Customer Engagement as a Service : Why we are building SegmentOne.
Over the last year or so, we have been talking to customers, understanding their problems, taking feedback on our product, shipping some great features as well as pushing back on some of the feature requests we have been receiving. Our goal has always been to simplify how businesses communicate with their customers. But it occurs to me that we have never gotten to explain why we are building, what we are building, and I hope this post addresses that.
The way a business interacts with their customers often plays a huge part in building a great customer experience. Let me give you an example of this. The other day, one of our customers(an e-commerce store), were moving their warehouse and they were facing delays in fulfilling certain orders. I’m sure this is just another day for most businesses — these things happen all the time. But what matters is how you react to these.
What should this business do? You were probably thinking — no big deal, they should send an email to their customers about the unfortunate delay. How does this happen today? The operations team informs about the delay to CS team. Who then talks to the engineering team and gets them to fire up their CRM and export people that placed orders from that specific city. Finally, this list goes out to the marketing team who uploads the list in a mailing list software, draft an apology, and send it out. Chances are, unless it affects a huge number of customers, these things are usually swept under the carpet. And it is not surprising, isn’t it, given how complex it is?
A dashboard for all your customer engagement touchpoints
Shouldn’t it really be as simple as an operations person logging onto a system, compose a message to people who are likely to face delays, and fire it off, maybe after an approval from the marketing team? Shouldn’t every part of the business be able to reach out to their customers quickly, when they have to? Consider the number of tools this simple interaction probably involves — CRM, databases, email marketing software, mobile marketing software, excel sheets. No wonder most companies suck at such interactions.
This is what we aim to fix. At SegmentOne, we believe every interaction with a customer is a huge opportunity to provide a great customer experience. An experience that every part of the business plays a part in.
We are just getting started, and we have a long way to go to make this possible.
Have stories on good/bad customer experiences? Share with us, we love to hear about them. write to me at danish@segmentone.co
