Question

1. Using practical examples, discuss the key challenges facing companies in the twenty-first century in reaching consumers. What actions might marketers take to ensure they are attractive to consumers?

2. What are available means of communication that companies can choose to communicate with their customers effectively? Give examples to illustrate your answer.

3. Go to 2 fast food restaurants and order a meal. Note the questions you are asked and observe how orders are handled; did you observe any significant differences in how orders handled?

Consider the differences you saw. Do you think the restaurants have different marketing management philosophies? Which is closest to the marketing concept? Is one closer to the selling or production concept?

Answer 1

Answer 1:

Key challenges facing companies in the twenty-first century in reaching consumers and actions marketers can take to ensure they are attractive to consumers : Here are some solutions to the most common marketing challenges:

1. Standing out from the competition

Trying to get your business to stand out in a crowded marketplace can be tough. Experian’s 2015 digital marketer report recently cited the top challenge among marketers is creating brand awareness, which when done well, can help your audience to clearly identify your values and voice across the web.

Solution: Discover what makes your business unique and more appealing than your competition and use it to your advantage. You can always conduct surveys amongst your existing customers to find out why they choose to do business with you to get a clearer understanding of how you stand out from your competition.

2. Generating awareness and driving traffic

As a keen marketer you might want to get stuck straight into generating awareness and traffic, but before you can start generating leads for your sales team to convert into customers, you need to first make people aware you have a product or service on offer. One main challenge marketers often face is the challenge of creating awareness, not having that prospect base to market to, or knowing what channel to focus effort on.

Solution: Look at how you are marketing yourself online; do you write a blog for your website? Are you promoting yourself on the right social media networks? By using these tools at the top of your marketing funnel, you’ll help to spread awareness about your business and services. By using analytics you’ll be able to check on each channel and determine which ones are performing the best and you can then shift your focus and efforts around those.

3. Targeting effectively

One of the first things any marketer needs to do is identify their key audience, determining who it is you should be marketing to. To catch your audience’s attention you need to offer some sort of value to them. Does your content offer something about your industry? Or does your product solve a problem your customers may have? Keep this in mind when targeting your audience and ensure that the message and value you’re providing is relevant to them.

Solution: First things first, you need to define your target. Look into their demographics to identify their needs and from that data, you can develop behaviour based profiles. By determining what each group or segment of your potential customers are looking for, you are able to target them and provide value. By segmenting your audience you will be able to target your content more closely to make your message relevant to every individual lead.

4. Using social media to generate customers and revenue

To some businesses, social media is still a relatively new concept. When social media first took off many businesses hardly knew what to do with their social media accounts; they just knew they should be using them. There is a real business value in using social media marketing, which many businesses are using, but might not fully understand how to convert social engagements into revenue. It isn’t enough to simply have a presence on social media, you now need to target, engage and nurture your social networks, allowing you to build up a social following that you can use as a quality source of leads for your business.

Solution: The best way to boost your social media sales is to provide your sales team with information about a lead’s behaviour and interaction with your company in social networks. This intelligence will allow a sales rep to begin the conversation with specific information about that person’s activity.

5. Increasing and proving ROI

With the increase of advanced analytics tools readily available, marketers are being held to a higher standard. It’s no longer enough to simply do marketing, you must now be able to measure and understand the value of each of your efforts in terms of leads, customers and revenue. Marketing budgets are being pushed and pulled in a variety of directions: increasing attention is turning towards how brands are gaining a suitable return on investment to justify spend through respective methods.

Solution: Effective marketers should be able to tie every single lead and customer back to the marketing initiative that created them. Start using and measuring your marketing campaigns. For lead generation initiatives, you can consider using call tracking software and other relevant lead generation apps to monitor results. You will be able to track how much of an impact your campaign is having on inbound lead generation. According to a study from BIA Kelsey, inbound phone calls are 10-15 times more likely to convert than inbound web leads, but phone calls are not something companies typically support because, historically, there hasn’t been the ability to track the customer against other marketing activities.

6. Keeping up with marketing trends

Over the past few years, marketing has transformed. Marketing focus has been shifted online from print media and we have witnessed the decline of direct mail and cold calling. Technology has introduced new tools that make communication with potential customers easier. Social media has risen as a dominant platform for communication and feedback collection.

Solution: To be effective with your marketing it is essential to know where your audience is, how to provide value to them and what the best tools and methods are for doing so.

