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How AI Can Increase Customer Retention

July 30, 2020 CRM News and Info

This story was originally published on March 21, 2020. As a result of popularity, it is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series.

Customer attrition and churn are not new problems. Anyone who has spent time in the sales world has heard statistics around the cost of acquiring a new customer. It can be five to 25 times
more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.

More importantly,
improving your customer retention by just 5 percent can increase profits by 25-95 percent, depending on your industry and company size. Needless to say, companies cannot afford to neglect their customer churn.

Today, many companies are intrigued by the idea of turning to artificial intelligence for help in the sales process. However, most do not know where or how to get started. The best way to tap into the power of AI and machine learning is by building an intelligent experience.

The intelligent experience is all about leveraging AI and ML to derive predictive insights that can be embedded into the workflow of a CRM. Companies seeking a competitive advantage must find ways to make their business operations more intelligent.

Reasons for Churn

How can the intelligent experience help improve customer retention? It starts with a shift in focus. Typically, businesses are addressing the problem by homing in on churn. They invest time in figuring out how to prevent churn. However, the focus needs to shift from customer churn alone to an overall look at customer success.

Focusing on churn exclusively is a very reactive tactic. Oftentimes, companies are late to the party with churn. They will identify customers likely to churn when it’s too late. This is because there is a major difference between a leading indicator and a lagging indicator.

For example, many businesses want to look at order cadence as a sign of churn. However, it tends to be a lagging indicator of a problem that manifested earlier. In order to make an impact, businesses must look at the leading indicators.

Often the best indicators for churn are further back in the customer lifecycle, during acquisition and onboarding. Sometimes high customer attrition is not due to poor customer service but to poor customer acquisition efforts.

Think back to what was happening in your business when a new customer started. Were you launching a new product? Were there changes in your manufacturing process? How long did it take the customer to start utilizing your service once the deal was executed?

It is crucial to assess the landscape of the acquisition time period. This often is where perceptions of the relationship start to form. Customers are going to be comparing their initial experience to the expectations you set during the sales process. As the age-old adage tells us, first impressions are hard to shake.

Examine Cost

Have you ever determined the true cost of customer churn for your business? Before you take any steps to improve customer retention, you must quantify the cost of churn. There are three major variables to consider.

First is obviously the loss of recurring revenue. Whatever that customer is paying is money lost.

Second, with any existing customer, there is an opportunity to upsell and expand revenue. So you have to take into consideration the loss of that potential revenue.

Finally, factor in all your customer acquisition costs.

By combining these factors, you can get a better understanding of the true cost of customer churn.

Once you have determined the true cost of customer churn, you can begin assessing the quality of churn. Not all customer attrition is regrettable. You should be able to determine what an acceptable level of churn is and set an established benchmark using basic analytics.

For example, it might be OK for a customer to leave if the cost-to-serve is high and the margins are low. That assumes you are acquiring net-new customers at an appropriate velocity and volume to compensate for lost business. AI is certainly exciting, but you cannot jump into it without first laying the foundation with basic analytics.

Get Smart About Customer Success

After you shift your focus from purely churn to overall customer success, determine the true cost of customer churn, and establish foundational analytics, you then can begin using analytics and AI to drive customer success and reduce attrition.

As I mentioned earlier, the real value is in creating an intelligent experience. When implementing AI into a business, gathering insights is great, but that is not enough. You must be able to leverage the insights that can be uncovered from data to identify next steps.

Your AI project cannot be simply about getting a score of how likely a customer is to churn. You need to set your team up for action by weaving insights into the business process. This allows the focus to move from churn to customer success.

Here is how it actually works. To predict the probability of a customer to churn, you need a logistic regression model that is trained on historical data. It is looking for examples of customers who have churned and ones who have not. It will learn from these situations and develop a probability score for each customer. Then various actions can be taken to influence that probability in hopes of changing the outcome.

Natural language processing models can be used to discern a customer’s sentiment. These models can be fed large amounts of unstructured data — such as call recordings and Web chats — to find themes. Then customers can be classified by how they feel: good, bad or indifferent. These classifications then are put into a logistic regression-based churn model.

You are starting to chain together multiple models to help isolate customers who are likely to churn. The key is to figure out how to intervene before something actually happens. This is the power of predictive analytics. It allows you to be more proactive in improving customer retention rather than reactive to customer churn.

Here is an example of how to pair insight with action: George, an inside sales rep, is working the retention desk, which is a specialized team tasked with reaching out to customers who have a high likelihood of churning. He enters the office in the morning and logs into his CRM. He sees a call list generated by an AI model that surfaces and ranks customers likely to churn. It tells George why the customer is likely to churn and provides a relevant sales play to take action.

