership can still compete in such a loud, information-rich landscape by aligning its online efforts with the customer’s offline experience.

Knowing what consumers want and making it easily and readily available to them will be a key success driver.

Right place, right time should not be a coincidence, but a deliberate plan.

A quarter of our study sample knew exactly which vehicle they wanted but were waiting for the right deal.

Online behavioural data can now tell dealers when a consumer is narrowing their search to one specific make or

model, which allows brands to target deals to those consumers at the most appropriate time and in the right place.

Dealers would be remiss to not optimize their site for mobile access when 60% of consumers intending to purchase or lease say that it’s important to be able to easily visit auto websites from their smartphones.

Thirty-five per cent of shoppers even consulted their smart device while in the dealership. Of those using their device on-site, most were comparing prices at other dealerships, reviewing vehicle specs, looking up other dealership locations and checking reviews of the dealership.

Driving it home We’ve come a long way from the days of dealers owning the entire auto shopping process. But buckle up because the transformation of the auto shopping journey isn’t slowing down anytime soon. Can you imagine test driving your next car using virtual reality? Well, 44% of Canadians can and would.

Advancements in technology like this and in media have given and

will continue to give shoppers the ability to learn more about vehicles specs, pricing and reviews before even stepping onto the dealer lot. From a marketing perspective, these online consumer behaviours give marketers the opportunity to use digital clues to tailor their communications to be more meaningful to consumers.

Consumers may want more transparency with pricing and inventory, but marketers are also getting a new level of insight into their prospective customers thanks to the increasing use of digital tools. I wonder what dad would say...

Shannon KellEy is a senior research analyst on the Yahoo category insights team, based out of Toronto. She supports Yahoo Canada as well as the autos, consumer-packaged-goods and health verticals in the United States. Shannon joined Yahoo in 2013 and originally worked as an optimization strategist on managed programmatic business before transitioning to insights. She holds both a master of arts degree in journalism as well as an Honours bachelor of arts degree in media, information and technoculture from The University of Western Ontario.

DMN.ca ❰

// 16

In-store/event marketing

More than mere background noise Understanding how music impacts the retail shopper’s experience

By Seung Hwan (Mark) Lee

C

an the type of music that a retailer plays inside of a store actually make a difference? Studies consistently show that retailers who use music reap rewards, ultimately adding value to their businesses. For instance, a recent study by the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) revealed that the majority of Canadians say they enjoy their shopping experience more when they hear music. The same study also showed that hearing music in a restaurant makes people more likely to enjoy their meal, dine in the restaurant longer and impact their decision to return or recommend it to others.

For retailers, it’s not only the type of music that they must consider. Factors such as volume and tempo also have an influence on consumer perceptions and behaviours. The following are a few tidbits that retailers should consider before blindly pressing the play button.

Congruency There is no one magical music genre that best works for every retailer. The key to finding the right music is to find music that best fits with the theme of your retail store and with your customers. If you’re unsure of what music to play, a safe strategy would be to play music that reflects the musical preference of your target market. For example, if your target market consists of late-aged teenagers, then playing pop music may be more suitable than other genres.

The findings from a study in the Journal of Retailing further confirm ❱ DMN.ca

this. When ‘easy listening’ music was played, shoppers under age 25 thought they had spent more time shopping than they had in actuality and the same effect was experienced by older shoppers when Top 40 music was played. When customers are waiting in line to pay for your merchandise, you don’t want them thinking they’ve waited longer than they have. In fact, the wrong music selection can send them out the door and leave you wondering what happened.

Congruency is important because music likeability has been shown to reduce wait perceptions, increase shopping behaviour and increase the frequency of visit. Congruency is also important when it comes to matching the retail theme of your store. This is because hearing a specific type of music activates abstract concepts in memory. For example, classical music may evoke concepts such as sophisticated, formal and expensive.

Moreover, classical music has been shown to encourage pricier purchases.