Question 2 : What are available means of communication that companies can choose to communicate with their customers effectively? Give examples to illustrate your answer.

Answer :

Effective communication is the key to building and nurturing any relationship - be it personal or professional. Even in business, communicating with customers effectively can help you gain their loyalty - leading to repeat purchases, positive word-of-mouth, and referrals. On the flipside though, failure to communicate well can create dissatisfaction, frustration, and a decrease in sales. And, in the day and age of social media, negative word-of-mouth from unhappy customers can spread like wildfire, tarnishing your reputation. Regardless of the medium through which you communicate with customers, the bottom line is that it needs to be done well. In this post, we’ll take a look at some simple ways to communicate with customers effectively.

1. Pay close attention to your first impression

54% of people have stopped purchasing from companies that provided bad customer service in 2017. In 2016, it was 49%. This goes to show how important it is for you to provide good customer service. If you really want to retain your customers, gain their loyalty, and hope for repeat business, you need to step up. A large part of your overall customer satisfaction level is derived from the first impression you give your customers when they contact you. You need to have the necessary processes in place to handle your customers’ queries quickly and efficiently. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

2. Reduce waiting time

Whether it’s over phone or email, the longer you make your customers wait, the more frustrated they’re likely to get. In fact, the lack of speed has been cited as one of the top three reasons for frustration with customer support. So you need to have an automated system in place that routes calls to available support representatives. This system also needs to have the capabilities of informing customers about their expected wait times. Or, you can install a live chat app on your website and talk with a couple of customers simultaneously. It’s up to you.

3. Don’t use scripted language

Scripted language is impersonal. Customers are quick to understand if you’re resorting to such responses in your conversations with them. This irks them and does not create a good experience. Make sure your support representatives have real conversations with your customers.

Here are a few things that support teams need to keep in mind when speaking to customers:

• Do not be defensive. Instead, acknowledge the problem that the customer has raised.
• Always be empathetic to your customers. They need to know that you’re understanding what they’re trying to say. Remember, a solution can take time and customers understand that. What they’re looking for at that very instant, is that you understand where they’re coming from.
• Use positive language rather than negative. For example, “Sorry, but this product is currently unavailable” sounds impersonal and negative. You can, instead, put the same thing in another way, such as, “I can see that this product will be available in a couple of weeks. Would you like me to notify you as soon as it’s available?”
• Do not use jargon. Instead, use simple and easy-to-understand terms to effectively communicate with customers. Be professional but talk to them as you would with a friend.

4. Equip your teams with the right tools

The right tools can help your customer service teams be more productive and efficient at handling customer requests. For example, when someone contacts your team via phone or chat, your representative should instantly be able to pull up their records. This can include information about their purchase history or any recent interactions with your team. How does this help? Information and insights such as these can help to give your team member some context about a customer’s issue. Suppose a customer contacts your support team to find out if there’s any update on a ticket they’d raised earlier. They would definitely not want to go through the painful process of describing their issue all over again. In such cases, it really helps to have all records of previous communication in front of you. The support representative can share relevant and accurate information. Lack of accuracy is one of the top reasons for customers to get frustrated with support. LiveChat, for example, can be integrated with multiple Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools - to help you store and manage customer information efficiently. It can also be integrated with various help desk or ticketing systems like JIRA, Zendesk, or Freshdesk.

4. Effective communication in customer service: focus on quality

In a competitive environment, it’s easy to get lost in a web of metrics that are focused on quicker resolution times. Sometimes customer support teams are more focused on closing a large number of tickets in a short time. Understand that quicker resolution does not necessarily mean a short phone call or chat. It means fully resolving a customer’s issue in the quickest possible time. 51% of customers believe that they can get the fastest resolution to their problems over the phone, followed by live chat (23%). So, develop a team of support representatives who are more focused on engaging meaningfully with customers than hitting metrics. Train your team to be your customer’s ally and try to solve their problems effectively. A quality customer experience is much more valuable than shorter call handling times - especially if short calls compromise on providing a satisfactory resolution or customer experience.