There is even more value in what AI and ML can do after George makes the call and takes the recommended action. Once he inputs his call notes and updates the CRM, the customer can be re-scored in real time. This system allows you to continue ensuring you are taking the next best steps to retain the customer.

Conclusion

AI is the future of business operations. When contemplating an investment in AI, be sure you have a setup that will allow you to embed insights into the daily workflow of your organization. Through the power of AI, you can start blurring the lines between sales, service and marketing.

Remember, the best time to have a selling conversation is right after you’ve solved a problem. AI can be used to improve customer retention in a variety of industries. Consider how implementing AI can help change your sales operations and ultimately drive customer success.

Nicholas%20Christ How AI Can Increase Customer Retention
Nicholas Christ is account director at
Atrium. He works with customers to leverage their data to unlock its analytic and predictive potential. For more than 20 years as a sales and service leader, he has transformed organizational processes and CRM capabilities. He is also a Salesforce Certified Administrator. Nick graduated from Loyola University Maryland where he earned his B.A. in business administration and management. He lives in Maryland with his wife and two teenage boys.

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CRM Buyer

How AI Can Increase Customer Retention

July 30, 2020 CRM News and Info

This story was originally published on March 21, 2020. As a result of popularity, it is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series.

Reasons for Churn

Examine Cost

First is obviously the loss of recurring revenue. Whatever that customer is paying is money lost.

Second, with any existing customer, there is an opportunity to upsell and expand revenue. So you have to take into consideration the loss of that potential revenue.

Finally, factor in all your customer acquisition costs.

By combining these factors, you can get a better understanding of the true cost of customer churn.

Get Smart About Customer Success

Conclusion

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CRM Buyer

Cooper Lake will deliver a 60% increase in AI inferencing and training performance

January 7, 2020 Big Data

During a press conference at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show, Intel gave a small update on its ongoing AI and machine learning hardware acceleration efforts. Details were a bit hard to come by at press time, but platforms group executive vice president Navin Shenoy previewed the performance improvement that’ll arrive with the chipmaker’s third-generation Xeon Scalable processor family, code-named Cooper Lake.

Cooper Lake, which will be available in the first half of 2020, will deliver up to a 60% increase in both AI inferencing and training performance. That’s compared with the 30 times improvement in deep learning inferencing performance Intel achieved in 2019 from 2017, the year the company released its first processor with AVX-512, a set of 512-bit extensions to the 256-bit Advanced Vector Extensions SIMD instructions.

Delivering this in part is DL Boost, which encompasses a range of x86 technologies designed to accelerate AI vision, speech, language, generative, and recommendation workloads. It’ll support the bfloat16 (Brain Floating Point) starting with Cooper Lake products, a number format originally by Google and implemented in its third generation custom-designed Tensor Processing Unit AI accelerator chip.

By way of refresher, Cooper Lake features up to 56 processor cores per socket, or twice the processor core count of Intel’s second-gen Scalable Xeon chips. They’ll have higher memory bandwidth, higher AI inference, and training performance at a lower power envelope, as well as platform compatibility with the upcoming 10-nanometer Ice Lake processor.

Intel products are used for more data center runs on AI than on any other platform, the company claims.

The future of Intel is AI. Its books imply as much — the Santa Clara company’s AI chip segments notched $ 3.5 billion in revenue this year, and it expects the market opportunity to grow 30% annually from $ 2.5 billion in 2017 to $ 10 billion by 2022. Putting this into perspective, AI chip revenues were up from $ 1 billion a year in 2017.

Earlier this year, Intel purchased Habana Labs, an Israel-based developer of programmable AI and machine learning accelerators for cloud datacenters, for an estimated $ 2 billion. It came after the purchase of San Mateo-based Movidius, which designs specialized low-power processor chips for computer vision, in September 2016.Intel bought field-programmable gate array (FPGA) manufacturer Altera in 2015 and a year later acquired Nervana, filling out its hardware platform offerings and setting the stage for an entirely new generation of AI accelerator chipsets. And in August, Intel snatched up Vertex.ai, a startup developing a platform-agnostic AI model suite.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Increase Productivity with Dynamics 365 App for Outlook

January 4, 2020 CRM News and Info

Increase Productivity with Dynamics 365 App for Outlook

Most business users respond to emails all day long. Oftentimes these emails dictate which tasks you focus on and help you to prioritize the tasks you need to work on. The main way you communicate with your customers and coworkers is email, so doesn’t it make sense that your email would be integrated with your CRM system? Toggling between disconnected programs can be very time-consuming. Dynamics 365 App for Outlook can help you save time. Learn how you can increase productivity with Dynamics 365 App for Outlook.

