nicolas, auteur sur Kestio

The selection criteria, the range of solutions made possible by technology and know-how, discourage even the most motivated. And yet, if you have the right guide, you can find your way through this jungle.

Choosing a CRM solution means first and foremost addressing three key issues:

- Firstly, to meet business challenges, i.e. to support the roll-out of sales policy, improve customer knowledge, develop new processes to support customer relations, effectively integrate customer data, etc.

- Then integrate historical data and anticipate future developments, i.e. be sustainable and compatible with the existing information system,

- Finally, respect the budget and schedule, in other words, stay consistent with your real needs.

So how can you meet this challenge and choose the best solution while respecting your constraints?

Best practice suggests organizing a call for tenders on the basis of a complete set of specifications. However, this is already an investment in time (and therefore money), which will mobilize resources for drafting, distributing, evaluating and selecting candidates. This is not always compatible with cost and deadline constraints.

What's more, the number of solutions available on the market makes things even more complex (220 solutions listed in 2013). Between generalist solutions that are more or less open, innovative challengers, cutting-edge specialists, or even safe bet solutions that aren't necessarily finely tuned to your specific needs, you may be forced to make a very broad call for tenders, or make choices that limit the relevance of the responses.

In our opinion,there are solutions that meet your specific needs (functional and technical), your context (knowledge of the business, size of the company) and with which you'll want to move forward.

The best solution on the market in terms ofexisting comparative analysesis not necessarily the most effective for you. The best solution doesn't exist in absolute terms: it's relative to your own situation.

That's why we've built the Quick Choice © CRM approach, based on a benchmark of the 20 most relevant CRM solutions on the market , and a database updated every year. It meets two objectives:

- Formalize a CRM requirements expression based on our 300-item functional map,

- Automatically filter your best short list from all existing solutions.

Over a period of 2 to 5 days, and based on workshops with business teams, we gather your expectations and needs (from the most common to the most specific), using our exclusive "CRM Functional Map" tool, reviewing over 300 functional items.
These workshops are also opportunities for discussion, during which we show you the possibilities offered by CRM solutions, challenge your needs, and help to develop your vision of CRM usage.
To identify the most suitable CRM solutions, we use our knowledge base, which is updated every year and includes more than 20 tools. So, by comparing our ratings with the levels of expectation expressed in the workshops, you can be sure of having a shortlist of relevant solutions.
The final choice is always made on the basis of suitability for the project team, budget and ergonomics, which results in more than convincing feedback: 100% of our short-list candidates propose a suitable solution!

To find out more about CRM and to help you with your projects, find all our methods and tools here :

A quick reminder: Inbound Marketing is all about attracting leads and nurturing their interest and reflection throughout the decision-making process, in order to convert them into qualified leads, prospects and then customers, or even, ideally, convinced ambassadors for your brand and your offers!

It is based on the change in attitude observed among buyers, who now carry out most of their purchasing process independently, relying in particular on the tools offered by digital technology (websites, forums, social networks, etc.) to develop their selection criteria and make their purchasing decisions.

By its very nature, it is opposed to Outbound Marketing, which relies on more "push" strategies (advertising and mass emailing, in particular) that have now lost their effectiveness.

The funnel logic of Inbound Marketing and the steps towards conversion can be summarized as follows:

The evening's program covered the 3 main stages of the Inbound approach:

1- Attract :

It's all about attracting a relevant audience to your website - potential prospects - by offering them content that appeals to them and interests them, in line with your expertise. Several ingredients contribute to this:

- Storytelling (Nathalie Grynbaum, IDRAC): Inbound content production means above all knowing how to tell a relevant story that will attract and convince your audience. It's all about demonstrating your expertise, but above all it's about responding in a concrete and useful way to your prospects' concerns and questions, providing them with elements that will enable them at least to fuel their thinking, and sometimes even to do some of the work themselves. You'll then be identified as a reference partner-expert, to whom they'll naturally turn when they need one.
- S.E.O. - Search Engine Optimization (Eric Guillermain, IDRAC): putting rich, relevant content online for your target audiences also means working on your site's visibility : producing this content is often a long-term process, so it has real value, in your eyes and for your targets... It would be a shame if it didn't reach its audience! This means generating traffic to your site, preferably qualified traffic. One of the levers for achieving this is theSEO (or "natural" referencing) of your website and your digital content : this means making it easier for search engines to identify your pages and their content, by working on the meta-tags, titles and descriptions, page urls, image titles, lexical fields of texts... etc, according to their reading criteria. This optimization work is based on the study and analysis of the keywords used by your prospects in their online searches.

