Multi Channel Communication Strategy

“Technology has empowered the consumer, putting him in the driver’s seat 24/7. In other words it is the customer who decides when and how to interact during a business relationship. This could be with a bank, an insurance company, a telecommunications organization, a utilities group or any other entity. However if a consumer receives a message that is not relevant to him, or via the wrong media or at the wrong time, his customer experience will be far from optimal.

How can enterprises deal with this? I believe that multi-channel communications is a major part of the answer as it enables companies to reach out to customers via their preferred channel, whether it be on paper, a smartphone, laptop or other device. Companies need to move from simply sending information to actually interacting with customers. And they need to ensure their customers are motivated to interact with them.
Customer communications are evolving rapidly. New technologies are in the spotlight as organizations make the transition to a world in which social media, mobility, data analytics and cloud computing (known as SMAC) begin to take center World Wide Web. So if enterprises really want to maximize the impact of digital communications they need to acknowledge SMAC trends.

You may have already decided you need to invest in a multi-channel communications platform. Or maybe you are not so sure. Whatever questions you may have, this white paper will help you make the right choice for both your customers and your business. There is no single solution to suit every business. But I am convinced that if you make multi-channel communications part of your overall business strategy you will be able to ensure that all the necessary elements of your customer communications are adapted to suit your budget and expectations.”

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MULTICHANNEL AND OMNICHANNEL COMMUNICATIONS

Multichannel communications is all about using available technology to ensure your target audience is presented with information or the ability to react to information across multiple channels. Customers expect to receive personalized, relevant communications that capture their attention despite their busy schedule. And, they are more likely to react to your message if it is delivered via their preferred media. In practice this involves sending the right message, at the right time, via the right channel.

Multichannel communications is more of an operational approach, and enables customers to complete transactions using different channels. Omnichannel communications however, views the experience through the customers’ eyes and manages the customer experience across all channels so that it is seamless, integrated and consistent. This synchronized approach presents a single face to the customer and a consistent way of communicating. In other words Omnichannel is Multichannel done professionally.

CUSTOMER COMMUNICATIONS MANAGEMENT

Communicating with customers today is all about connecting, engaging and building sustainable, trustworthy relationships. A Customer Communications Management (CCM) strategy is therefore essential for businesses wishing to remain profitable in the digital era. A CCM program can offer you the following benefits:

• CUSTOMER RETENTION: Consumers do not think twice about unsubscribing from brand communications when the messages they receive are not relevant to them. Therefore you have got to have the ability to communicate appropriately across all channels in order to keep customers.
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• MARKETING OPPORTUNITIES: Transactional documents such as invoices and statements are opened and read more than any other type of documents. But they are generally sent out by Operations or Finance departments. If you allow your Marketing experts to leverage this type of customer communications, by addnig for example personalized promotional messages, you could transform your transactional mail into a valuable touch point, bringing in new orders.
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• IMPROVED CASH FLOW: Outstanding payment figures dramatically decrease when customers are offered a wider range of payment options. Expanding your payment options to include physical mail and a range of digital-based bill paying options not only improves your treasury performance, it also increases customer satisfaction.

EMBRACE DIGITAL & ENHANCE PHYSICAL MAIL
One of the fastest growing trends in customer communications today is the shift from physical to digital communications. InfoTrends (a market research and strategic consulting firm) is forecasting that 8.6 billion (35%) consumer bills and statements in the U.S. will be delivered as paperless in 2017. So although this represents a significant increase, compared to 18% in 2012, it still means that paper is here to stay for another while. The reason for this is that the consumers surveyed value receiving bills and statements by physical mail because it:

• Acts as a reminder for them to pay
• Can be archived as a hard copy
• Is their preferred way to receive communications

However in reality digital channels can also act as reminders to pay, while offering simple and secure archiving capabilities. Customers who prefer to receive their transactional communications by physical mail will most likely continue to do so. However they will expect high quality communications in the future. Other customers will prefer digital communication channels for payment including pdfs by email, web portals and e-invoicing service providers. Offering consistency across channels allows people to switch according to their needs at any moment. This may involve the use of a tablet one day and then moving to paper where prestige or attention grabbing may be more effective. If you would like to serve your customers better, it is probably the right time to carry out a survey to find out how your customers like to send and receive their business communications.