Microsoft sees the value of tight integration between the programs you use every day. The integration between Outlook and Dynamics 365 is certainly no exception.

Previously, Dynamics 365 for Outlook was the go-to Dynamics 365/Outlook integration tool. There are currently two versions available for Dynamics 365/Outlook integration. The older application, the Dynamics 365 for Outlook client and the newer version, the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook. While the newer version has some definite advantages, both allow you to work faster and more efficiently. For the purpose of this article, we will be focusing on the newer version, the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook.

Unified Interface Makes a Difference

The app is built on the Unified Interface, which uses responsive web design – providing the user with an optimal viewing experience regardless of device they are on.

Soon the Unified Interface will be the only client interface across all Dynamics 365 apps. Deprecation of the legacy web client for Dynamics 365 Online was announced in September 2019 and the legacy will no longer be available from 1 October 2020.

The Unified Interface is now the default interface for the Dynamics App for Outlook, the Dynamics mobile app, and for all new Dynamics 365 apps moving forward.

What the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook Offers

Increase productivity and tap the power of Dynamics 365 apps while you’re using Outlook on the desktop, web, or phone.

What a huge time savings it is to be able to add contacts, leads, cases, and much more to a record… all from within Outlook, without switching applications. This is how easy it is:

Simply click on the Dynamics 365 icon in Outlook (found at the top right-hand side). add contacts and leads 1 1024x122 Increase Productivity with Dynamics 365 App for Outlook

A screen then pops up, click the (+) sign.

add contacts and leads 2 205x300 Increase Productivity with Dynamics 365 App for Outlook

You are then given a choice of adding not only just a contact, lead, opportunity, case, or account, but you can also choose to add knowledge articles, projects, or SOWs.

add contacts and leads 3 238x300 Increase Productivity with Dynamics 365 App for Outlook

The item of your choice is now added. See how simple that was?

Another very useful function is Using Relationship assistant to get additional insights on your customers.

Again, click on the Dynamics 365 icon. add contacts and leads 1 Increase Productivity with Dynamics 365 App for Outlook

A screen will pop up. Simply click on the 3 ellipses on the right-hand corner

relationship assistant 2 210x300 Increase Productivity with Dynamics 365 App for Outlook

A drop-down menu will open, giving you three choices, choose Relationship Assistant.

relationship assistant 3 300x186 Increase Productivity with Dynamics 365 App for Outlook

Visit our blog to continue reading the article and for some great Microsoft resources…

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

5 Ways to Increase Velocity During Restaurant Shift Work

October 27, 2019 NetSuite

5 Ways to Increase Velocity During Restaurant Shift Work

Posted by Brady Thomason, NetSuite Solution Manager, Restaurant & Hospitality

According to Wikipedia, velocity is equivalent to a specification of an object’s speed and direction of motion. Velocity as it relates to your restaurant’s operations isn’t so much about physics, but a culture that you create as the leader. When a guest is left waiting at the host stand, or a server forgets to greet a table, we usually think about how that impacts the guest experience first (as we should), but have you ever considered how those service missteps impact your financials? Let’s take a moment to explore a few ways that velocity affects your top-line.

…In Full-Service

There are typically more guest “choke points” in a full-service restaurant (FSR) compared to a limited-service restaurant (LSR) due to the greater complexity of FSR guest-flow, and consequently, more ways to congest your revenue intake.

Problem: Hosts put guests on a “false wait” with open tables in the dining room
Impact: Guests opt to dine elsewhere, or your tables aren’t turned as quickly, leading to longer wait times, lost sales and dissatisfied guests
Solution: Train your hosts to never go on a false wait unless approved by a manager. Depending on your restaurant’s size and volume, you may need a greeter and a seater. The greeter’s job is to stay at the host stand to greet incoming guests and manage the wait list, and the seater’s job is to get “butts in seats” while scouting for open and/or dirty tables and communicating with the busser. On the same note, make sure hosts are quoting realistic wait times. Under-promise and over-deliver (quote higher wait times and seat faster than quoted) is very common and actually not a great practice—the high wait times scare guests and increase the likelihood of a walk-out.
Problem: Lack of training leaves key people unaware of expectations
Impact: Hosts have no idea they’re not supposed to go on false waits, bussers don’t know how quickly they’re expected to flip dirty tables (i.e. 90 seconds), servers don’t know how fast they need to greet the table (i.e. 60 seconds or less). All of this negatively impacts your velocity and slows the entire operation down, especially during the rush when it counts the most.
Solution: Service timing expectations should be documented in your service training and enforced by the management team. Otherwise, your staff is left to their own interpretation of speed-of-service and your velocity is cut off at the heels. Expectations should be ingrained in the culture of your restaurant and discussed during pre-shifts and staff meetings.
Problem: Key roles don’t effectively communicate to each other
Impact: Hosts don’t know where to seat next, which backs up the front door, the kitchen doesn’t know there are 20 open menus in the dining room which impacts ticket times, the busser doesn’t know the next tables to clear which . . . you get the idea.
Solution: Consider implementing walkie talkies with headsets for hosts, bussers and managers. This is an affordable and effective way to allow your staff to communicate the right way without leaving their stations. Now key roles can respond to the information being delivered real-time, and your dining room can operate at max efficiency and hit full revenue potential.