2- Engage

Being able to produce content that's interesting (to your target audience) and representative of your expertise enables you to attract strangers and turn them into visitors to your website. Once you've achieved this first objective, however, there's still a lot to be done to really reach your goal: ultimately, it's all about selling your product or service offering! To do this, you need to work on engaging this audience.

- Engagement and social networks (Fabian Innocenti, PUBLIC ACTIF): This crucial stage consists of getting your visitors to take their relationship with you a step further. To achieve this, you need to provoke interactions with your prospects that will lead them to invest (time, energy... and above all, affection!) in a process that links them to your brand. One of today's most effective vectors in this field is social networking: animating a community through the dissemination of viral images, gaming, direct online access to services and products, the ability to personalize or even co-design products... All this plays a key role in engagement. It allows us to broaden our audience, to get to know them better, and above all to really "meet" their interests, expectations and purchasing behavior.

3- Transforming

If you already have a qualified audience engaged in a relationship with you, you've come a long way. However, your entire audience represents a mass of contacts too large for your sales force to handle effectively. What's more, not all visitors to your website or social networking pages are necessarily in the buying decision phase! It's up to you to get them there, or to identify those who are already at a level of maturity that can be exploited by your sales force...

- Lead nurturing and lead scoring (Olivier Prost, KESTIO): the aim of this patient work is to generate qualified, mature leads that can be passed on to our sales teams ! This involves a "nurturing" process, which consists in "nurturing" your visitors' thoughts and getting them to mature their purchasing project (for example, by offering them white papers, providing them with benchmarks, or inviting them to take advantage of a free trial...). The design and provision of this rich content is the subject ofa close collaboration between Marketing and Sales, to align and coordinate objectives and the tempo of operations. The interactions proposed to prospects and their reactions enable us to establish a "scoring" system designed to identify "mature" and interesting prospects. The score is established according to criteria such as the prospect's characteristics (scale, sector...) and his or her level of progress in the pre-purchase process (general information, definition of choice criteria...). At the end of the process, only leads that have reached the required score are passed on to sales reps, so that they can efficiently feed their pipeline and maximize their chances of success (optimizing conversion rates and sales effort allocation).

The conference demonstrated the effectiveness of this new marketing approach, and the need to master all its facets in order to implement it effectively. It was well attended by entrepreneurs, managers, marketing and sales professionals and students alike.

What about you? How are you approaching the implementation of Inbound Marketing in your company?

To stay competitive and maximize your chances of converting your leads into future customers, it is important to optimize the performance of your sales assets. Find out how by watching this webinar:

Generating and exploiting qualified inbound leads is our business. For the past 10 years, KESTIO has been helping companies (from SMEs to major corporations) to acquire and retain customers.

According to a study carried out by IKO system in 2012, 59% of a salesperson's working time is not devoted directly to sales! A stinging observation, which reveals the weight of numerous time-consuming ancillary tasks: internal meetings, administrative tasks, transport...

Restoring sales to its rightful place at the heart of the sales force's activity is therefore a major challenge for sales managers, and a necessity for the company if it is to develop its profits and optimize the use of its resources.

So how do you turn this a priori unfavorable situation into an opportunity? For example, by exploiting the potential for optimization available through CRM!

These figures, taken from the very interesting study by IKO system [1] "Action commerciale: 66 statistiques et infographies" (Sales action: 66 statistics and infographics), highlight the unproductive or excessively time-consuming tasks that make salespeople's lives miserable:

Is time wasted on these non-core tasks inevitable for salespeople? Fortunately, no!

Here are 4 ways CRM can help you:

Improve the productivity of your sales teams (and therefore their results)
Saving your sales staff from a nervous breakdown!

1. Optimize unproductive time

An obvious first priority is to optimize all unproductive time!