BUSINESS BENEFITS OF MULTICHANNEL COMMUNICATIONS
One single platform can be used to implement an integrated multichannel communications strategy across an entire enterprise. This empowers the organization to produce, optimize and deliver customer communications via both paper and digital channels, depending on customer preference.
A successful multichannel campaign enables you to:

• SPEED UP CUSTOMER ACQUISITION: by efficiently targeting individuals through their preferred channels
• GROW CUSTOMER SATISFACTION AND LOYALTY: by providing clear, targeted and consistent customer communications via any channel
• CROSS SELL/UP SELL: by transforming regular transactional documents such as invoices or statements into relevant marketing tools containing personalized offers
• REDUCE OUTSOURCING COSTS: by bringing document creation in-house
• IMPROVE YOUR BRAND IMAGE: by reducing manual errors thanks to the automation of batch document creation
• BOOST OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY: by merging data and streamlining business processes to create, produce, deliver and track customer communications
• ENSURE BRAND CONSISTENCY: by taking control of all of your document design and template management
• INCREASE TIME TO MARKET: by designing documents once, maintaining less templates and consolidating assets such as pdfs, Word documents and logos into one single controlled environment

EFFECTIVE CUSTOMER COMMUNICATIONS

There are four key foundations for effective communication:
CLARITY
This involves making sure we understand what customer needs are and ensuring content delivers these needs. For example not all customers want to see all the transactions on their bank statements. Effective communications is like having a conversation. It should only be about things the person you are talking to is interested in.
CONTEXT
We know all customers are different. But how do we know what to give them? We need to give them content that is relevant to their needs. For example if a bank notices that someone is saving a lot of money it could embed targeted promotions and new product offers on statements and bills.
CHOICE
Organizations drive choice, not consumers. For example banks often fail to give us a choice and simply inform us that statements will be sent in a digital format and if we prefer paper statements we have to pay for them. By giving people the opportunity to choose how they receive their communications means you can increase customer engagement.
CONSISTENCY
All of the benefits of multichannel communications are lost when there is no consistency. This means coherence when it comes to messages, images and colors. Multichannel communications platforms provide you with tools for creating consistency, in a sustainable compliant way. This ensures that people know who their message is coming from, whether it be in a paper or digital format.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DATA
Data silos exist in many organizations. And this can cause problems. For example if you have a customer who does not pay his bills, you should not be sending him new offers. Therefore someone needs to take ownership. A team needs to bring together data from different systems and merge it into both print and digital channels.
Many companies make the mistake of taking data from different sources. They do not realize that you need to merge data in order to create value. For example if a customer regularly buys clothes online, the financial platform used for payment will contain a lot of useful data on how the customer likes to pay. He may prefer to pay on receipt of goods or in advance. If the retailer in question has a separate database containing a complaint from this customer because his account was debited twice by mistake, this could be overlooked. Also if you have errors in your data systems you may have different entries for the same person in different formats and the same person may receive the same direct marketing campaign many times. “By merging all the data you have for the same customer you can create a Single Customer View. This enables you to provide customers with better service, create better customer relationships and more adapted communications campaigns” explains Esther Labrie, Marketing Specialist at Human Inference.
CONCLUSION
Businesses today are increasingly faced with having to manage separate projects in order to get a message out via web portals, consumer smart phones, tablet apps, email and print channels. Co-coordinating this is both difficult and complex . Even when it works, there are significant gaps between the different channels. The information available to the customer is not the same on every channel. This causes frustration which can lead to the customer leaving or contacting the call center to complain. Either way, the business is losing money.
As Scott Draeger, Customer Communication Strategist for GMC Software Technology, explains “Managing customer communications as a portfolio is a solution. This requires modern CCM technology that accesses data and content from many systems and assembles it into effective customer communications regardless of the channel. By connecting communications together early in the process, it becomes easier to manage complex communications. Effective CCM adopters can truly focus on their customers, instead of focusing on technology.”

