In 2020, travel restrictions and social distancing rules decimated businesses across almost every industry. Within a month, sales at Primark plunged from £650 a month to zero. By contrast, the Zoom Video conferencing app was suddenly worth more than the world's seven biggest airlines combined. The future is not what it was forecasted to be.
With most people advised to stay in their homes, traffic growth across over-the-top (OTT) streaming services rocketed. At the same time, this initiated new challenges around creating enough content to satisfy the insatiable appetite of locked-down audiences. One of the most significant changes for the industry was the move towards low-touch experiences.
Onboarding New Customers
Welcome to the rise of the low-touch economy. Business leaders now have a long list of lessons learned in 2020. In a world where direct contact between customers and businesses is no longer encouraged, OTT streaming services need to build technological and next-generation products to diversify their recurring revenue streams. They have to do this fast. As new behaviors blend with old mindsets, the only certainty is that businesses can no longer continue exploring a new world with an old map.
Multi-service operators, SaaS companies, and direct-to-home cable services have to reimagine new customer onboarding strategies, all while improving the post-sales experience. The traditional high-touch customer onboarding model is no longer fit for purpose. For the most part, nobody wants to deal with cable companies or risk inviting an engineer into their home.
The low-touch onboarding approach enables new customers to self-serve, get up, and run through an onboarding tool or series of video tutorials. This method allows users to embrace Slack, Dropbox, and Zoom with minimal fuss. Such low-touch experiences are becoming the standard expectation for future customer interactions. This is why at Evergent, our intuitive and robust lifecycle management platform allows consumers to onboard and make full use of our system quickly.
However, before businesses can build genuine and effective low-touch onboarding experiences, they must first understand their customers from the inside out.
The Importance of Understanding the Customer
Big data is increasingly playing a critical role in how businesses get to know their customers. Emerging technologies and new solutions make it possible to unlock valuable insights from multiple touchpoints. Understanding customers' demographics, economic status, and what motivates them will enable businesses to embark on a journey of customer segmentation.
We all have unique purchasing habits and personal preferences, and we all interpret advertisements differently. Customer segmentation allows companies to offer different value propositions to their customers. Through personalized marketing strategies, customized advertisements can be delivered to customers based on their individual preferences, at the same time giving businesses the power to shape how customers see them.
Creating a Seamless Low-Touch Experience
There are heightened customer expectations from audiences, especially the tech-savvy, who see seamless low-touch experiences as the new standard. Evergent's subscriber management solution makes the discovery and learning process much easier by providing insights into how subscribers engage with low-touch options. It does this all while helping customers save money in the process.
When many users are cutting back on their monthly outgoings, looking after customers has never been more critical. Evergent's customer care and support modules focus on reducing churn and maximizing customers' retention through a self-support model that brings billing, profiles, preferences, and credit card information into one portal.
Our intuitive billing and revenue management solution also plays a crucial role in simplifying user monetization. On the flip side, it makes revenue optimization and OTT billing more straightforward for OTT streaming services. Using machine learning, the solution also eliminates the need for human intervention when onboarding new clients, accelerating the overall process and saving time for businesses.
A Low-Touch and High-Tech Economy
The low-touch economy is fueled by consumers' evolving demands and how they are consuming digital content. With technological advances, we are witnessing the emergence of new delivery models across every device, changing the competitive landscape as we know it.
Combining customer data with automation tools and intuitive UX customer experience design help deliver a seamless low-touch experience. Conversations with cable and satellite companies, telecommunication, and wireless organizations worldwide have enabled us to build a frictionless business enablement solution that makes it easy for multi-service operators to deliver the low-touch experiences their audiences seek.
It's time to ditch the tired one size fits all approach. Segmenting the customer journey can help delight digital audiences while helping businesses discover new recurring revenue streams. By uniting TV, app store purchases, and direct purchases, businesses can arm themselves with a holistic view of the digital entertainment landscape.
Moving forward, business success will continue to be determined by how quickly companies can adapt and evolve with the expectations of their audiences. In a socially distanced world, the low-touch economy looks set to thrive for the foreseeable future.
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