This means working in a cab, on the metro, waiting for a plane or train, for example, and treating all this unproductive time as an opportunity.

To do this, some CRM solutions offer 2 possibilities:

- mobile applications
- the ability to work offline

ZohoCRM, Sugar CRM, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, for example, offer mobile applications that can be enhanced by customization.

Off-line versions of CRM solutions, on the other hand, are generally based on a strong integration with Outlook.

These are all opportunities for your sales reps to capture their activities, verbatims from their interviews, or set up follow-up and reminder tasks at previously unproductive moments.

2. Enrich customer / lead data

All CRM solutions facilitate the enrichment of customer data in a variety of ways:

- standardizing this data (for example, defining and standardizing the address format) to facilitate its use (generating reports, setting up marketing campaigns, etc.)
- by checking the consistency of these data, using functions to verify the existence of addresses or telephone numbers.

Two major innovations take this logic a step further for BtB and BtC:

The first is the complete integration of data from specialized external databases. This can involve the use of dedicated interfaces (such as Zebaz, which works with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Yellowbox, Easiware, Marketo, Eloqua or Digatelo solutions) or the provision of specific modules: Data.com or Amabis, for example, have created a CRM solution around their company directories (Data is therefore their core business, but these companies have understood the importance of directly offering the technical solution to exploit them). Another example is B&C Technology's 2I solution, which offers a single, enriched customer view.

In both cases, interfacing enables automatic, simplified import of data, which is directly linked to existing accounts in the database (no duplication, thanks to a similarity search system with equivalence rates). Updates are made automatically and in real time.

This makes it possible to update administrative data (address, SIRET...) and qualitative data (activity, sales, headcount...), but also to enrich contacts: functions, organization charts... with rich, high value-added data for salespeople!

The second is the integration of professional or personal social networks directly into the contact's CRM file. This makes it possible to keep track of contacts centrally in the tool, without having to disperse the information, and thus to increase the relevance of exchanges (tracking news about the person and their company, knowing their centers of interest and identifying their networks of acquaintances for possible contacts and recommendations).

IKO System, on the other hand, offers intelligent alerts on your prospects, customers or competitors to increase the responsiveness of your sales teams.

3- Qualify and score leads

In addition to the integration solutions with external databases already mentioned, which facilitate lead retrieval and the import of rich data into the CRM, the major innovation of recent years has been the explosion of marketing automation modules.

These more or less functionally rich (and more or less costly) modules can be used to implement nurturing policies, i.e. to propose personalized content (messages, offers) and encourage interaction with identified leads (based on Inbound Marketing scenarios) through different channels.

This process enriches the database with usable behavioral data and enables :

- nurture a prospect's interest in your company/offers
- develop and deepen your relationship with him over time
- identify interests and habits (behavioral data)
- support them as their project matures and as they make their purchasing decision
- establish lead scoring based on the various interactions to identify hot prospects and deliver them to sales at the right time

This marketing channel therefore ultimately feeds the leads available to sales reps, who then have a base of qualified contacts with a history of interactions. The list of solutions is long and varied: Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Exact Target, Silver Pop, InfusionSoft, Koban, Act-On, SalesFusion, Click Dimenson....

4- Sharing knowledge and working together

As is often the case, this innovation comes from Salesforce, and has been adopted, complemented and adapted by the majority of CRM solutions on the market.

The idea is to consider each entity as a Facebook page: an account, a contact, an opportunity.... What may seem anecdotal at first glance, above all, is the ability to store unstructured data on accounts and contacts instead of sharing them by email, thus avoiding the loss of information and enabling a newcomer to integrate customer knowledge beyond the numbers.

By unstructured data we mean: interview verbatims, organization charts, data relating to the customer's market and its offers (in a BtoB context)... In other words, data that doesn't fit into standardized "dedicated fields" and can't be imported automatically.

By allowing them to be stored and displayed on the page dedicated to the account or contact, CRM meets several needs:

- Keep track of this information and archive this knowledge, which comes under the heading of Business Intelligence and has a high added value in the sales process.
- Share it, so that different players can contribute to and enrich it (a member of the customer service department or a project manager can glean key information about the customer's decision-makers or projects from his or her exchanges with the customer, which will be of great value to the sales person).
- Historicize" it: link the rich information thus obtained to the history of interactions between the company and the customer, and thus enable any person taking over the file to quickly get up to speed with this information and take account of the customer's history

The ability to subscribe to "feeds" to follow the "news feed" of a contact or an account can enable a manager to monitor the activity of his sales force, a sales person to follow the news of his customer... or several members of a team to work together (sales people working together on the same account, sales + marketing + customer service teams).