Fighting Negativity

I thought I would write today about how people think. 


Why does the failure seem to stick in our mind so much longer than a success? 


I think genetically in our instincts evolution has made us remember the negative experiences more than the positive, successful experiences .  It was then when the situations we stayed in were different.  I believe it was then when the life of a living organism was more dependent on the external factors rather than his/her/its own.

Just imagine we are living in the forest and we tend to take a path which leads us to a lion den or a pond with snakes and crocodiles. the evolution through natural selection would only take those who would remember this negative path so as not to take it .  I believe with this the brain wiring for hard wired for us to take cognizance of negative thoughts more than the happy safer thoughts.

We all know intuitively that there are different ways of thinking about things. The same glass, the saying goes can be seen as half full or half empty. And there’s a lot of research in the social sciences showing that depending on how you describe the glass to people as half full or half empty, it changes how they feel about it.

So if you describe the glass as half full, this is called gained brain because you’re focusing on what’s gained. Then people like it. But if you describe the same glass as half empty, a lost frame, then people don’t like it.

What I take away from this writing is that our view of the world has a fundamental tendency to tilt towards the negative. It’s pretty easy to go from good to bad but far harder to shift from bad to good. We literally have to work harder to see the upside of things. And this matters.

On a more personal level what this research means to me is that you have to work to see the upside. Literally this takes work. This takes effort. And you can practice it. You can train your mind to do this better. There is research  showing that just writing for a few minutes each day about things that you’re grateful for can dramatically boost your happiness and well being and even your health.

We can also rehearse good news and share it with others. We tend to think great that misery loves company that venting will help get rid of our negative emotions, that we will feel better if we just talk about how terrible our day was. And so we talk. And we talk. And we talk about the boss who’s driving us crazy and the friend who never called us back and meeting at work where every little thing that could go wrong did. But we forget to talk about the good stuff.

I think we can also work in our communities to focus on the upside. We can be more aware that bad tends to stick. One mean comment can stick with somebody all day, all week even and bad times to propagate itself, right? Somebody snaps at you and you snap back and you snap at the next guy too. But what if the next time somebody snapped at you you forgave them. What if the next time you had a really grumpy waitress who left her an extra large tip. Our minds may be built to look for negative information and to hold onto it. But we can also retrain our minds if we put some effort into it and start to see that the glass may be a little more full than we initially thought.

Books List

Few Books that all good folks are reading -
1. The Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldun
2. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
3. Energy: A Beginner's Guide by Vaclav Smil
4. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
5. Rational Ritual by Michael Suk-Young Chwe
6. The End of Power by Moisés Naím
7. Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull
8. The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker
9. Dealing with China by Henry M. Paulson, Jr.
10. On Immunity by Eula Biss
11. The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
12. Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh
13. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
14. Orwell's Revenge by Peter Huber
15. Genome by Matt Ridley
16. The Varieties of Religious Experiences by William James
17. The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
18. Hyperion 
19. 3 body problem
20. The Dark Forest
21. Seveneves
22.The Martian

Where to Start with Inbound Marketing!!

It’s a simple question, but an important one. Knowing where to start with your inbound marketing process is the first step creating an awesome marketing campaign and pushing your lead generation through the roof.

The Answer:

The best place to start your inbound marketing efforts is to identify your #1 target persona so that you can craft your marketing efforts around your ideal customer.
To do this, you create a fictional profile of what your ideal customer would be like based on your best customer accounts. This profile is called a persona document, and it is the foundation on which your marketing efforts should be built.

