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Imagine that you are a mobile telephone provider and a customer that is out-of-contract walks into one of your stores and says she wants to cancel her service. She doesn't like her phone anymore, experiences too many dropped calls, and is threatening to switch to a different service provider. Servicing customers like this can be challenging. Today, an agent has to blindly balance the various factors that play into this kind of interaction with a customer: Should they convince the customer to stay? If so, what offers or solutions should the agent present to the customer? Should every customer be afforded the same deals? The reality is that in a perfect world, the task of handling this kind of conversation should have variable paths based on many factors that an agent would have no way to gauge without some serious help. On top of that, tone, messaging and offers should be consistent from agent to agent and store to store. Examples of factors that should be considered:
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Customer’s specific value to the organization (each customer’s value is unique)
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Customer’s statistical propensity to switch carriers
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What it would cost to keep the specific customer
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The organization’s current priorities in terms of subscriber retention
This is all part of a new paradigm in the Promotions and Retention Management space, called Inbound Promotions. An inbound promotion is a campaign, promotion or offer that is never explicitly advertised to its target base audience. Instead, retention and campaign managers set these up for when a customer engages with the business through certain channels and situations. They essentially wait for the right customer to interact with the service provider in such a way that the promotion is seen as a match. The example above is a prime candidate for an inbound promotion. This paper explores this example scenario in greater detail. It will work through each step of the process that leads up to an organization being able to interact with customers at a much more dynamic, personal and specific level with a focus on retaining the right customers at the right price.
Published: September 14, 2011