Article: Constant Contact uses Glance to expand customer success, product support and advisory services

Glance’s client, Constant Contact, was the subject of a great article in CIO magazine. Here are the high points:

Why you have to become a trusted advisor for high level customer experiences

By David Smith, CIO
December 23, 2019
https://www.cio.com/article/3511590/why-you-have-to-become-a-trusted-advisor-for-high-level-customer-experiences.html

Enterprise business strategies across all industries are shifting to be customer-centric, where organizations hold the customer experience (CX) as the most critical component to overall business success. This is also evident as we witness the convergence between customer relationship management and contact center. The cloud is the convergence point for the technologies, but it is the customer centric focus that drives it.

A major part of customer experience strategies is empowering customer facing teams to drive long term customer satisfaction and loyalty with the critical tools needed. With that said, tools that support visual engagement enable customer-facing personnel to humanize this and help create a more intimate customer experience that reduces miscommunication issues. It also enables businesses to expand visual engagement to other departments and groups who need to provide high level personal service to customers. That service has to span from support to higher value advisory services. 

The next level of visual engagement

I had the opportunity to speak with Sandy Kenny, director of customer support and workforce management from Constant Contact, who intimated that visual engagement solutions have been key in helping them go beyond just contact center support services and move into more of an advisory role to customers to add richer value. Pivotal in that was their leverage of the Glance For Advisory Services Program, which educates businesses on new methodologies for incorporating visual engagement solutions across departments. It speaks to how organizations can leverage visual engagement for broader impact on the business outside of the contact center.

For a bit of context, in my understanding, The Glance For Advisory Services Program sets out to provide businesses with best practices on advisory services use cases, as well as tailored deployment options to fit within the enterprise’s existing CRM and digital engagement touchpoints. The program includes ongoing support to help businesses leverage and measure the tangible business benefits associated with visual engagement solutions for advisory services. However, with that said, this is not so much about any specific technology provider or their wares. What’s important here is about rethinking customer interaction from the point of how to add extremely higher levels of value to improve the overall customer experience.

In my conversation with Kenny, she mentioned that Constant Contact was originally using the Glance visual engagement solution to support sales efforts. Specifically, Constant Contact brought Glance’s visual engagement capabilities, which includes co-browse, screen sharing, and one-way video interaction, into their contact center and CRM platforms. It enables agents and customers to “see, show, and share” web pages and other online resources to enhance service and allows businesses in my estimation the potential to create more intimate bonds with their valued customers through more consultative, one-on-one interactions.

Kenny mentioned that their offering of professional and marketing advisory services is a key differentiator that allows them to stay competitive in their space with competitors while enhancing the customer experience. In her experience it’s been proven that customers that are more engaged across multiple services and products have higher customer retention. 

Intimate customer engagement is critical

More and more of their customers are evolving into this advisory capacity. Their agents are tapping into a recommendation engine. It’s become part of a proactive approach to support that doesn’t wait till customers have an issue, but also provides services to help them make their marketing efforts more effective.

Kenny intimated that in practice, this includes Constant Contact operating as a personal marketer working with customers in developing customized marketing and social media plans and adding and managing contacts. She mentioned customers can give over their content and her organization will build templates, schedule and send emails, and track results. The next tier of service includes her company doing everything for customers, from marketing strategy to content curation to custom reporting and analytics. The tiers of service can be broken down into, doing it with the customer and doing it for the customer.

So, let us forget for a bit the providers mentioned here. Let me point to what the critical need is in my estimation. It is critical that customer engagement go beyond just basic product or service support and evolve into a way more intimate partnership that includes strategic consultative services with the ultimate goal of customer success.

For technology providers, beyond just selling your products and services, how are you enabling your customers to succeed? Is there a customer success program in place that provides both product support and advisory services? What is your customer’s experience with your brand? Go beyond your product and be fully committed to your customers’ experience and success. Become a trusted advisor!

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Click here to learn more about Glance’s Advisory Services Program.