This also avoids a dramatic pitfall often encountered by teams not using a CRM: the outright loss of information, or its control by a single person (likely to leave the company).

CRM is therefore a real goldmine for optimizing your sales force and developing a more collaborative approach within your company... Provided you choose it well, and make sure it's actually used! Two essential elements on which we work on a daily basis with customers of all sizes from a wide range of sectors, such as :

- healthcare: BIOMNIS
- leisure and events: STADE DE FRANCE
- industry: GPN (Total Group), GEMALTO
- services: GL Events, APICIL

How are your teams using CRM tools? What benefits have you seen, and what difficulties have you encountered in implementing such a tool?

To find out more about our CRM solutions and how we can help you, click here:

[1] http://go.iko-system.com/rs/ikosystemtrial2/images/eBook_statistiques_action_commerciale_2012.pdf

Collecting customer data is no longer enough - you have to act on it!

"2016 promises to be a lively year when it comes to customer relations. It will be a year in which companies that develop real efforts to improve customer relations will be rewarded, while those that have been downplaying their customers' needs for years will begin to wither away," confides Forrester in its study " Top 10 Success Factors to Determine Who Wins And Who Fails in the Age of the Customer " (1).

According to the report, customers will reward companies that anticipate individual needs and make use of the data they collect. On the contrary, companies that constantly have to ask for basic information, and are unable to "recognize" a customer, will start to lose them.

In short, Business Intelligence must create added value! Data collection must truly serve the customer experience!

Customers will no longer tolerate companies with amnesia when it comes to knowing their preferences.

explained Gene Alvarez, managing vice president at Gartner, at the Gartner Customer 360 Summit in September 2015 (2). It is therefore imperative for companies to recognize their customers and provide them with relevant content that demonstrates real effort.

Respect for confidentiality and privacy as a differentiating value

Consumers are used to brands collecting data, and are more or less in favor of it... But one thing is certain: if personal information is collected, then these consumers expect it to be useful!

Consumers demand that brands use data before they interact! All your customers know that you collect data, and they'll accept the idea more readily if it serves the experience they have with your brand.

To act, you need data. But be careful how you collect it. Data confidentiality and privacy have become key issues. We can no longer confine ourselves to the simple "legal" aspect, or even see data collection as a risk. Quite the contrary, in fact. It's a real opportunity to stand out from the crowd. We need to explain what the data collected is used for, and how it can be used to personalize our offering.

Customer involvement will thus become a lever for improving the relationship! In other words? According to Forrester, brands that get their customers more involved - through their loyalty programs, for example - will see the benefits.

Companies that launch customer-focused operations will gain real and lasting differentiation. Business as usual is doomed to failure.

Customers need to be involved in defining the brand and designing its products and services: who's in a better position to know their needs than they are? This is something our customer Castorama has understood very well: by means of questionnaires delivered via in-store touch-screen terminals, some of its sales outlets collect the opinions of their customers directly. This has enabled them to adapt the working hours of their teams, further improve customer service and develop new ideas based on reliable data obtained in real time.

Since the heart of customer relations is based on the personalization and contextualization of the offer, the consumer must be strongly involved, ideally at a very, very early stage. This is what our consultants contribute to, particularly when they implement a customer experience improvement coaching program .

Are you ready for these changes?

Sources :

(1) Forrester study: https://solutions.forrester.com/aoc-predictions

(2) Gartner study: http://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/the-customer-experience-in-2020/

(If you haven't already, we invite you to rediscover the reasons why customer experience is a strategic topic and how customer delight affects your profitability !) You probably even already have an idea of the target customer experience you're aiming for, a vision and an ambition for it... But do you know where to start to achieve it? The starting point is invariably to define and optimize your customer journey. Here's a look at the fundamentals of customer journey design and evaluation, the prerequisite for any customer experience improvement project.