5. Conclude your conversations properly

Conclusions are just as important as your first impressions. Too often, support representatives are in a hurry to attend to the next ticket in line. This can ruin the experience for a customer who’s communicating with them at the moment. Your eagerness to solve one more ticket could cost you a customer. So make sure that your representatives end their conversations well. Even if that extends the chat or call by a few minutes. Your objective should be to end the conversation in a way that leaves your customer happy and content. Here are a few examples of conversation conclusions:

• Is there anything else I can help you with?
• Thank you so much for your time today. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you need any help in the future.
• I’ll be happy to email you a transcript of this chat after I close the chat window. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or need any assistance.

6. Leverage content to engage customers

Content marketing is a great way of engaging both customers and prospects. 91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers today use content marketing. Both B2B and B2C marketers are heavily reliant on social media posts for their content marketing. These are followed by case studies, videos, ebooks/white papers for B2B and videos, illustrations, and infographics for B2C companies. Useful, informative, and relevant content is appreciated and valued by customers. So, in order to engage your customers meaningfully, you need to have a solid content strategy in place. This includes creating and distributing fresh content at a steady pace on your social networks, blog, and website. A smart solution to this is to use employee communication apps. Platforms like Smarp, for example, can enable idea exchanges among your employees. You can start conversations around certain ideas and encourage your subject matter experts to share their thoughts. Your marketers can use such conversations to pick up content ideas that are unique and relevant.

7. Pay special attention to social media

You know that social media can be a blessing at times as well as a curse at others. Anything can go viral at any time, and there’s not much you can do to change it once something goes viral. And, call it human nature, but negative things have a way of getting blown out of proportion much easier than positive things. Regardless, social media is still an integral medium for communicating with your customers. Customers not only interact with your posted content but also treat it as one of the mediums for raising their concerns. In fact, 34% of customers have used social media to ask a service related query. 47% of them even found it to be an effective channel for customer service. So when it comes to communicating with customers on social media, you need to handle it with utmost care. There will be situations, possibly multiple ones, where an irate customer writes something nasty on social media about you. Sometimes you might be responsible for their behavior, however, at other times you may have had nothing to do with it.

Question 3.

Answer : Awareness of health, sanitation and food safety will be even more important than before, both for restaurant operators and its employees, and customers. That’s why it’s highly probable that contactless transactions are here to stay, as well.

Businesses in all industries will have to upgrade technology to provide customers with contactless payment options, as well as no-contact delivery options. In terms of self-service kiosks, that means you’ll have to make sure to wipe them clean with alcohol between customers, so they are immediately put at ease. While kiosks are a good option to avoid handling cash and human contact alike, people are going to be very cautious about touching screens to order their meal. If they’re not sure that proper hygiene precautions have been taken, they’ll probably prefer ordering from an actual person (by phone) or using their own mobile devices which brings us to the next likely shift in delivery: mobile-ordering technology.

Lets analyse the impact on Dominos below :

While the pizza is made by hand, everything before and after that stage has undergone relentless innovation. Since 2007, the range of channels through which to order digitally has steadily expanded: via desktop, then mobile, apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch and Android, Samsung televisions, Pebble, Android and Apple smartwatches, Twitter and text with a pizza emoji, Amazon Echo, Google Home, Slack, and Facebook Messenger. Mr. Maloney said order time reached its minimum with “zero click ordering”: Open the app, do nothing and in 10 seconds your favorite pizza is ordered. All were developed to make ordering and delivery faster and more convenient. And because digital ordering obviates the need for cash to change hands, it also aided in physical distancing when the pandemic began. Digital ordering is key to growth for food-service establishments because it yields valuable data for better targeting customers and expedites pickup, said Andrew Charles , a restaurant analyst at Cowen & Co. He estimated 5% to 10% of the typical quick service chain’s orders are digital. Domino’s share was 65% last year and has since climbed to 75%.

“This pandemic just accelerated the trends that were already in place there. Domino’s also benefited from new concepts it was able to introduce as the pandemic rolled across the U.S. One was “Carside” pickup, which was already under development at the company’s “Innovation Garage” in Ann Arbor, Mich. GPS order tracking, introduced late last year, was rapidly expanded so that customers who didn’t want to interact with a driver could confirm the driver was in front of the house. Other Domino’s innovations also came in handy. One of its lowest-tech features is a cardboard foldout “pizza pedestal” on which drivers can place the pie to avoid contact with customers. It also contracted with a manufacturer to supply its stores with e-bikes adapted to carrying pizzas and is working on driverless pizza delivery vehicles, which would remove the possibility of any contact with a human being.