espire-infolabs

[espire-infolabs]

Sitecore CRM Connectors - Opening up a World for Integrated & Superior User Experiences

It has been long and successful journey for Sitecore - from being a robust and scalable content management platform to an integrated multi-channel engine with a suite of market-leading tools for managing and improving customer experience.

Marketers have the ability to customize user experience at the micro level with data gathered through every user interaction with businesses, and it helps them to drive personalization, marketing automation, testing & analytics.

While Sitecore is positioning itself as a versatile marketing tool, the truth is that the only way to truly reach a comprehensive view of customer interactions with your brand and use this information to deliver personalized content - is to integrate it with the CRM system.

Connecting User Experience

Customers connect with brands through various channels and it's important to unify data throughout, for seamless experience on each of your brand channels.

Data from Sitecore xDB can be extracted from Sitecore and shared with your other systems, such as Dynamics and Salesforce, and vice versa. It helps to update a Sitecore user profile based on your CRM data. This means you can maintain an up to date and consistent view of users in both systems and use that to influence the way you communicate with them online as well as offline.

CRM Connectors

Sitecore connectors are the latest integration tools from the WebCMS giant that allows for quick customization to fit specific organizational needs. Connectors are so built to allow the delivery of data and functionality to Sitecore. These connectors are highly usable, consistent, manageable and can be upgraded. Sitecore offers CRM connectors both with Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Dynamic CRM.

Sitecore to Salesforce Connector/ Sitecore Connect for Salesforce

Sitecore Connect for Salesforce helps you combine Sitecore with Salesforce CRM or the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, to help you offer personalized experiences to your users. The Sitecore connector is primarily focused on exchanging profile information to and from the CRM system. This means that the connector lets you synchronize Sitecore experience profiles in Sales Cloud contacts. This bidirectional integration allows Sales Cloud contacts to sync back to Sitecore.

If additional aspects need to be synchronized, they can be made available in the system as 'properties' on contacts. Adding facets in Sitecore is part of the configuration, but it also requires some code changes to help identify facets. Additionally, the connector allows you to synchronize CRM tasks, assigned to the cloud sales contact, in the experience profile within Sitecore.

Espire's Expertise in CRM connector Integration

Our experience in integration of Sitecore connector with both Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Dynamics, and our decade-long partnership with Sitecore, puts us in a leading position to help our prospective customers in smooth transition to connect their Sitecore CMS with their CRM systems.

We have successfully implemented the full workable solution as per contingent custom requirements and initial issues while implementing the connector for exchange of data between the two systems.

Some of the challenges that we have successfully resolved for brands, among others include:

Custom Setup

Custom field mappings

Rule based conditional mapping

Sync delta contact pipeline

Unique Contact Identifier

Managing Duplicate contacts

Merging contacts facets

We have helped businesses drastically reduce sync time from days to real-time. At a higher level, data can be integrated by mapping fields from Sitecore's xDB user table with appropriate fields in CRM. Therefore, you need to decide which data you wish to share between the two platforms. With right resources and enough time, you can start creating new acquisitions and continue to retain them by connecting the two platforms together, thereby increasing conversions and quality of leads.

Read More : https://www.espire.com/blog/posts/sitecore-crm-connectors-opening-up-a-world-for-integrated-and-superior-user-experiences

Blog Source: https://www.espire.com/blog/posts/sitecore-crm-connectors-opening-up-a-world-for-integrated-and-superior-user-experiences

[espire-infolabs]

How AI and Big Data is Revolutionising the Insurance Industry

It is not surprising to note that insurance industry is among the first to adopt modern technologies like AI, IoT, Big Data and Analytics given their reliance on consumer data. However, such technological terms are not generally associated with this industry. But if you start to think whether insurance industry requires these technologies - your answer quite naturally would be yes as the basic principle on which insurance industry works is risk management.

Hence, such an industry depends largely on prediction of risk for a person, company or an organization. This is here data plays crucial role as more the information - better will be the prediction. More so, when predictions are accurate it helps such insurers save money and earn extra revenue. Adoption of AI and Big Data technologies gives the company an edge over the competition.

Telematics and wearable sensors collect information about customers by installing a device, say in their car, which shows how the person accelerates the car or applies brakes, whether she is likely to cross speed limit and so on. All this information allows the company to build a detailed profile of the customer and assess the risk involved. In this way a safe driver may not be charged more premium than an unsafe one.