1. By the way, what is the Customer Journey?

The customer journey is all the stages and points of interaction between a customer and a company, from the start of the purchasing process through to complete consumption of the product.

To simplify, there are 3 main phases in this process:

BEFORE: all preliminary stages, from active or passive awareness of the offer through to the purchasing process, including the purchasing decision phase

DURING: the "delivery" process, integrating all the stages involved in making the service or product available and consuming or using it.

AFTER: After-sales processes, including customer service, measuring customer satisfaction, and the entire relational process for maintaining contact and building customer loyalty.

The challenge is to smooth the loop from AFTER to BEFORE.

In this sense, and even if they partially overlap, the customer journey differs from the customer lifecycle. The lifecycle is a much more macroscopic observation of the successive passage from prospect to active customer to lost customer. It may therefore contain several iterations of the customer journey, or even several journeys, depending on the change in the customer's state.

2. What is the purpose of customer journey modeling?

When it comes to improving the customer experience, modeling the customer journey is the first necessary step.

This makes it possible to :

- identify all stages of the customer journey and all points of contact between the customer and the company,
- determine the importance of each contact point in the customer experience,
- assess the company's level of response at these contact points,
- define and implement the improvements needed to meet the company's ambitious response levels.

While this approach was first deployed for companies in the BtoC sector, it is increasingly being replicated and adapted to companies in the BtoB sector.

3. Define the customer journey

There isn't just one customer path. Depending on its customer typology, a company can offer different customer paths: this is the case, for example, for companies with an intermediary clientele comprising distributors, specifiers, installers and end consumers, or for those who want to offer a very different path to their best customers.

A touchpoint is defined as an interaction between the customer and the company, via a specific physical or digital channel. The interaction can be informative or transactional, and triggered either by the company (push) or by the customer (pull).

For example, reading an advertisement online or in a magazine, receiving a promotional email, visiting the company's website, entering a store, calling customer service, receiving a parcel, receiving an order confirmation email, receiving an invoice, and so on.

The customer journey stage is not systematically linked to a point of contact. It can be experienced in the customer's journey without direct interaction with the company. For example, a recommendation by a third party on a social network, a trip and a mode of transport to the company.

4. Evaluate the level of importance of the stage of the journey

Not all stages of the customer experience are created equal. It's often said that the first and last points of contact in the customer journey are the ones that most shape the customer's feelings, whether positive or negative. There are also other stages, often the most delicate, which together with the first and last impressions left represent the key stages.

We call these "moments of truth" key stages which, depending on how the company handles them, can turn a customer into a loyal customer... or a lost one.

The challenge is to meet and exceed expectations at a critical moment for the customer.

A few examples: the receipt of a parcel or the return procedure for an e-commerce company, the presentation of the invoice for a garage, the welcome on arrival for a hotel, the availability of the product for a store, the presentation of a proposal for a service company, the accessibility of customer service for a transport company, etc.

Satisfactory coverage of customer expectations at these stages is an anchor for loyalty. Failure to cover them encourages customers to leave.

5. Evaluate the level of response to customer expectations

It's important to assess the level of satisfaction delivered, taking into account the expectations and needs of different types of customer. Because not all customers are the same, it is necessary to detect and create customer segments according to their expectations, and in some sectors even to personalize the customer journey.

A family doesn't have the same needs as a couple in a ski resort, a DIY enthusiast doesn't have the same expectations as a professional in a tool shop, an SME doesn't have the same expectations in its car fleet management with a rental company.

It is also essential to consider the multi-channel dimension of the customer journey, respecting the customer's choice of preferred channel(s), and the "omnichannel" dimension of the customer journey, enabling customers to pursue their customer experience seamlessly, across all relationship channels and with all the company's contacts.

At all stages of the customer journey, and particularly at the moments of truth, we help companies measure their level of response to customer expectations, so as to define effective and relevant actions to be implemented to improve the customer experience and generate delight.

The WelcomeExperience® method proposed by KESTIO makes it possible to

- define multi-channel customer paths
- assess the criticality of interaction points
- assess the level of satisfaction delivered

to develop an effective plan for improving the customer experience.

