While the COVID-19 crisis continues, if your company is in luxury retail, fashion, hospitality, automotive, travel, wealth management or any other business that provides goods and services to VIP customers, while business is relatively quiet, you are in all probability hoping those customers will stay with you when life returns to normal. After all, with extra time on many peoples’ hands, they can be looking around and finding more about what your competitors are offering.
Certainly there are companies offering innovative new digital services to maintain engagement with customers. For example, in the UK, the department store chain John Lewis is providing virtual appointments for customers seeking advice on nursery purchases, home design and clothing. This is a great example of personal customer engagement, yet the alternative from many other companies seems limited to bombarding consumers with either ever more desperate online discount offers or generalised public relations messages about how they are coping with the crisis.
Yet, isn’t there an opportunity to think about how you build truly personal relationships with key customers? How you continue to transfer some of the great content, knowledge, help and personality you normally provide in person to a necessarily physically distant, but virtually close way? If you get it right, this isn’t just about a temporary fix to get through the current crisis, but could form the basis of longer lasting, more productive customer relationships. The tools are there to do it.
Keeping the personal touch with your VIP customers
A few years ago, one of our colleagues created the video at https://broadvision.com/vmoso/galaxy-fashion/ to show how digital hub technology can be used to create private, personal, always-on services to strengthen relationships with your most valuable customers. Of course the technology is not the whole answer, but it does make it a lot easier to try something new and innovative – something that might prevent valuable customers slipping away in this otherwise dormant time, and add longer term business value.
If you would like to discuss your ideas in this area, how they might be developed and implemented, then please get in touch.