Thus, a high-end prestige store may be better off playing classical music which is more congruent with their retail atmosphere.

Tempo While fast tempo music generates more arousal and excitement, slow tempo music tends to be more calm and peaceful. While this is intuitive, what many don’t realize is that, in restaurants and supermarkets, customers tend to stay longer and spend more money when they’re listening to slow music rather than fast music. Fast music is more appropriate for distracting customers.

Fast music also increases movement which encourages consumers to explore. For a store that sells a wide variety of items, playing faster tempo music would encourage consumers to view more items. In contrast, a store that sells items that typically require consumers to concentrate or to ponder, playing slower music may be appropriate.

Volume There are reasons why music is so loud in pubs and bars. That’s because louder music increases the arousal level of the patrons. After all, bars are meant to be exciting, not dull. Further, heightening the volume lowers wait time estimates. A retailer that is used to having long lines or slower service may benefit from adding a notch to their volume. In restaurants, lower volume increases people’s expenditures for food and drinks and, according to a study in the Journal of Business Research, softer music with reduced tempo/volume and increased familiarity to the shopper can make them stay in the store marginally longer. Retailers know that even five minutes can be the difference between making and not making a sale. These findings solidify the need for retailers to know their target demographic intimately to ensure they are not missing out on sales because of environmental factors.

In summary, here are three main takeaways that retailers can consider when determining what music to play in-store: ❯❯ Know your demographic and their taste in music so you can play familiar songs during peak

❯❯

❯❯

purchasing times.

Volume and tempo are essential to keeping customers happy and in the mood to shop, so ensure you’ve tailored those factors to your target shopper.

If you’re a retailer that serves multiple target audiences, consider curated playlists that vary the type of music played depending on time of day. This type of tailored approach can increase the amount of time customers choose to stay in your store, as your morning customers may be very different than your afternoon customers.

In the end, there is no one type of music that is perfect for all retailers.

Each retailer must decide what combination of music (type, tempo, volume, etc.) best fits their sales objectives and their target shopper.

In any regard, it is also important to note the ethical nature of playing music for retailers. Playing music within a store requires a license (through SOCAN) which allows retailers to freely play music legally and ethically. And studies also show that ethical business practices help build long-term customer loyalty, too.

Dr. Seung Hwan (Mark) Lee is an Associate

Professor at Ted Rogers School of Retail Management at Ryerson University. He earned his Ph.D. in Business Administration from the Ivey School of Business at Western University.

He completed his MBA at University of Windsor and Bachelor’s degree in Arts & Science at McMaster University. His previous work experiences include working for Coca-Cola and General Motors.

December 2016

THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAGAZINE ISSUE 4 • 2016

The

Technology Issue

❯❯ The 2016 GTACC Achievement Awards

❯❯ What time is it where you are?

❯❯ Contact centre trends that make or break customer experience

❯❯ Emerging technology vs. public sector processes

The Technology Issue

Contact centre trends that make or break customer experience

By Mark Basinger

Y

our customer’s experience may be one the most influential factors affecting the health and ultimate wealth of your organization. A stellar experience can quickly turn a onetime visitor into a raving fan, while a single misstep—long hold time, multiple call transfers, an ill-equipped agent— could lead to missed sales opportunities and frustration for customers.

As organizations look to the future, continually enhancing the customer experience to meet their rapidly evolving wants and needs will be key to staying ahead of competition. According to Deloitte, 62% of companies view the customer experience delivered by contact centres as a competitive differentiator. So, it’s time to invest—Gartner predicts that organizations are already planning their moves, with more than 50% predicted to redirect their investments to customer experience innovations by 2018.

Whether your organization is looking to maximize its current contact centre investment or take the first step, consider the following trends.

2 | contact management

The modernization of contact centre technology Is your contact centre seen as a cost centre or a revenue driver? At Mediu, we’ve found that the answer to this question is often an accurate indicator of the state of an organization’s current technology and the likelihood of making future investments. While younger businesses can be more inclined to embrace new technologies, established corporations tend to move at a slower rate—especially those in historically conservative industries such as banking and insurance.