Step 1: Crafting a Persona Profile

To create a top-notch persona document that you can use to improve your marketing, there are a few things you have to ask yourself:

1. “Who are my best customers?” It seems like an obvious question, but it’s one that you need to have a financially provable answer for. I emphasized the word “financially” because these should be the customers who bring your company the most money, not the ones you like personally. Your #1 target persona is the group that will bring your business the most dough.
2. “What are their challenges?” Once you’ve identified the customers who bring you the most money, it’s time to dig in and learn about them. Finding out what these customers are looking for when they find your company is what will allow you to draw more customers like them later.
3. “How does my company fix these problems?” After identifying the problems and challenges that your customers are trying to overcome when they find your company, it’s time to find out how your products or services address your customers’ needs. While it is tempting to simply say, for example, “I’m a food company, my customers are hungry and want food,” there’s more to it than that. What kind of food do you serve? Are customers coming to you for a specific flavor, a buying experience, or because they trust the brand name? Being specific here helps you target your advertising to emphasize what brings customers in your doors as opposed to your competitor’s stores.
4. “What is their buying process?” Now that you know your customers’ needs and how your company addresses them, it’s time to really get inside their heads. Find out what channels your ideal customers use to get to your products, whether that’s Facebook, Twitter, Google searches, etc. If you don’t already have a way to track this information, get one. Once you know where your customer’s watering holes are, where they go to learn about what they need, you’ll be able to align your sales process to their buying process.

After clearing each of the above questions, you can turn the information that you’ve collected into a persona document that you can use to target your marketing to the segment of the population that can bring you the largest profits. Creating and using this persona document is the first step in optimizing your online marketing efforts and boosting sales.
Keep in mind though, the persona document is meant to be a generalization, an aggregate based on information that many customers have in common, not a case study of any single person. Case studies have a place in optimizing marketing, which is to be used to underscore the validity of a persona document, not be the document.

Step 2: Create Three Offers

Now that you have an idea of who your best customers are, what they’re looking for from you, and how they find what they’re looking for online, it’s time to create some specialized content to draw them to your company.
As a rule of thumb, you’ll want at least three offers. For these three content offers, you’ll want to make sure that each one is targeted at customers in different phases of the sales funnel:

• Top of the Funnel (TOFU): TOFU offers are content offerings that are largely stripped of references to your company’s brand. Content that is for the top of the funnel is meant to provide customers with information and showcase your company as a subject matter expert. Content that can be classified as a TOFU offer includes eBooks, how-to guides, and whitepapers that give visitors to your site information about a specific problem. You can use TOFU offers to draw visitors in and get them to volunteer to become leads.
• Middle of the Funnel (MOFU): MOFU offers are those offers that specifically reference your brand or products as a solution to the customer’s challenges. These offers are targeted at potential customers who are in the comparison phase of their buying process. In these offers, your company is positioning itself as the best way to accomplish a specific goal or task, and encouraging customers to use your solution.
• Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU): BOFU offers are designed to speak to customers who have made the decision about which company to buy from. Here, the customer is near the end of the cycle, and just needs that final push to complete the process and claim your solution. One example of a good BOFU offers would be a free consultation offer.

It is important to create an offer for each phase of the buying process so that your website’s visitors have a complete experience. With one of each kind of offer for your workflow, you can guide customers to the final purchase decision and minimize the chances of losing that customer to a competitor.

Step 3: Place Offers on Your Website

Naturally, once you’ve made the three offers, you’ll want to make sure they’re placed somewhere where potential leads and customers can find them. Exactly where you place each offer is up to you, but here are some helpful guidelines for your first content offers:

• Tweak your website to make room for the offers in the design. Over time, you’ll be constantly changing out and modifying offers as you discover what responds well and adjust to new marketing trends. Creating space in your web pages for the content offers and CTAs leading to the content offers will go a long way towards making life easier later.
• Place TOFU offers and CTAs on the home page. This is the content that gets you customer goodwill, make it easy to find and visitors will appreciate it. You want visitors to remember your website as a convenient resource for useful information, not a labyrinth where they had to trudge through three miles of useless dross for every nugget of helpful advice.
• Place MOFU offers on interior pages. Customers who are already interested in your products or services are more likely to put up with looking through your entire website, so put your MOFU offers on the interior pages that match up to the offer. Make sure to update your CTAs on these interior pages as you add new offers and update old ones.
• Place BOFU offers on interior pages and in your follow-up emails. Just like MOFU offers, your BOFU offers are designed for people who are interested in your products or services already, so it’s okay to put them on interior pages. As an added piece of advice, these offers are perfect for lead-nurturing follow-up emails, as they can entice a customer into making a snap purchase decision fresh after they have given you permission to email them.
• Create workflows for lead nurturing. Keeping in touch with your leads by using lead nurturing emails is a great way to improve sales and close rates. A well-optimized workflow enhances the overall buying experience for the customer, making them more likely to use your company’s services again. This is one reason why marketing automation tools are a must-have for any company that wants to market itself online.

If you don’t already have marketing automation tools, you’ll want to acquire them ASAP. Every day, new tools are being made to help improve your marketing automation, such as HubSpot. Considering that the right automation tools can have as much of an impact on your sales as an entire 10-person sales team, there’s no reason to avoid automated marketing software.
Using well-made content and offers can have a huge impact on your online lead generation and customer conversion efforts.

Recap

So, the road to perfecting your online marketing is to:

1. ID your target customers by making a persona document.
2. Create three content offers to entice your target persona.
3. Place these offers on your website and integrate them with your workflows.
4. Go sell like a CHAMP!

Saiyyaan...( Album: Jhoom Re Singer: Kailash Kher)

Heere moti main na chaahoon, Main Toh Chaahoon Sangam Tera

Main toh teri... Saiyyan, Tu hai mera ....

Saiyyaan (2)

Tu jo chhoo le pyaar se, Aaraam se mar jaaoon

Aaja chanda bahon mein, Tujh mein hi gum ho jaaoon main

Tere naam mein kho jaaoon

Saiyyaan (2)

Mere din khushi se jhoome, Gaaye raatein

Pal pal mujhe dubaaye jaate jaate

Tujhe jeet jeet haaroon, Yeh praan praan varoon

Haaye aise main nihaaroon, Teri aarti utaaroon

Tere naam se jude hai saare naate

Saiyyaan (2)

Banke maala prem ki, Tere tan pe jhar jhar jaaoon

Baithoon naiya preet ki, Sansaar se tar jaaoon main

Tere pyaar se tar jaaoon

Saiyyaan (2)

Yeh naram naram nasha hai...badhta jaaye

Koi pyaar se ghungatiya deta uthaaye

Ab baawra hua mann, Jag ho gaya hai roshan

Yeh nayee nayee suhaagan, Ho gayee hai teri jogan

Koi prem ki pujaaran mandir sajaaye

Saiyyaan (2) Heere Moti.......

'Twilight' - Stephenie Meyer.

Regardless of what people think about the book, I actually like the main cover - back before it was insanely popular, back before the movie and Twihards and fangirls and Team Edward's and Team Jacob's, the cover was what made me read this book sitting endlessly in crosswords,odyssey,etc etc!!! ;).This is truly a modern day Romeo and Juliet, only with a paranormal twist that has captured the hearts of pretty much every girl who picks this book up.

So this is how this starts :

'I’ve never given much thought to how I would die – though I’d had reason to in the last few months...
Surely it was a good way to die...in the place of someone else, someone I love.'

I never thought that I will get around to read Stephenie Meyer’s ‘Twilight’series, because I have been daunted by the size of it. I watched the first part in the movie version and liked it. So I was hoping that I would let the novel be and just watch the movie series. But when I saw the graphic novel version of the series at the bookshop recently, I couldn’t resist it. I finished it with a series of friendly visits and here I stand with my impressions:

Twilight, an exquisite fantasy, readers discover a pair of lovers who are supremely star-crossed. Starts with a new school kid and his group of sme beatyful friends. To add more to the above summary (you must be knowing this already and if you don’t I have to warn you that this is a spoiler), Bella discovers that the mysterious Edward is a vampire, but she cannot help falling in love with him. What happens when a normal high school girl falls in love with a vampire forms the rest of the story.