…in Limited-Service

Problem: Fragmented or non-existent tech
Impact: Guests have difficulty with or are completely unable to order online, impacting speed-of-service, visit frequency and intent to return. According to a recent survey conducted by QSR Magazine, 39 percent of QSR customers in the U.S. ordered food from an app in the past 90 days, and 60 percent said they would visit a limited-service restaurant more if kiosks were available. It’s clear, restaurants that are willing to adapt to their guests’ evolving needs will improve not only velocity, but the guest experience, intent to return, visit frequency and the P&L benefits that come with all the above.
Problem: Menus aren’t readily available in line, so guests take too long to order at the counter
Impact: Slow-moving line, long wait and unhappy guests. Incoming guests see the long line and walk out. Guests are quicker to decline add-ons and upsells in a slow-moving line.
Solution: Improved menu visibility towards the start of the line will help guests make their decisions while they wait, instead of bogging down the service line. Consider adding paper or digital menus at the start of the line. If possible, explore kiosks/self-service options.

Posted on Thu, October 24, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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Increase Business Impact with Power BI and Azure Analytics

October 4, 2019 Self-Service BI

Emerging competition and fierce financial pressures are driving businesses to embark on a digital transformation journey.

A new Harvard Business Review Analytics Service survey revealed that data-driven enterprises are better positioned to manage this disruption and become market leaders. In this survey, 87% of the respondents believed that analytics proficiency will be a competitive differentiator in their industry over the next two years.

Power BI and Azure Analytics help businesses build a data-driven culture and drive analytics proficiency. This has been seen in recent findings from the commissioned Forrester Consulting study, The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Azure Analytics With Power BI. The study specifies that together, Azure Analytics and Power BI can provide value to customers by delivering an ROI of 271% over three years.

But how is this significant ROI possible? Three aspects we explore here are our impact on Total Cost of Ownership, Time to Insights and Productivity.

Total Cost of Ownership

The Forrester study found that Power BI and Azure Analytics lowers TCO by 25.7%. Power BI’s economic model really helps customers drive a data culture by putting BI in the hands of everyone: authors can use Power BI Desktop completely for free, and access to Power BI for end users is just $ 10 per user, per month. When combined with Azure Analytics, a large portion of your infrastructure is managed by Microsoft. This results in a lower cost of ownership. These cost savings are one of the reasons why customers like Fordham University are adopting Power BI and Azure.

“We can quickly roll out Power BI to anyone who needs it, and, compared with other solutions that charge over $ 1,000 for a desktop license, Power BI Desktop is free.”

Rashid Khan, Director of Analytics, Fordham University

Time to Insights

According to the Forrester study, Time to Insights was 27% faster. Waiting for data to refresh, queries to be revised, and hiring highly skilled data scientists to build AI models are a thing of the past. Power BI provides a low-code/no-code report authoring experience with the ability to easily add AI models via point and click experience and simple visualizations. With Power BI and Azure Analytics, business users can get data and actionable insights in seconds.

“We now deliver all store sales data at 9 a.m. instead of 11 a.m. Those 2 hours are very important for our purchasers because they have so much, they need to do. This improves forecast accuracy, managing inventories, and ordering the right products to sell.”

Forrester study interviewee

“The Power BI machine learning algorithms made unlocking insights from qualitative feedback quick, efficient and meaningful. We can now parse hundreds of thousands of customer comments for sentiment, themes, and issues with a speed and level of analysis that our human efforts simply could not achieve.”

Lee Sherry, Head of Analytics and Data Science, Geocaching

Productivity

Better self-service tools and automation via Power BI and Azure Analytics led to an average time savings of 1.75 hours per week for business users.