Over the last several years, our consultants at Mediu have worked closely with current clients to help them move into the modern era of the customer experience. While it may be seen by some as more cost effective to continue to operate on legacy platforms, these outdated contact

centre systems provide only basic telephony and aren’t equipped with abilities like routing context which provide valuable insights to agents.

Migrating off of legacy platforms to updated environments creates a more flexible, powerful and insightful contact centre. For example, we have seen great success with the Genesys SIP Solution as a replacement for the legacy PBX. It provides more features and functionality at a lower cost of ownership and, when combined with other Genesys components, enables the addition of more media channels and self-service into our clients’ environments. Additionally, moving contact centres onto SIP technology and web-based agent desktop applications allows contact centres to be truly virtual so agents can be located anywhere.

Issue 4 • 2016

The Technology Issue needed to manage the contact centre effectively. When implemented successfully, companies with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, as compared to 33% for companies with weak omnichannel strategies (according to Aberdeen Group).

Self-service Self-service continues to be a strong trend as contact centres are working to allow their customers to accomplish more on their own without the need for assisted service from agents. When done right, selfservice can provide a better customer experience than forcing callers to wait in queue and run the risk of being transferred if the agent they reached is not able to service their needs. When self-service is extended across multiple contact channels, the customer experience is improved even further.

Contact centre trends in action: A case study

Omnichannel customer experience Today’s technology-savvy customers have come to expect omnichannel service capabilities from any company with which they do business. Even if an organization supports multiple channels such as voice, email, social media and chat, they may not be able to share context across channels, making it difficult to manage the lifecycle of the customer journey and provide a personalized experience. A new study from Aberdeen Group says companies that excel in engaging customers across channels retain more than twice as many customers as companies without effective cross-channel customer care strategies. This means contact centres need a modern platform to support the growing needs and expectations of their customers and agents.

As the industry continues to mature the omnichannel customer experience, contact centre managers must realize the importance of utilizing a unified platform that can allow new channels to be added without creating silos of agents and operations. Both customers and agents benefit from a single platform where the agent can see all interactions of the customer journey, while operations managers and executives benefit from a single platform that supports the reporting and analytics Issue 4 • 2016

By developing a strategy that aligns with your organization’s goals and then implementing it successfully, these trends can make a significant impact and lead to cost savings. For example, when a global technology services provider and conglomerate of web hosting companies was looking to create a more effective and efficient network of contact centres, Mediu’s integration and Genesys solutions resulted in more than $1 million in savings in just one year.

Each time the company acquires a new web hosting company, it inherits a new set of technologies, including contact centre technology.

The technology services company sought to replace its current system with one that would provide their brands with unique functionality specific to the way they do business, while still providing a single platform. Mediu recommended the Genesys CX Platform to provide an integrated enterprise-wide pure SIP environment that seamlessly routes blended multiple interaction types for both inbound and outbound communications. Globally located remote contact centres for new brands can be added to the platform without investing in more infrastructure.

Additionally, Mediu consultants implemented a new standardized routing application, Mediu Extensible

Routing Framework (MERF). This application allows Mediu to support virtually any call flow—including auto-attendant menus and prompts, skill based routing and many other features—through configuration, without the need to develop any new actual routing code. Mediu consultants have applied this solution to multiple organizations and business units, helping clients achieve substantial savings in time and resources versus traditional routing application development.

These innovative solutions have improved the company’s contact centre efficiency by allowing agents to handle intelligently routed interactions of all types from a single integrated unified agent desktop (Workspace Web Edition) without having to switch between multiple applications. Mediu’s Genesys implementation has also led to a significant decrease in high priority level incidents at the company (from 49 to nine in one year) and outage length (from 98 hours to just over eight hours).