Customer Experience, a cross-functional issue

The Customer Experience is the trace left in the customer's mind, and is the result of the various responses, interactions and experiences with the company throughout the customer journey: before, during and after the actual transaction phase. (To find out more about the concept of Customer Experience and how it differs from customer satisfaction or CRM, read our article "Are you sure you've mastered the 3 key approaches to building customer loyalty?)

It is therefore necessary to set the same high standards for all possible points of interaction: the information distributed on the website, the content of a marketing campaign e-mail, the use of the product, the exchange with the customer service person by telephone, the checkout in a store, etc... must generate a coherent and qualitative experience.

Experience (rational and emotional), as well as brand loyalty, are therefore not the prerogative of "Customer Service", but of all the departments concerned (whether directly linked to the customer or not).

It's a cross-disciplinary subject that can be complex to deal with.

...A matter for the Management Committee!

Customer Experience improvement projects can only be successfully implemented if they are supported by the Management Committee itself.

There are three reasons for this:

1. They require real decision-making power

Unlike the management of a project confined to a single business line within the company, led by a project manager, all operational departments must take ownership of the subject in order to size investments at the right level and take the appropriate decisions.

Projects to improve the quality of the Customer Experience are at a strategic level (direct impact on sales performance, close link with the company's overall strategy). To entrust them to project leaders who are far removed from the decision-making level, however brilliant they may be, is to run the risk of not succeeding, as they will have neither the status, nor the decision-making power, nor the strategic vision that will enable them to carry out such a transformation.

2. Their operational deployment implies profound changes

We realize that these projects, in addition to being cross-functional, most often require changes to the organization, processes, tools and/or skills. Their operational follow-up is therefore complex, involving a large number of people and parameters. Ensuring their coherence and dynamism therefore requires both a global vision and the ability to drive such sometimes profound changes.

3. Monitoring and steering these projects are at a strategic level

The very definition of indicators for monitoring the quality of the customer experience is a strategic issue, as they must reflect the vision and ambition that the company has set itself. Depending on the company's objectives and maturity on this subject, we may opt for the Net Promoter Score, or work to define the Customer Effort Score, for example (see our forthcoming article on Customer Experience measurement and management indicators). You can also track the loyalty rate, the average basket or the speed at which new customers are recruited.

In all cases, we're talking about the company's revenues and margins, but these more precise intermediate indicators can be very useful.

The Management Committee will then have to adjust its management approach to the data and tools available.

This is why, in this type of project, KESTIO consultants involve the Management Committee right from the start, defining the approach and sizing up the ambition.

In fact, we are delighted to note that, while some managers may be unconvinced of their usefulness at the start of the process, they become more and more involved during the course of the project, and sometimes even enthusiastic... they see in a pragmatic way just how much sense it makes to their team to improve the customer experience, thus "humanizing" the company's performance objective!

Get your sales performance score with our online questionnaire

What is customer enchantment?

Covering customers' needs means making sure they're satisfied. To exceed their expectations is to delight them.

More often than not, enchantment in a company is the result of chance. It's based on the personality of an employee who surprises the customer by going beyond his or her expectations: providing a service that goes beyond what the employee is supposed to do, creating a high-quality relationship, giving attention, making special gestures such as offering a gift...

It is in these situations, experienced as exceptional, that the relationship goes beyond the transactional register and activates the emotional register.

Enchantment shouldn't happen by chance, but should be created in a thoughtful, systematic and reliable way. This means identifying the activities in the company that will bring delight and generate profits.

Emotion as a positive marker of the customer experience

As the "Wow" effect explicitly describes, positive emotional branding enables customers to remember their experience for a long time, and thus prolong their loyalty. So pay particular attention to the first and last impressions left in the customer journey.

Enchantment as a prescription driver

Customers are more and more attentive to feedback from their peers, and as part of their choice process, they have taken to studying the opinions and comments of other customers on social networks, forums and comparison sites. And because a satisfied customer doesn't share his feedback as easily as a dissatisfied one, one of the challenges is to make customers "very satisfied" and therefore prescribers, so that recommendations and positive buzz are the order of the day.

Is enchantment profitable?