Presently companies study their client's information received at their end and not on real time basis. A real time information gives an edge to the insurer by saving money that would have otherwise been spent on expensive assessments and audits.

Chatbots help an insurance company to gather initial data without having to engage employees. Hence the efforts of employees can be channeled elsewhere. Such chatbots thus help in decreasing operational cost and ultimately reduction in the price of premiums. Individualized experience leads to improvised CX and customer loyalty with higher ROI and growth in revenue.

The times are gone when customers were offered a limited set of options to choose for insurance packages. Hyper-personalization and improvised CX is the buzz word in today's business and insurance industry is not aloof of the fact. Italian insurance company Allianz1 allows consumers to design and tailor policies from modules offered by the company.

Introduction of AI and Big Data not only helps an insurance company to provide tailor-made solutions and reduce premium cost but also helps in faster and successful settlement of claim. Lemonade's Artificial Intelligence robot 'Jim' hit the news headlines when it settled a claim in just three seconds or less which takes for the best companies at least a week to process.

Blog Source : http://www.espire.com/blog/posts/how-ai-and-big-data-is-revolutionising-the-insurance-industry

[espire-infolabs]

Data Driven Marketing is Indispensable for Strong CX

Today's customers are more powerful than ever, and marketeers are on their feet to ensure an improvised CX led by consumer data to provide a hyper-personal feel. CX is more than just meeting customer expectations. Providing excellent CX is an integral part of customer retention which leads to better ROI, higher sales and ultimately bigger profit margins.

"69% of marketers plan to increase their budgets for data-based marketing next year - GDMA"

In a competitive business culture based on analytics, data-driven decisions are the most crucial decisions.  It is to be noted that ultimately measuring and optimizing CX cannot be simply limited to conversion but to ensure an efficient customer journey. To ensure a prosperous business, CX requires centralized, customized tools, comprehensive analysis and, above all, a well charted strategy that focuses on data and is built around data.

The sooner your marketing team develops the ability to collect large data and process it more effectively, the better you will be prepared to focus on your CX (customer experience) strategy.

Getting the right audience at the right time with the right message is essential to drive relevant participation and meaningful communication. To achieve this, your marketeers need to align their campaigns along data rich trajectory, understand the various user profiles in depth, and start interest-based communication with them.

Data-driven marketing allows marketeers to practice dynamic customization through customer journey mapping (CJM), that is, to identify the key points of a user's journey and channel steps towards final purchase.

To know more about CJM please follow this link (Customer Journey Mapping)

Versatility is the key to meaningful conversations across multiple marketing channels available. A marketeer can easily measure how a particular customer responds to deals and offers through social media and how another client would prefer e-mail to customer service requests, often responding to coupons and offers via e-mail. Thus, organizations can provide a data-based approach to reach individuals in the most effective way and collect positive responses.

"Data enables marketing leaders to measure and optimize their programs in real time, and design and improve customer experience."

Marketeers these days rarely consider product pricing as a way to steer ROI. However, pricing when linked to structured data can significantly improve the company's ROI. The key is to change product prices based on customers, market conditions, demand supply economics, competition, etc. These parameters must work together to reach the appropriate price points. A fully enriched marketing data bank can provide businesses potential to explore different pricing strategies that fit its product range.

Data-driven marketing gives you improved, refined statistics for your audience that minimizes product failure. This not only helps marketers develop strategies for their marketing campaigns; it also helps processes and the technical team to continually improve and update the product.

Automating your marketing tasks in the absence of correct data and without regard to buyer behavior and preferences will only automate inefficiencies. Integrating a data-driven approach and automation creates an effective way to gather and sort ideas from thousands of data points about campaigns, channels, users, products, and services. Thus, automation of marketing will be more feasible when combined with large data.

Data-driven decisions are the most important factor for businesses today. Whether it's a decision on how to divide a company's responsibilities when it comes to CX, or a decision on how to meet customer expectations, some aspects like: centralized data, detailed analysis and marketing driven data in general, have become critical.

Link Source : http://www.espire.com/blog/posts/data-driven-marketing-is-indispensable-for-strong-customer-experience

[espire-infolabs]

3 key Digital Strategy Giving Insurers the Competitive edge in this Disrupted Landscape

The insurance industry is in one of the most disrupted phases in the current era and it will redefine the way this industry works. The industry has been clamped down by legacy mainframes and tight legislature, riddled with low customer experience quotient. Hence innovation and transformation were always a Herculean task. However, there was no deterrent to adoption of the lightning speed changing technology landscape. Technology is advancing rapidly, and customers have multiple options, therefore expectations and hence stakes are very high.