Power BI improves human productivity by bringing already familiar experiences from Office 365, Excel and PowerPoint. In addition, our integration with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint enhances collaboration between users in an organization. All these, in combination with Azure Analytics providing automated server management on behalf of IT staff greatly improves productivity.

“End user empowerment is key. Everyone in the company can now produce better data visualizations and can access the data faster. Collaboration, communication, and visibility on analytics have greatly improved.”

Enterprise architect, networking equipment interviewed for the Forrester study

When you add it all up, Power BI and Azure Analytics are simply unmatched!

Get started today

To learn more about Azure Analytics and Power BI, watch the recording of the webinar: Take Your Business Intelligence Further with Blazing-Fast Analytics or read Azure’s take on why, together, we are simply unmatched.

Increase Business Impact with Power BI and Azure Analytics — Charles Feddersen and Christian Wade

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Upstream Oil And Gas CFOs: Increase Oilfield Margins And Reduce Operating Costs

September 13, 2019 SAP

As an upstream oil and gas CFO, you are well aware that your business has a lot of boom-and-bust cycles.

For example, four years ago, the price of oil dropped to approximately US$ 30 a barrel – and wells became hugely unprofitable. Three years later, it went up to $ 70 per barrel, and there was a lot of irrational exuberance. Geopolitical risk and supply/demand factors added to the instability.

But you need to moderate those boom-and-bust, bust-and-boom cycles – and it’s not easy when everyone around you is having a hair-on-fire moment.

After all, your wells are your bread and butter. If they’re not producing, you’re not surviving.

Profound change

Upstream oil and gas CFOs are seeing profound changes in the financial landscape. They’re seeing oil price swings, new technology, more restrictive regulations, and oilfield production challenges. They’re seeing drilling, operating, and maintenance costs increasing while upstream production margins are dropping. In addition, they’re seeing declining well production, increasing water disposal costs, procurement/supply chain inefficiency, and Health and Safety Executive (HSE) reporting and compliance issues.

Digitizing operations improves well profitability

Did you know that you could get a 10% to 20% reduction in financial operating costs by using intelligent finance solutions?

Here are some operational benefits:

A/R finance: 5%-10% reduction in A/R write-offs

Financial close: 5%-10% reduction in business and operations analysis and reporting analysis

Finance operations: 10%-40% improvement in invoice-processing productivity

Your financial planning and analysis processes could produce increased visibility into overall spend and expenses by 25%-50% – as well as a reduction in financial planning cycle time and budgeting and forecasting costs. And you could eliminate silos across business units by 25%-50%. These could go a long way to improving value to your shareholders.

Source: SAP Performance Benchmarking

Finance focused on well profitability

Now finance can be the intelligence center of both corporate and business units. You can take advantage of a fully integrated oil and gas financial management system, including finance, joint venture accounting (JVA), production revenue accounting (PRA), and upstream operations management. The aim is to optimize well profitability and reduce operating costs.

Well profitability: Gain a real-time view of well profitability and operating costs by completion interval and detailed drill-down on all payables and receivables with financial and operational KPIs that drive the business.

Operating cost reduction: Instantly access accurate production and oilfield services information to assess vendor performance, actual versus budgeted costs, and business-unit margins. Drill down into detailed operating costs and production margins.

Simplified reporting and analysis from the oil and gas business unit to the boardroom: You can see a single version of the truth for all financial and operational data. You’ll also see real-time business and operational performance metrics.

Customer success story

SAP recently worked with a global company in the emerging oil and gas development market. It provides a full range of upstream products and services including oil/gas field development, oilfield supply chain, equipment maintenance, and technical services.

The key challenges were material and equipment cost inefficiencies and no timely information about operations status and financial flow. In addition, the finance team was using manual procurement processes and Excel spreadsheets.

The company implemented a hybrid environment with end-to-end finance and procurement business processes and fully integrated capabilities for marketing, operations, R&D, and knowledge management. Newly created finance and procurement templates are adaptable to future business requirements.

The result was a $ 4.6 million savings on material and equipment costs per year, $ 630,000 reduction in reporting costs per year, and $ 2.3 million savings on external procurement costs per year.

A finance capability roadmap

Your roadmap to the future depends on five fundamentals:

Centralize financial reporting with a focus on well profitability: Centralize financial reporting from all oilfield systems, including integration of production, procurement, supply chain, and oilfield services costs. Enable real-time operational visibility to well performance and field profitability.

Digitize core finance processes: Drive updates to a single journal, general ledger, cost accounting, and JVA/PRA. Enable increased hydrocarbon margin transparency, intercompany transactions and reconciliations, and granular visibility into all accounting transactions.