Surprising customers by exceeding their expectations is far more costly for a company than simply meeting their basic expectations. Indeed, this often requires greater availability from employees, for longer, more personalized exchanges. But it's interesting to assess the cost of enchantment not only in terms of loyalty gains, but also in terms of recommendation rates and positive word-of-mouth generated. When customers advertise free of charge to prospects, they save effort!

Enchantment as the final stage of the Satisfaction rocket

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Beware, however: we can only enchant customers when we've already satisfied them with regard to their basic needs, which they (rightly) take for granted. Customer satisfaction is a prerequisite for enchantment. So there's no point in focusing your energies on enchantment if essential needs aren't covered!

In short, a company that is serious about improving the customer experience is committed to covering its customers' needs to the point of even exceeding their expectations, in order to create positive emotional branding. As a result, it will be much easier to win and retain customers, and its business development will be less dependent on the effectiveness of its "hard" prospecting actions.

Find out more about customer experience by downloading our white paper

1- Customer Relationship Management (CRM): a catch-all concept

Customer Relationship Management is itself a confusing concept. It can refer to the department that answers customers' questions about products, services and so on. It can also refer to the software (CRM) used to track relationships between customers and the organization. At KESTIO, we consider that Customer Relationship Management covers all interactions between the customer and the organization, whether upstream of the sales process (in which case we speak of the prospect rather than the customer) or downstream. These interactions can take place via a variety of channels: customer service, of course, but also the salesperson, the Internet, traditional advertising channels, etc. In addition, CRM software is evolving to integrate increasingly complete traceability of this Customer Relationship in the broadest sense, i.e. multi-channel. This means you can track the relationship established by a sales rep via outgoing calls, the number of times a customer has ordered from your website, and the mail he or she has sent to after-sales service, as well as the response he or she has received. All in the same tool. These different contact points and channels can also be visualized in the form of a Customer Journey, a diagram showing all the interactions between the organization and its customers.

2- Customer satisfaction: the quest for the Holy Grail

Customer satisfaction is a concept that seems simple, even binary: is the customer satisfied (or not) with the offer (product and/or service) that the organization has made? However, customers tend to declare themselves satisfied as soon as the offer corresponds to their minimum expectations. Kano's model explains this phenomenon. For example, during a customer journey observation mission in a store, I noticed that a customer was having trouble quickly finding the product she had come for, and then identifying the right product on the shelf. As an external observer, I felt that her journey was unsatisfactory, as she had gone round in circles in the store. After her purchase, this person declared herself satisfied with her experience and had no negative remarks to make about her journey: she had finally found her product, mission accomplished. The fact that her journey could have been quicker was not obvious to her, so her satisfaction was not affected.

The good news is that customers declare themselves satisfied as soon as the company has correctly met their basic expectations (i.e. found the product they were looking for). The corollary is that this notion of "satisfaction" is the company's minimum target, and that it would be a pity (and even dangerous) to be satisfied with it: to leave a lasting impression on the customer's mind, you have to offer more than that!

To increase customer satisfaction, it is therefore necessary to widen the field of possibilities and not limit oneself to customer declarations:

- focus on "Very satisfied" customers and understand why they report this level of satisfaction.
- identify and understand implicit needs in order to meet them.
- use other metrics such as Net Promoter Score to determine whether Customer Satisfaction is at such a level that customers become ambassadors for the organization.
- Vary the moments at which Satisfaction is collected: on the spot, after a moment of truth (see below), or on the fly, by conducting an annual satisfaction survey and analyzing the verbatims expressed by customers (this is known as Voice of Customer or Ecoute Client).

It's only by aiming for a high level of Customer Satisfaction that a company can build lasting customer loyalty.

3- Customer experience: the little extra that makes all the difference

Customer Experience is one of the keys to optimizing Customer Satisfaction.

Customer Experience is the customer's perception of the relationship they have with the organization.

This perception is conditioned by the customer's culture and the market expertise of the organization serving him. These two factors will generate a certain level of expectation. It's up to the organization to take this level of expectation into account, in order to generate a positive Experience that leads to Customer Satisfaction. To meet these expectations, the organization needs to master two axes: the ease with which the customer can obtain the desired offer , and the emotion generated by interactions between the organization and the customer.