With the advent of hi-tech, customers need everything at their convenient time, anywhere, and from any device. With legacy and resources limitation but with the myriad of new technologies, meeting this expectation was difficult but not impossible. As customer experience is of foremost importance but so is the legislature, hence online self-service portal became the need of the hour.

1. The maturing self-service and the future state of it

The first baby step was simple Self-Service portals bringing their offerings online and allowing download of forms. From here, insurers rapidly moved onto online quotation services, online purchase of standard policies, endorsement requests, and other such simple updates. However, with maturing AI, machine learning, and cognitive services - the Self-Service portals are now capable to offer more personalized, convenient, central, and channel agnostic customer engagement experiences.

In recent times, Self-Service now includes on-spot intuitive underwriting for even complex proposals with the instant quote and document submission, Instant First Notice of Loss notification, claims notification and so on. But this is not the end of it. We are miles to go before the entire benefit can be achieved through the self-service approach. There is a lot of scope for innovation in Self -Service solution, powered by AI enabled content management solutions, cognitive services, and machine learning. The next-in-line Self Service solutions would empower customers to take the next right step without seeking help from insurance call centers or service agents or brokers. This complete self-empowerment can be achieved through AI enabled chatbots, Robo-advisor, machine learning based underwriting and fraud assessment, automated policy servicing, and cognitive portals. One single solution or any such stand-alone hi-tech solution will be able to provide the comprehensive customer engagement nirvana. One also must be very careful of data security and GDPR guidelines. Hence, it requires a service partner who encapsulates the entire customer journey to suggest the right mix of technology offerings to elevate the customer experience and fulfill the digital transformation goals of that specific insurer.

2. The customer communication management roadmap and why now omnichannel

No Self-service solution is complete without communication management. Due to archaic platforms and disparate systems with outsourced activities, insurers are not able to provide consistent branding and customer experience. Customers are demanding more transparency in the communication process, especially with regards to claims settlement and policy servicing. Hence, insurers in their bid to rationalize and consolidate their offerings, they gravitate to personalized, targeted customer communication solutions. On-demand and interactive communications are no longer considered as a differentiator but as a basic must-have, as this is the norm now with the changing customer behavior. With the advent of ‘digital natives’, there are various options to communicate and connect with insurers and seamless experience is expected in the entire communication process. While they hop from one touch-point to another, without having to repeat the same details again and again, on each of these touch-points. To cater to this need, multi-channel customer communication solutions emerged but failed to create such seamless experiences, purely for not being able to integrate the different touch-points. It failed to manage parallel communication across multiple channels and hence led to the evolution of omni-channel communication. Omni-channel communication not only encourages eco-friendly strategy but also reduced the brand inconsistency and customer leakage. Omnichannel communication enables personalized interaction with customers, meeting their emotional needs by making contextual conversations, based on their last communication history across different touch-points and channels and current profile across different systems. With advancements in CCM technology, personalized videos with interactive features took that leap to provide that ultimate customer experience, by striking the right context, enabling smooth onboarding, up-selling and cross-selling.

3. The need for a connected ecosystem and the ingredients to build one

The next step for insurers to meet the millennial’s demand and technology advancement is to have channel-agnostic or channel-less solution for optimized, cognitive and tailored offerings. Insurers have always had the concern to optimize the orchestration of their solution as giving it to one vendor for all solutions may not be optimal and having multiple vendors involves high cost and interrupts seamless service. Hence, designing an integrated solution is required for a cohesive business ecosystem. A connected ecosystem is the key to climb up the customer journey management (CJM) maturity scale.

For a connected ecosystem, the architecture must be:

Highly scalable

Easy to upgrade

Manage seamless integration between different touch-points and provides comprehensive reports

ready and easy to introduce or remove any technology solutions

Smooth connect and disconnect with third-party vendors, as and when required

The building of reusable assets or APIs

This enables to bring technology out of the solution and strive to achieve the CX strategy goals of the business. It empowers the insurer to use the best-of-the-breed technology in the right context without going for a one-size-fits-all approach - enabling them to adopt a more comprehensive solution, tailored to meet their customers' need.

Vendors provide technology, but partners provide a solution to business problems. Insurers are now gravitating to the right partner who can orchestrate the solution, optimize and customize based on each specific insurer’s needs by selecting the right capabilities from the rich catalog of technology offerings.