Do I really know who my customers are?

• What new products should my company focus on?
• What are the demographics of my market?
• How can I pinpoint my marketing, sales, and operational efforts directly to the individual?
• How do my current customers leverage the attainment of new customers?
• How do I create brand loyalty in a commodity market?

All Customer Touch Points - One Customer Database

These are just some of the questions we considered as we began to discuss and formulate our efforts to create Digital Concourse. We wanted a solution that is strategic to the needs of a corporation; a solution that helps increase revenue and market share. Finally, a solution that is easily deployed and is put into the hands of your customers. Digital Concourse focuses on solutions that foster a long-term bond between your company and your customer.

Your customers interact with you daily.

The relationship that you build with your customers needs to be a scalable relation; it must start with individuals, but must scale to every interacting business point between you. Every interacting point of contact can deliver the information you need to stay sharp and stay tuned to your customers needs. It is imperative that you find a method to gain this information. Today’s competitive market demands it.

The relation between a business and its customers is always unique, but there are many similarities. You have the traditional relationship consisting of the original participants in the contract, the implementers, support people, and sales people. As time goes on the relationship changes, people change, needs change, technology changes and the world changes. In its simplest form the original people and spirit of the relation is just not as exciting as it was at the beginning. Assuming you continue to provide the value your customer requires, your relationship should maintain. In the case you don’t know if you are providing value or you assume you are is where the trouble begins. And the ultimate question is; Are you a strategic component of your customer’s business plan? If you do not have the answer, your company probably isn’t. This is where relationships come in. What are you going to do about it?

Are you strategic, tactical, or simply operational? Do you consider your customer and the type of business they are strategic or tactical to your plans?

These questions come to the same point. How do you know? Assuming your customers have been targeted through corporate strategy and attained through hard work, time, and money, the answer is obvious. Your customers are strategic to you. That now leaves the question: Are your strategic to your customer?

Are You Strategic to Your Customer?

We believe you can only be strategic to your customer if:

• Your offering is in alignment with the tactical needs of their strategy
• Your offering will scale to their needs
• There is no offering like yours on the market
• You stay connected with the key people who develop strategy
• You are perceived as a partner as opposed to a vendor

Most business people will understand this. Most business people believe they are staying tuned into their customers needs. This is easy when you are a small company; personal relationships are the game;customer intimacy. As you grow, as your team goes from 10-20 people to 4,000-10,000 people and as your customers grow from several to thousands, it becomes much tougher. The number of individuals associated with your business within just one of your customers should help you do the math when you extend the average number of people within a customer company multiplied times the number of customers you have. Take that and multiply that against the number of interacting points between sales, support, and services and you begin to see the challenge of managing your customer relation. It cannot be a manual process; it must be automated.

So you bring in a CRM package.

Your implementation goes well, your people are trained, and you are ready to improve your relations with your customers. It certainly is a start but it can’t stop there. CRM is just a technology, it must be adopted and your business disciplines must be adjusted to ensure your investment is successful. There is only one problem. Who said a relation is one sided? Why is it that primarily your sales people seem to be the only one with access to the information and tools? What role does your customer play in this interaction? CRM is just the beginning. What you need is a way to organize your customers around your product. And you need to offer them a solution that they can use to manage their "Customer" operations. You also need to provide the tools for collaboration and information gather.

A Community of Customers

Digital Concourse connects the customer through customer facing solutions that they need to operate in your organization while providing information back to your business in both informational and integration methods.

Digital Concourse leverages the many touch points of your business that your customer interacts with on a daily basis. It tracks, records, and updates your customer information in a real-time basis. Delivering two-way value to both your customer and your business in the form of customer facing solutions that dispatch services only after authenticating the customer and ensuring that every destination is tracked and every opportunity to collect new and/or update customer information is taken.

Digital Concourse delivers the solution that leverages the interacting points of customer contact to deliver factual information that helps you become strategic to your customers business and your customers deliver actionable information that is important to your strategies.

Digital Concourse was founded in 2003 to deliver strategic value to businesses who need to retain their existing customers while building the informational infrastructure that helps them attain new customers. We deliver an on-demand web solution that consolidates all touch points to authentication engines that validate company profiles, individual profiles, as well as deliver back the statistical information that helps your company improve while staying in alignment with your corporate strategies.

All Customer Touch Points - One Customer Database