The SNCF has been working hard onCustomer Experience in recent years. It has facilitated the customer journey by multiplying the points of contact for buying a ticket according to each user's channel of preference: the website, the mobile application for smartphone users, the call center, ticket offices for customers who need advice, kiosks in stations, and so on. At the same time, we also work on emotion and comfort to create preference among our customers: welcome on board trains, TGV or other first-class magazines, frequent flyer reception areas... All these services aim to improve the Customer Experience from a global point of view over the entire journey.

While improving the Customer Experience produces immediate and positive results, it's crucial not to overlook the equally powerful impact of the opposite attitude: certain stages of the Customer Journey are critical, and if theCustomer Experience delivered at that precise moment is not good, the customer may decide to leave the brand, whatever his or her level of loyalty. This is known as the Moment of Truth. Imagine, for example, that you've been a bank customer for over 10 years. The day you want to take out a loan, your advisor tells you that, despite his best efforts, he can't grant it. Chances are you're so annoyed by this experience that you're going to take out the loan with another bank and transfer all your accounts in the process!

Customer Experience is therefore a more conceptual notion than the other two. Based on effort and emotion, and therefore perception and feeling, it is more difficult to measure for each individual customer. To improve it, we need to put ourselves in the customer's shoes and understand what they experience, or better still, observe them directly in their relationship with the organization.

The 3 concepts are therefore interdependent. Customer Experience is at the heart of the other two notions: it is the link between the two. Trying to improve Customer Satisfaction by working only on Relationships (i.e. processes and players) is difficult. We need to understand, measure and improve the Customer Experience if we are to succeed in improving Customer Satisfaction in a sustainable way.

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General Management, Finance, IT, Sales/Marketing, Purchasing, Production/Maintenance, and a host of top-quality partners will be at the show to share their experience and help you achieve even greater performance in your organizations.

You'll discover the latest trends in management software, through numerous customer testimonials, themed workshops and conferences, under the theme of "the company's influence on society".

From lead generation to sales transformation:

The lead, understood as an identified contact with a potential (purchasing) project, more or less well qualified, is at the heart of the relationship between sales and marketing teams.

The Marketing department is in charge of lead generation, i.e. implementing programs and actions to acquire leads: website animation, multi-channel campaigns.

The Sales department is in charge of processing identified leads to transform them, i.e. finalize qualification and make the sale.

The 2 teams have to play together to be effective. However, we have noticed that they are more often in opposition than in cooperation... Why?

In this workshop, KESTIO will analyze the underlying causes of this situation, and give you concrete keys to improving the efficiency of the lead generation and transformation chain, through a few simple rules, examples of best practice and feedback.

In this article, we propose a few ways of getting to know your customers better thanks to digital technology, and we'll cover the other missions in later articles.

Digital tools (a website, an application, a newsletter...) enable you to track the many actions your customers take when using them. However, you need to distinguish between actions that you can track globally and those that you can associate with an anonymous or identified user.

Global information comes from the tracking software you've linked to your digital tools. They need to be set up properly if you want relevant data. This will give you behavioral and social indicators on your users: how long they spend on your tools, where they come from (site or geolocation), which pages they view the most or which actions they carry out the most, etc.

This information can be used to improve your tools, but also to help you guide certain strategic or operational decisions.

Anonymous information is linked to the use of "cookies" deposited by the tools on your customers' devices. The latest European directives strictly regulate their use. These cookies can be used to find out what visitors are doing on your tools and adapt your offer to their browsing habits.

This knowledge is personalized, anonymous and immediate, and is used to improve your tools in real time. It can be analyzed retrospectively in the same way as global information in tracking software.

You can collect information on identified customers. They may, for example, have created an account on your site, or have a loyalty card in your network of stores, or even log in with their profile from a social network. In such cases, it's important to be able to quickly set up a unique customer repository and aggregate the information in your CRM tool. This will enable you to better segment and know your customers, and give you an overall view of your multi-channel potential.

Of course, this data can be aggregated, and global browsing data can be attached to an identified contact and integrated into your CRM or Business Intelligence solution if it makes sense for your business.

Si vous souhaitez structurer votre collecte d’information et améliorer votre connaissance client, les experts Kestio peuvent vous aider, donc n’hésitez plus pour nous contacter.