Member Article

Behind the business with Transversal

Sharon King-Livesey, head of marketing at web self-service specialists Transversal, takes Bdaily behind the business.

What key challenges has your company recently faced?

Every year in the web self-service sector, customers are finding new ways to make contact with brands and the next big channel is always on the horizon. Our clients are always looking to us to guide them through the hype and plethora of new online tools to decide what will be most effective for their business. In 2012 we have worked hard to match the pace of these developments while managing the growth of our business without compromising on service excellence. One good example of a step we have taken recently is opening our knowledgebase up to search engines such as Google and Bing. We recognised that rather than navigating through company websites more and more customer queries originate from search engines.

What is your biggest achievement over the past 12 months?

2012 has been all about global expansion for Transversal. Over the past 12 months we have expanded our business reach into Europe and extended operations in Australia whilst maintaining and exceeding growth expectations here in the UK. We also brought in several senior leaders to the business, including Marc Quantrill, Partner Sales Director and Michael Aston, Product Manager. We have achieved this growth by engaging with global brands such as Nissan and Sportingbet and even more of the UK’s leading brands, including Allianz and John Lewis. We are equally proud to have broadened our engagement with long standing clients.

What is your biggest focus for the coming year?

We want to continue building on the web channel with Social and Chat and enable seamless channel shifting. Delivering a truly cross-channel solution for consistency through all channels is our key aim so that customers have simpler and less complex interactions. Up until recently, solutions have been focused on satisfying current demands, but we have now started to tackle the next big challenge – predicting what customers will want to do next.

‘Real-time decision support’ will be the priority next year because of the increasing pressure we see from consumers and their growing expectations of brands. Whether posting a question on social media, using the self-service technology on a website or walking up to the customer service desk in store, there is an expectation that the customer experience will remain consistent and that the response will be immediate and relevant. ‘Real-time decision support’ is all about enabling companies to analyse their customers’ interactions across all channels, optimising the engagement and starting to predict their customers’ needs.

If you had to choose one top piece of advice for someone just starting out in business, or is currently operating within your industry sector, what would it be?

Focus on customer needs and understand what they want to achieve. Deliver a solution that truly satisfies the requirements of the customer.

The tools exist today to help companies optimise the customer experience and ultimately show that your company is shaping its strategy with the end user in mind. Although this may seem like fairly obvious advice, it is amazing how many companies lose sight of the customer, particularly when it comes to the way they want to engage with a brand. You need to understand how to prioritise why a customer wants to engage with your company – is it a simple general knowledge enquiry or do they have a very real frustration? Each scenario requires a different response – get that response right and it can have a massively positive impact on your success…just ask one of our customers like Mothercare.

What is more, the customer’s needs must be constantly reviewed. For many of our clients, and indeed their customers, the end user does not always have a static set of needs. Christmas is a perfect example of this for the retail sector, when customer needs and requests will vary greatly from any other time of year. As you start your business you need to be aware of this and build in ways to continually evolve your service to match the customer needs at any given time.

Can you share with us your view of the current landscape of business, in your region or generally and where your organisation sits within it?

In a time when consumers are tempted to cut back on spending and competition for their attention is ever increasing, customer service has never been more important. Even in highly competitive markets such as the supermarket sector the companies that get their strategy right prove that good customer service can be directly correlated to profitability. That success is not guess-work or even attempting to predict trends, it is based on optimising the customer experience to make it simple and easy for them to make the right decisions.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .