Founded in 2011, U.K.-based purechannelapps Inc. helps customers drive business growth through better enablement, communication and collaboration with their sales teams. purechannelapps delivers enterprise-class targeted e-communications and social media amplification solutions that help organisations to reduce communication costs and amplify their social media messaging through their brand advocates.
Olivier Choron, CEO and Founder of purechannelapps, talked to Loyalty360 about his burgeoning company.
What factors prompted the creation of purechannelapps, how does it work, and how is it unique in the customer loyalty/customer engagement market place?
During a prospect meeting (for another company of mine), I noticed that channel-centric vendors (i.e. companies that sold exclusively or largely through intermediaries) were typically missing the boat and not involving their ‘channel partners’ (retailers, dealers, resellers, etc.) in their own social media strategies. Instead, these vendors would engage in ‘direct’ social media activities (i.e. their own twitter handle, etc.) whilst completely ignoring the fact that buyers did not buy from them (or follow them) but from their partners (exclusively or largely).
So, I devised socialondemand, and we now enable vendors to:
- socially enable their partners (which is a great thing) and
- amplify their own brand messages via the huge social reach these intermediaries have.
So, everybody’s happy…
Intermediaries, who are typically small and cannot produce marketing content/news, now have easy and targeted access to news from their suppliers/ brands which they can easily re-post on their social media networks–making them ‘look’ very ‘socially active’ and, more importantly, enabling them to create discussions, via social media, with their own followers, around the brand messages they have re-posted.
Brands/vendors are happy because their content is now been seen by much wider audiences (it the networks of their intermediaries) and they generate demand ‘around’ their partners whilst keeping them closely engaged with the brands.
How does this impact the customer experience?
In a ‘channel/ intermediary’ model, hearing from a brand is great but these brands don’t sell directly. So, as an example, even if you like the latest car from BMW (as per a TV ad, for instance), you cannot buy from BMW directly…you have to find a local dealer for BMW. And maybe your local BMW dealer doesn’t have this car available yet…
Instead, if you already follow your BMW dealer, you can get informed by them (they would have shared the BMW content via socialondemand), quickly and via social media about the new models that are available… you know where you can get it from and you know you can get it now…
So, the customer experience has changed dramatically: Buyers get to hear the ‘brand’ news (in this case BMW) via the brand partners (i.e. the dealers) with whom the customer already has a relationship with…making the sales cycle much faster… buyers are influenced by the ‘real’ sellers…(i.e. the dealers).
How does your company stay on top of new technologies and how do they play a role in your company?
We employ a team of expert marketers and web developers who follow trends and competitors every day. Being a technology company, we adopt and implement new technologies as we see fit. For us, for instance, we use public APIs from the likes of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing etc. As soon as these companies develop new features, we embed them in our solutions.
What is your definition of customer loyalty and has it changed in recent years?
Customer loyalty as a definition is simply customers staying with us. How that happens and what that means for us and our approach to customer satisfaction is what we primarily focus on, for account management. Certainly in recent years all consumers have become more empowered, and competition has increased. This puts pressure on customer retention, and means you have to adapt your approach to customer satisfaction, which directly impacts on retention.
For me, we have to be proactive, visible and fair with our customers. That means that we are always thinking of new, better ways to improve our platform, to improve our communication with our customers and our relationships with them. We hold weekly calls with every customer, which is attended by decision-makers within our business, and we don’t overpromise to under-deliver.
This seems to be a successful definition and working structure of customer loyalty, as we have had a 100% customer retention rate last year!