Preparing for the future As your organization looks toward the future, it’s important to assess the current state of your contact centre and make key investments in order to stay on top of trends affecting the customer experience. With a strategy that encompasses the integration of modern, up-to-date contact centre technology and a unified platform that allows for omnichannel interactions and self-service, your contact centre will be better equipped to stand out among competitors and win long-lasting customers.

To learn more about the future of contact centres and what your organization can do to prepare, check out the webinars, case studies and other tools in the Mediu Resource Centre.

Mark Basinger is the chief technology officer at Mediu. With more than 28 years in information technology, Mark has extensive hands-on experience across multiple technologies as a solutions architect, developer, analyst and leader in all stages of the software development life cycle. Since joining Mediu in 2007, Mark has worked as the director of solutions architecture, senior architect and software developer on the Mediu Professional Services Team.

contact management | 3

The 2016 GTACC Achievement Awards

GTACC Awards

4 | contact management

LoyaltyOne wins the Giving Back Award Accepted on behalf of LoyaltyOne by Jennifer Atkinson, manager, operations.

Gatestone & Co. Inc. wins the Service Consistency Award Accepted on behalf of Gatestone & Co. Inc. by John Stock, vice president operations Issue 4 • 2016

GTACC Awards

Moneris wins the Customer Centricity Award Accepted on behalf of Moneris by Richard Antosik, director, customer experience.

By Sarah O’Connor

O

Representatives from the award-winning companies share their successful strategies in a panel discussion during the GTACC annual conference.

The crowd at the GTACC annual conference listens attentively during the panel discussion.

Issue 4 • 2016

n November 3rd the Greater Toronto Area Contact Centre Association hosted their annual conference and the GTACC Achievement Awards, celebrating and acknowledging the exceptional achievements of their members.

Hosted by MCs Mike Aoki and Anu Aduvaka, the awards were open to contact centres of all sizes who demonstrated exceptional commitment and/or achievement in one of the three categories: Giving Back: The Giving Back category is just that—it recognizes contact centres that put their time, energy and heart into giving back to their communities. It can be as small as a bake sale in the cafeteria to organizing a centrewide CN Tower climb.

Service Consistency: Service is defined differently by industry and no one does it perfectly. With the multichannel centre evolving to an omnichannel customer care model and the ever-increasing demand for faster, more accurate service delivery, providing a consistently highlevel customer experience is becoming more and more difficult.

Customer Centricity: The customer is number one. We all know how important this is. But how do we ensure this is a core belief and cultural cornerstone in the contact centre?

Becoming a customer-centric organization can help propel an organization to even greater success, but achieving a customer-centric culture can take significant planning, process redesign, and buy-in to achieve and sustain.

Representatives of the winning organizations shared the secrets of their success in a panel discussion as part of the annual conference. Nominations for the 2017 awards will open in late Spring 2017. contact management | 5

The Technology Issue

What time is it where you are?

To truly meet the needs of customers across multiple timezones, it’s time to give up the world clock for something smarter

By Leah Hutcheon

I

f it weren’t for the complication of timezones, meeting the contact management needs of customers who work internationally, or even just from Pacific Time to East Coast Standard Time, would be much more straightforward.

Technology has progressed to the point where it’s as easy to communicate with someone on the other side of the world as it is with someone in the next street. Except... it’s not, because communication only works if everyone involved is awake and, when you’ve got “timezone math” to contend with, there’s still no guarantee of success. But timezones pose a problem to any contact centre that deals with customers outside their timezone locality. And when you’re booking appointments for your customer’s remote team of hundreds across multiple locations, who are in turn dealing with clients all over the world, this can be a recipe for disaster. That’s the challenge many contact centres face and there’s a limited number of tools out there that can actually help in any significant way.

There are some challenges with handling customers who work across timezones that are obvious. For example, coordinating with clients and colleagues overseas at a mutually convenient time without laborious “Is that 10AM my time or yours?” exchanges that still so often end in mix-ups. But there are others that are less obvious, perhaps because they seem so unresolvable. When your customer travels around a great deal, moving from one timezone to another or even skipping across several in the course of a day, how do you arrange telephone appointments for them?

