What is Interaction Studio, and how does it drive transformative business value?
This post was originally published on the RelationEdge blog.
Interaction Studio launched in 2018 as an innovative Marketing Cloud feature that enables your company to engage with customers at every stage along the path from lead to loyalty. Interaction Studio uses cookies to track customer data and then matches that data with customer-provided information—like email addresses and phone numbers.
How much could you increase sales at your company, if you could meet your customers where they are on the buyer’s journey and guide them toward your product or service?
With a solid awareness of consumer interactions, you can deliver a more personalized and streamlined customer experience. The ability to track customer behavior is not new, but Interaction Studio's capability to allow you to do it in real time is especially innovative. As long as you comply with GDPR and local data privacy laws, it can be a powerful way to improve your customer relationships.
Solving customer pain points with Interaction Studio
Interaction Studio removes your reliance on batch data during customer interactions—providing you with all the data you need at the click of a button. It lets your brand customize interactions with an individual customer’s behavior and guide them to the most appropriate product or service, eliminating many common customer pain points.
Here are four ways that your company can use Interaction Studio to improve customer service and drive transformative business value.
Scrap customer service scripts
Today’s consumer often wants to research your brand, product, or service before contacting support. Almost 70% of consumers want a managed customer service experience, so they don’t need to repeat themselves when using different support channels.
Interaction Studio helps your brand deliver a relevant and personalized customer support experience. It shows you exactly what someone was looking at on your website the moments before they contacted customer service. For example, if someone visits the mortgage page on your banking company’s website—when they contact support, instead of generically asking, “Hi, how can I help you today?” your customer service agent can ask, “Hi, I see you’re interested in mortgage products. Can I answer any specific questions?”
By leveraging this data, you can provide a faster and more effective customer service experience.
Customize on-site content
Interaction Studio allows you to display customized content on your website to suit the needs and interests of each customer.
For example, a customer visits your telecom website and views your selection of iPhones. The next day, when that customer returns to your site, Interaction Studio can ensure the content they see is specific to iPhones, rather than other types of mobile devices.
Interaction Studio also enables you to provide consistent messaging to a consumer across multiple channels. If your customer is looking at iPhones online, you can email them a related discount. You can also re-engage customers you’ve lost along the buyer’s journey by creating an audience segment that only receives a certain kind of messaging.
No matter who your customers are or where they are on that journey, you can present them with the messaging they need, through the channels they prefer, for unique and effective customer service.
Record in-store activity
When digital activity combines with a traditional brick-and-mortar experience, it can be difficult to get the full picture of the buyer’s journey. Not only does this reduce your visibility into customer behavior, but it also creates a disjointed and incomplete experience for the customer.
By connecting online touchpoints with offline touchpoints—such as call centers, ATMs, and in-store POS—Interaction Studio creates an omnichannel customer experience. That means, if a customer walks into your store a few days after visiting your website, you can track these interactions and use that information to trigger the next personalized message.
Over 80% of consumers want brands to really understand them, and you can’t fully understand your consumer if you are missing either the digital or brick-and-mortar part of their journey. Interaction Studio lets you make these connections so you can see the full picture.
Creating a strategy for success
It can be tempting to track everything with Interaction Studio, but smart marketers know it’s better to be discerning. Instead of looking at every piece of data from every customer, create a strategy that focuses on the data that is most important to your business objectives.
To create your Interaction Studio strategy, consider what you hope to achieve from the tool and look at your buyer personas to understand your customer touchpoints on their buyer’s journey. Your company gets the most out of Interaction Studio if you take into account both your marketing goals and the typical experiences of your customer.
For example, your customers might generally prefer to receive emails, but they might not engage with your company newsletter. You could use Interaction Studio to develop a strategy for increasing email click rates by identifying specific products and services that individual customers are interested in and then personalizing your email content accordingly.
Similarly, if your customers tend to make online purchases, you could make shopping online with your company as easy as possible. Use Interaction Studio to see where most customers abandon their online shopping carts and work to simplify the process or offer additional customer support.
Need help navigating Marketing Cloud tools like Interaction Studio?
This is just the tip of the iceberg for what Interaction Studio offers. As a trusted Salesforce Platinum Consulting Partner, Rackspace can help you implement Marketing Cloud and use this tool to get the most from your customer data. Our team of business consultants, technology experts, and marketing strategists collaborate with you to find the right solution for your organization and support ongoing success. Contact us today to start driving transformative business value with Interaction Studio as well as the wealth of other Marketing Cloud tools.
Learn more about Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Visit www.rackspace.com and click Sales Chat to get started.
Use the Feedback tab to make any comments or ask questions.