Now about the graphic novel. The book is a fast-paced read. I have heard that in the original novel, the prose could have done with some more editing, but because the graphic novel is predominantly about pictures, it doesn’t suffer from this problem. The artist, Young Kim, is Korean and so we can see the influence of Manga in the book. It sometimes looks like a Manga version of ‘Twilight’, with glossy pages. Most of the illustrations are in black-and-white but there are some pages in colour. It reminded me of some of the old movies, which were made in black-and-white, with some scenes produced in colour (for example, ‘Mughal-e-Azam’, ‘Nadodi Mannan’ and ‘Portrait of Jennie’). Bella and Edward look quite different from the way they look in the movie, but it works fine in the graphic novel. One of the things I was disappointed about, in the graphic novel, is that the story ends somewhere in between. I remember seeing more things in the first part of the movie series (for example, Edward introducing Bella to his vampire family, all of them going on a weekend picnic etc.) which is not there in the graphic novel. It looks like each part of the ‘Twilight’ series has been split into two graphic novels and so this first volume of the graphic novel is just half of the first volume of the actual novel. The cynical side of me says that the publishers are doing this to milk the cow for the longest time – I hope that is not true.It is basically a vampire-romantic novel between the lead characters Bella (Isabella) Swan and Edward Cullen. The author represents Edward as a charming school-going guy who is a vampire and Bella is s the new girl in town who is very clumsy. The story begins when Bella moved to Forks, a small town in Washington from sunny Phoenix, Arizona. She came to stay with her dad, Charlie Swan (police chief). On her first day at school, she met with Edward. When they met in their Biology class, Edward tried to keep a distance from Bella. He was very attracted to her blood. As he didn’t want to be a monster, he became her savior. He tried over and over again but he failed to stay away from her. Bella was also very attracted to him because of his ignorance. Edward was always afraid that what would happen if Bella found out what he is. When it was revealed to Bella that Edward is a vampire, she didn’t care. When time came, they introduced themselves to each others parents. Edward and his family used to call themselves veggies because they avoid hunting animals. After sometimes, the Cullen family found out about a new vampire coven’s arrival. One of the members of the new coven, James, figured out the relationship between Bella and the Cullens. So he tried to hunt her down. But finally Edward saved her. At the end Edward and Bella went to their school prom dance where Bella expressed her wish to become a vampire. But Edward denied granting her wish. This is the main plot of the story. I highly recommend this book, but be sure to have book two on hand.

i am leaving on a jet plane

All my bags are packed I'm ready to go
I'm standin' here outside your door
I hate to wake you up to say goodbye
But the dawn is breakin' it's early morn
The taxi's waitin' he's blowin' his horn
Already I'm so lonesome I could die

So kiss me and smile for me
Tell me that you'll wait for me
Hold me like you'll never let me go
Cause I'm leavin' on a jet plane
Don't know when I'll be back again
Oh babe, I hate to go

There's so many times I've let you down
So many times I've played around
I tell you now, they don't mean a thing
Every place I go, I'll think of you
Every song I sing, I'll sing for you
When I come back, I'll bring your wedding ring

So kiss me and smile for me
Tell me that you'll wait for me
Hold me like you'll never let me go
Cause I'm leavin' on a jet plane
Don't know when I'll be back again
Oh babe, I hate to go

Guitar Solo

Now the time has come to leave you
One more time let me kiss you
Close your eyes I'll be on my way
Dream about the days to come
When I won't have to leave alone
About the times, I won't have to say

So kiss me and smile for me
Tell me that you'll wait for me
Hold me like you'll never let me go
Cause I'm leavin' on a jet plane
Don't know when I'll be back again
Oh baby, I hate to go

Cause I'm leavin' on a jet plane
Don't know when I'll be back again
Oh babe, I hate to go