Digital mood (& why it matters)
April 22nd, 2008
How individual customers feel about the brands they choose to do businesses with can be best described as their brand temperature, or mood. In an online environment where much or all of the relationship is defined digitally, brand attitude towards the online channel is often called digital mood.
Digital mood is important since it affects a customers’ propensity to buy and ultimately their loyalty. It is a fickle thing, changing dynamically based on the latest experience, but influenced by the customers unique past experience with the brand as well.
It’s important because a customer’s attitude at any point in time needs to be taken into account in the tone of any communication with the customer.
Here’s an example: a prospect is on line applying for a new account. After several steps they abandon the process, an all too common problem impacting as many as 4 in 5 online applications. If you’ve designed your new account opening process well, then you’ve captured both the email details early on and key value indicators which allow you to classify the potential value of the client.
It’s obvious that you need to follow up with the prospect. For example, you could automate an email that automatically follows up abandoned new account openings, with a link suggesting they complete the process. This will help, but is far from optimal.
How you follow up depends on why they abandoned the process, and who they are. If the prospect experienced a sequence of page errors, or poor website performance during their online application, then sending a link in a generic email for them to try again is unlikely to be effective.
In practice, a far more effective technique is to recognize they had a bad experience, and switch channels, perhaps by triggering a chat session while they are online, changing the content of the site, or offering a customer service based call to complete the process.
Recognizing their potential value to the business is also important at this stage to determine which channels to use. The opportunity to offer a higher quality of service to a potential premium client early on in the relationship can be very profitable.