And then there are the challenges faced by organizations managing remote teams, or coordinating multiple branches, or simply dealing with clients in different timezones (or combinations of all three!). If you provide phone support, for example, how do you easily ensure that customers can speak to someone in their own timezone and avoid frustration as they get passed from operator to operator, re-explaining the issue every time, because their initial contact is unavailable?

With such wildly different complications and inconveniences arising from timezones, it became obvious 6 | contact management

to me that the key to dealing with all of them at once lay in creating a tool that was, above all, flexible.

When Appointedd started developing our multi-timezone booking and scheduling functionality, it was in direct response to the needs of an international company that had searched high and low for a time management tool that would actually manage their time, wherever they were. It’s one of those things that you’d assume someone must have come up with ages ago—like earphones that don’t end up as the Gordian Knot in your pocket, or shampoo that runs out at the same time as your conditioner—but then realize that no one has.

It was with this in mind that we started developing our software (which is still unique in its abilities; even daylight saving time can’t confuse it!) allowing users to coordinate easily with every resource within a company when they work in a different timezone every day of the week if necessary. The aim was to allow users to operate seamlessly between timezones without disrupting working hours for their customers (so that they didn’t end up accidentally booking calls at four in the morning). Plus, we didn’t want anyone at either end of the booking process to have to count hours back or forward, so we made sure that everyone sees availability in their own timezone.

The implications of this for contact centres is that it allows a customers to house all of their

resources, even those in different branches or different countries, on a single centralized system while still allowing the individuals to operate in any number of timezones. In this way, companies can offer “follow the sun support” on a global basis, safe in the knowledge that they’re not going to get tripped up by timezone math.

Time is, of course, a tricky business, but we shouldn’t just accept that timezones are complicated and there’s nothing we can do about it. We need to think innovatively about how to make it as simple to work with a customer on a different continent as with one on the next floor down, and the benefits so far are proving to be more impressive than we could have hoped.

Hey, maybe we should all just be grateful that the whole world agrees a minute is a minute, because if they didn’t that would really make conference calls an ordeal!

If you want to know more about multi-timezone booking and scheduling, take a look at www. appointedd.com.

Leah Hutcheon is the founder & CEO of Appointedd, an award-winning company revolutionizing the way businesses schedule appointments. From contact centres to serviced offices, independent businesses to large corporations, Appointedd enables online booking on any device in any timezone. Appointedd offers CRM, marketing and business management tools, and fits seamlessly with 25+ two-way integrations.

Issue 4 • 2016

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Vertical focus: Public sector

Emerging technology vs. public sector processes

By Emily Nielsen

E

very year Dimension Data conducts a Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report where 1,320 participants from 81 countries are surveyed on key issues affecting customer management within today’s contact centres.

Nine per cent of the 14 industries examined are public sector organizations.

Of all participants, 50.2% rank analytics as the number one factor to reshape the industry in the next five years.

What’s more, using analytics you can then capitalize on another emerging technology called omnichannel CX: a combination of technologies which allows you to personalize the customer journey leveraging customer data from multiple channels and interactions.

These are the technologies emerging in the public sector and I’d love to tell you all about them. But in the best interests of the public sector, I can’t do that.

Why can’t I? Based on the observations from this often-cited report, insights from various public servants and coupled with my contact centre experience in health care, education and municipalities, it seems to me that a discussion about emerging technology is like putting the cart before the horse.

Why do I say that?

Because many public sector organizations haven’t yet deployed or even considered yesterday’s technology.

Therefore, a discussion about tomorrow’s technology is like showing up to a race and you want to hear how you can improve your lap time with the newest piece of technology… yet you’re not wearing running shoes because you haven’t invested in any. In this event, no gadget will help you run faster because you can’t run without shoes.