AP and AR automation: Reduce accounts payable (AP) invoice-processing costs related to integrated invoice routing, exception handling, and invoice management. Use credit management, disputes and collections management, and self-billing. Integrate commodity transactions to reduce the need for daily bulk-data transfers to third-party solutions, provide tighter management and enforcement of credit limits, and automate cash application.

Compliance and governance controls: Use compliance and governance controls (GRC), segregation of duties (SOD), and access controls. Provide continuous compliance of SOD conflicts to eliminate manual audit work. Offer cybersecurity to prevent threats to the core transactional system by bad actors.

Treasury and risk management: Manage every activity associated with cash, payments, liquidity, risk, and compliance. Help finance gain more control over payment batches, foreign exchange, and commodity exposures.

Your morning coffee

In your next daily or weekly meeting, ask your CEO, COO, and VP of field operations these questions:

What are our actual fully burdened production costs?

What are our detailed operating costs?

What wells should we produce today that might not be profitable at $ 30 a barrel or $ 40 a barrel?

What are the best projects we can work on today?

It’s sure to spark a lively conversation.

Join our webinar series on the SAP S/4HANA Movement program and learn from the program’s manager Bjoern Braemer how it enables your organization to manage a seamless transition to SAP S/4HANA.

Follow SAP Finance online: @SAPFinance (Twitter) | LinkedIn | Facebook | YouTube

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For Immediate Release: Increase Visibility with These Press Release Basics

June 12, 2019 CRM News and Info

Pitch, Promote, and Publish Your Press Release

Get your news on every available channel and pitch it immediately upon release to your relevant media contacts (remember: know your audience; help their readership). Newswires serve their purpose, but only 3% of journalists rely on the newswire, so why should you (2)?

Pitch your press release to journalists

I like to see who’s been talking about the press release topic in the past few months, covered our competitors, and has shown interest in our news in the past. It’s a lot of work, but having a media database like Cision, Agility, or Muck Rack makes this a lot more manageable. In fact, 65% of journalists would rather receive customized press releases segmented by product, industry, or theme, rather than one mass-audience distribution (3). For instance, I have different media lists for different types of press releases and then segment the media lists further for relevant messaging.

Submit your press release to participating publications

Some publications are great about submitting your press release (either by form or email), and if you follow all the above tips, you can likely get your press release featured. I maintain a list of publications for easier coverage, and I highly recommend creating your own list for quick reference.

Publish your press release on your website

Every organization’s website needs a pressroom to house media coverage and press releases. For one, you own the link to your press release — plus it helps drive more traffic to your website. Housing your press release in your own press section of your website creates more engagement opportunities through email newsletters, social media, etc.

Share your press release on social media

Never underestimate the power of social media. Share your press release on your company’s various social media handles, and encourage your team members to share as well. (This is especially easy with Act-On’s Advanced Social Media Module.) Include your multimedia imagery to give the social posts extra umph, create a few varying versions, and piggyback off a few trending hashtags.

Press releases require great writing, thorough research, and deft distribution techniques — all of which requires a great deal of time and skill — but the pay-off can help get your business and offerings in front of your target audiences while also increasing brand awareness. Plus, they help you build brand credibility by getting featured in media publications. If you want to see how it’s done, visit Act-On’s pressroom to learn more!

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4 Advanced Ways Brands Use Data to Increase Online Sales

May 12, 2019 CRM News and Info

Data is one of the biggest advantages e-commerce brands have over their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Brands that sell products online can glean insights not only from sales figures, but also from impressions, click-through rates, bounce rates, and numerous other data points. They have a constant stream of visitors to help them optimize every image, ad and product description.

However, most brands are just scratching the surface of what they can do with e-commerce data, because they’re focusing exclusively on their own data. Manufacturers that want to maximize sales need to look beyond their own websites and tap into data from retailers that sell their products.

It sounds daunting, but without data from retailers, you’re missing the big picture of how people interact with your products online. As technology continues to evolve, the gap will only grow between brands that leverage the full potential of e-commerce data and those that don’t.

Right now, brands can use data from online retailers to improve their customers’ shopping experience, learn from buying behavior, monitor branding, and optimize their campaigns — all of which help you increase sales.

Following are four advanced tips for using e-commerce data to increase sales.

1. Streamline the Path to Purchase

No matter how good your product page looks on your own website, some consumers prefer buying from their favorite online retailer. Their loyalty to your brand shouldn’t be at odds with perks like these:

Free two-day shipping
Hundreds or thousands of verified reviews and ratings
Rewards programs
The convenience of buying online and picking up in store (BOPIS)

You can fight to keep people on your own website and risk losing sales, or you can embrace the diversity of the e-commerce ecosystem, and let your visitors decide where and how they want to buy your products.

What happens if someone goes to a retailer’s website, and your product is out of stock? Or the price is higher than what you listed on your website? They’ll probably either decide not to buy, or worse — they’ll buy a competing product.

That’s why more and more manufacturers have begun using software that automatically pulls pricing and stock information from their retail partners in real time, so they can display the data on their product pages. This lets consumers choose to buy your products in the way they prefer, while also ensuring that you don’t send them to a dead end.

By reducing the number of clicks and searches it takes to get to their products, these manufacturers have been capitalizing on people’s intent to buy. There’s less opportunity for their visitors to fall through the cracks or change their minds. Since these brands send people to retailers where they can actually purchase their products, they’re increasing dramatically the number of visitors who become customers.

2. Follow the Entire Customer Journey

Say someone clicks your Google ad or opens your email and clicks through to your product page. After doing some research about your product, say that individual decides to buy it. So the shopper hops over to Walmart.com and… what happens next?

Does the shopper buy your product?
Does the shopper ditch your product for a competitor’s?
What else goes into the shopper’s cart?
What complementary products does the shopper purchase?

Without data from online retailers, manufacturers can’t be certain how well — or how poorly — their marketing campaigns are doing. All you can see is what happens in the bubble of your own website, even though consumers might be buying from retailers as a result of your campaigns.

Manufacturers can remove the mystery by using tools that pull data from retailers’ websites. These tools allow you to follow a consumer’s path from your marketing assets to your website, to your retail partners, to checkout — so you actually can see how your campaigns are performing. This helps you focus your efforts on the campaigns that give you the biggest return on investment.

Additionally, some tools dgive manufacturers cart-level data, so you can learn what your customers are buying alongside your products, and how much they’re spending. Are consumers buying your drill with a competitor’s drill bits? Are they buying your home security cameras along with cribs, diapers, and other baby supplies? Insights like these can lead to bundling opportunities or even new product lines, diverting more sales from your competition.

3. Unify Your Brand Across Storefronts

Suppose someone is very interested in your product, but wants to purchase from a retailer to take advantage of a rewards program, or to read reviews. The shopper researches your product for a while on your website and then they goes looking for it on Amazon. Or Target. Or wherever. When the shopper reaches those other product pages, the images may be a little different. Or the name is displayed differently. Or the description isn’t quite right.

These might seem like minor discrepancies, but if there’s doubt that a page is displaying the right product, the consumer is going to click somewhere else. No one wants to pay for a knockoff or get stuck with an outdated model. All of a sudden you’ve lost a sale — not because your product wasn’t what the shopper wanted, but because your retail partner didn’t upload the new branding assets you sent a month earlier. Or — oops — you updated your own branding and forgot to send the new assets to your retail partners.

With the sheer number of products you sell and the many online retailers you work with, brand monitoring might sound like an impossible task — but it doesn’t have to be. Again, many brands today leverage data from online retailers to solve this problem and increase sales.

Using advanced technology, manufacturers can see all the copy, images, videos and other assets that appear alongside their products. More importantly, they can aggregate the data and see how well their retail partners are following their current brand guidelines.

By ensuring that your brand and products look and feel consistent wherever they appear, you help relieve any friction created by old images, incorrect copy and other discrepancies.

4. Prioritize Your Highest-Converting Retailers

Obviously, you don’t want to send people to a retailer that is doing a terrible job representing your product online or whose product page simply isn’t converting.

Maybe there are some abysmal reviews on your product page from people who had a bad experience with the retailer, or who objected to things that had nothing to do with your product. Sending shoppers there doesn’t just lose the sale on that page — it dissuades those consumers from considering you elsewhere.

Or maybe a retailer is promoting your competitors’ products on your product page.

On the other hand, some of your retail partners probably are doing an outstanding job. They have stellar reviews and current branding, and they always promote your relevant add-ons. Most importantly, they make sales.

You can use this information to decide which retail partners are worth investing in and promoting — and who you need to drop. If you have a “where to buy” widget on your website, you can elevate the retailers that convert and demote the ones that don’t. This ensures that you have the best shot at converting visitors who hit your product pages — and ultimately, at increasing sales.

Use Data to See the Big Picture

When you sell multiple products with multiple online retailers, the data you collect from your own website can take you only so far. If you can’t see which retailers have your product in stock, which represent your products the best, or if visitors even convert, you’re losing sales.