What do I mean exactly? Well, according to Dimension Data, “Contact centres still struggle to achieve cross-channel integration or, as we now know it, omnichannel capability.”

Specifically, many public, and private, contact centres are still telephone-centric contact centres with a few digital channels like email, chat and social media. And these channels are operating in isolation and are not tied together in omnichannel fashion, which isn’t considered an emerging technology today.

In the 2015 report by Dimension Data it was said, “A worrying 78.7% of operations point out that their current, often telephone-centric systems won’t meet their future needs, and many are already failing.”

So when the situation seems to be that most contact centres can’t provide a complete omnichannel experience, something akin to not having your shoes on for a race, who cares about emerging technologies like analytics or omnichannel CX. We must get back to the basics.

So, why is it that way? And what can public sector organizations do to fix it?

Well, let’s take a step back, momentarily forget about future technology, and focus on what needs to be done right now so that our public services can lay the foundation 10 | contact management

required to adopt emerging contact centre technology. There are three challenges to overcome to do this.

First, drawing from my own experience working within the public sector, I’ve observed that they often don’t even know they’re operating a contact centre. Despite using contact centre tools, answering calls and responding to emails they don’t view themselves, for many reasons, as a contact centre.

It’s this lack of self-awareness which means emerging tech won’t be adopted because they haven’t selfidentified themselves as a contact centre which should consider and use these tools.

The solution? Admittedly, it isn’t an easy one. This requires a change champion from within the organization or an outsider with fresh eyes, such as a consultant, to make the administration aware that they are in fact a contact centre.

Second, if a public service is aware it is running a contact centre, the next difficulty which prevents it from acquiring technology is due to the IT procurement process.

Roy Wiseman, executive director of Municipal Information Systems Association Canada, addressed the issue of whether the procurement process works for IT projects in MISA Interface magazine (June 2016 issue).

In it, Roy quoted the former Oregon CIO, Dugan Petty, capturing this situation reasonably well: “The alignment of technology and procurement has always had a lot of tension to it. Often it’s about whether the jurisdiction has met the procurement laws first—and, perhaps secondly, whether or not they actually achieved the outcomes they were looking for.”

To jump this hurdle, a review of the entire procurement process must be conducted. For a very well done and detailed way of doing this I’d highly recommend reading Roy’s article which contains his approach to improving IT procurement.

The third challenge to adoption is that cloud solutions, which provide the technology, are based on pay-

as-you-go pricing models which are incompatible with how government agencies prefer to consume services.

Traditionally, public services acquire technology through capital projects where the cost of the solution and multi-year support are bundled into the initial sale.

This “new” pricing model for cloud or software-as-a-service is difficult for current procurement templates, legal terms and conditions to adapt to. Until this is fixed, public services will be weary of how new technologies are quoted.

Solution? Again, it isn’t easy but it can be done because the public service has overcome a similar challenge before—remember the days when the telecom industry shifted towards licensing agreements? This was when a licensing fee was attached to each piece of hardware or software to use it. At first this licensing model was incompatible with how government procured telecom services. However, today it is now the norm in this sector.

The same discussions that happened when the licensing model appeared and was made accepted within public services needs to be conducted now with the adoption of pay-as-you-use cloud services.

When public sector services make the changes recommended here, they’ll be able to more easily adopt new and disruptive contact centre technology. But, more importantly, they’ll be able to deploy the tools of yesterday—integrating all their channels—and then a discussion about emerging technology can follow.

Emily Nielsen launched Nielsen IT Consulting Inc., one of Canada’s top unified communications (UC) and contact centre consulting firms, in 1999. Carrying an impressive portfolio of 100+ projects and having managed $65 million worth of UC and call centre solutions, she regularly acts as a trusted advisor to some of Canada’s largest organizations. Emily can be reached at enielsen@nielsenitconsulting.com or by calling 519-473-5373.

Issue 4 • 2016