Conversion optimization platforms are developing new, more robust data solutions every day, and tech-savvy brands are finding more ways to leverage data and increase sales. In the world of e-commerce, the data revolution is far from over.

Anthony Ferry is CEO of
PriceSpider.

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Three Ways to Increase Your Restaurant’s Yelp Rating

February 17, 2019 NetSuite

Posted by Brady Thomason, NetSuite Solution Manager, Restaurant & Hospitality

Nearly half of restaurant-goers surveyed said they checked an online review before visiting a business, according to a survey by Restaurant Bistro. Although Google is gaining traction for its reviews, Yelp is still the dominant destination for restaurant reviews, so much so that the restaurant category is most commonly associated with Yelp, according to a recent post on the Yelp blog. In fact, 94 percent of diners are influenced by online reviews, according to a TripAdvisor survey.

But here’s the thing: it’s really hard for a restaurant get a very high rating on Yelp, even harder than it is for businesses in other industries. The average rating for businesses across Yelp is 3.77, with 40 percent of the ratings neither one star nor five stars. For restaurants the average Yelp rating is 3.71 which is consistent across the United States and Canada, according to the Yelp analysis.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Studies consistently show that consumers associate imperfection with authenticity, with even negative reviews serving a somewhat positive role because they establish trust, according to a study from Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center. And there are ways your business can continually try to push those ratings higher and ensure that it’s portrayed at its best to those scrolling through Yelp to make their dining choices. Here is some advice on how to increase your business’ Yelp rating.

1. Understand Yelp’s recommendation engine – and don’t try to game it

Yelp’s recommendation engine is powerful, but can also serve as a source of great frustration for restaurants that see positive reviews filtered out of rankings. About 75 percent of all reviews are recommended, according to Yelp, leaving of course a full one-quarter that are not. This means that while bogus reviews are ditched, sometimes a legitimate one might be caught in that net.

Yelp will “generally” filter out reviews from a person who has written only one review, has no profile photo or posts reviews that are too positive or too negative or are from a location other than where the business is located, according to an article on Vivial. Because quality, reliability and user activity weigh so high in Yelp’s ratings, there are some things you definitely don’t want to do if you’d like to boost your ratings, according to RevLocal. These include avoiding paying or incentivizing people to review your business or asking friends and family to write reviews.

2. Content is king, and brevity, the soul of…it

People pay more attention to what the review says than the star rating itself, according to a blog on Consumer Affairs.

In that same vein, shorter is better. The top 25 percent of mobile reviews by length rated 3.31 on average, while the 25 percent shortest came in at 4.10.

Yelp’s own data demonstrates the benefits of shorter reviews and the words that generally characterize them. A review that fits into a text message and sums up the experience with words like “great,” “best,” “awesome” and “amazing,” is much higher rated than reviews with the words, “ordered,” “came,” “minutes,” “asked” and “wanted,” according to Yelp.

Consider this in developing strategies for getting your customers to leverage Yelp. For instance, if you’re going to include some language on the bottom of a receipt or in a follow-up email asking for a review, consider phrases with a call to action like, “Let others know about your awesome time! Write a few quick words on Yelp!,” or “Was our pizza the best? Help us by spending a second on Yelp!”

What’s more, consider brevity and adjectives in deciding which reviews you want to have recommended of the ones that have been filtered out. According to RevLocal, “if you see a review a real customer has written on your Yelp page, but the review is being filtered, you can add the reviewer as a friend or vote the review useful, funny or cool.” This can help legitimate reviews be recognized by Yelp, according to the blog.

3. Respond to reviews

Consumers are almost twice as likely to visit the business if the owner responds to a negative review, according to a survey from Review Trackers. How you respond to reviews – negative or positive — makes a big difference in whether consumers view the feedback as authentic and are willing to give your business a try.

First, it’s important to respond fast. Responding within 24 hours increases your chances of having a reviewer upgrade their review to a higher star rating by 33%, according to Yelp. Secondly, use the right channel. A Yelp Business User Account lends the ability to respond to reviews with a Public Comment or Direct Message.

Yelp recommends always starting the review process with a public comment so that, of course, the fact that you value customer service and feedback is apparent to all visitors. But consider following up with a direct message as well, according to Yelp, to gather more information from the consumer about their concerns, whether you believe they are valid or not. It not only lends valuable insight that can reshape how your business approaches something, but engaging a potential adversary could actually help turn them into an impactful ally.

These strategies can help boost your Yelp scores, and ensure consumers continue to spend time on the platform letting the world know just how great, awesome and amazing your restaurant is.

Posted on Thu, February 14, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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