Julian Scott

As the saying goes, “happy employees, happy customers.” One of the best ways to ensure your customer-facing teams are happy, is to give them the tools to succeed.

As an example, we understand that one of the primary objectives in any customer care resolution situation is to help resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Often unnecessary challenges, like the inability to quickly look up an email or other marketing communication, can be frustrating and time-consuming for all involved.

Our Sageflo Archiver solution can reduce the search times from minutes to seconds. It empowers your customer care team to instantly find what they need and act upon the information in ways previously not possible:

Sageflo is passionately committed to improving both the lives of your customers and the internal teams that work with them every day—we look forward to helping you foster “happy employees, happy customers!”

Ready to learn more? Give us a call or send along a note to schedule a demo.

The relationship between franchisors and franchisees is generally a straightforward arrangement. Franchisees pay an initial investment and ongoing royalties for the right to use a franchisor’s brand and to sell their products. In return, the franchisor provides ongoing operational support, including marketing.

One common challenge franchisors face is how to support their franchisees’ digital communications, such as email and SMS, to ensure the experience is both authentic and effective at a local level, while practical and compliant from an operational perspective. From already strained resources to inefficient processes, to complex technologies and confusing privacy rules—never mind the potential for mistakes—Sageflo can help tackle all these issues and more.

Our distributed marketing platform is an easy-to-use, web-based tool that empowers local teams to create professional, on-brand marketing campaigns quickly and easily, without needing corporate support. It works in tandem with almost every marketing platform on the market and has the necessary built-in functions and guardrails to minimize errors, all while ensuring a consistent experience aligned with global brand guidelines.

Pet Supplies Plus, a franchise-based pet supplies brand and Sageflo customer recently shared their experience using our solution:

If you’re curious to learn more about how we helped Pet Supplies Plus, please read our case study highlighting how Sageflo made an immediate, meaningful, and measurable impact on their franchisee marketing approach.

One of our goals is to make the lives of our customers better. Once up and running, we’re confident your franchisees will thank you for ensuring they have the tools and support they need to thrive. In addition, as the franchisor, it’s a great investment that will help save time and money while adding additional value to the ongoing royalties your franchisees pay to you. Sounds like a win-win to us!

Whether you’re a franchise-based business or need help supporting your through-channel marketing across local teams and partners, Sageflo can help set everyone up for collective success.

If you know us, you likely know we’re passionate about driving innovative, easy-to-use, customer-centric marketing technology solutions. What you may not know is why we do what we do.

We’ve collectively been around the block more than once and believe a great suite of products are not enough—we need a reason to get up every morning and keep striving to deliver more. For us, that reason is simple—we want to make life better for everyone who works with us, from our fellow employees, to our partners and to most of all, our loyal customers.

What does this mean for our customers? We know they already have more than enough complicated solutions, competitive challenges, and corporate pressures to face each day. We want to be the company that makes their day a little bit easier, whether it’s a friendly face ready to help out, or one of our solutions doing exactly as promised. We’re their partner working to make sure they achieve their objectives, cost-effectively and worry-free. This way, they can focus on their other not-so-easy-to-solve problems or maybe even leave work on time confidently knowing we’ve got them covered.

We help folks think more clearly about problem solving, i.e. working smarter not harder, which is where the “sage” in our name comes from. So that they can better manage their work, which is where the “flow” comes in. Bring those together and you have Sageflo. From our distributed marketing platform to our digital marketing communication archive, our solutions will save money, boost productivity, improve customer experience and ultimately make life better for all involved in our own unique way—and that’s why we get up every morning and do what we do.

Curious to explore how we can help make YOUR work life better? Let’s talk!

As marketers, we tend to focus on supporting customers up to the point of sale but then pass the customer experience baton to other teams once a sale is complete. This is a missed opportunity to not only drive more sales but enhance the overall customer experience and foster ongoing customer loyalty throughout their entire journey.

All one has to do is look at the comments section of any commerce website to see that, when an issue arises, there is often a significant disconnect between the intended customer experience and actual customer satisfaction. While customers are often happy to share on social media and talk about purchased products and related brand experiences, unfortunately, it’s even more so the case when something goes wrong. Whether they express their dissatisfaction through ratings, reviews or word-of-mouth, once the damage is done, it is hard to undo, even if the issue is ultimately resolved to their satisfaction.

It’s often said that people are much more likely to mention a bad experience with a brand to others than they are to talk about a good experience.

This means marketing and customer experience teams must work together to get ahead of poor customer interactions. As an example, one particularly neglected area by marketers is what happens when something goes wrong with a marketing touchpoint, such as when a customer cannot find a promo code they were sent, needs a confirmation email re-sent or has a question about a specific marketing communication — whether text, email or direct mail. Despite many advancements of the major marketing platforms, the simple task of retrieving a previously sent personalized marketing communication within the contact center is remarkably hard to accomplish, despite there being tools readily available to do just this. The issue in simplest terms is specific to dynamic personalization. A brand may send out one campaign to a million subscribers using just one template, but each of those subscribers will receive a completely unique version based on personalized dynamic content. It’s a bit of a needle in a haystack when you are trying to track down one email among millions without the right tools and processes in place. Often brands have to re-create the email based on the data that drove the personalization just to figure out the issue.

However, by coordinating with your customer care and experience peers across your organization, you can start to jointly tackle these types of customer issues. Here are three recommendations based on my company’s experience and interactions with brands: 

1. Work together to create a consistent experience across all interactions and channels.

Customers don’t differentiate between internal department hierarchies, and neither should you. From social media, website, physical locations and customer care, it’s only one team to them, and any one of them can negate all the hard work of the others. This means that teams should not only check in with each other, but they should actively work together toward common goals and benchmarks that ensure a consistent customer experience that creates joint accountability.

2. Errors and issues are inevitable — it’s how you jointly handle them that makes all the difference.

Map out the most common customer pain points across your organization and create processes and guidelines to not only mitigate but effectively and efficiently resolve common issues. This will help to empower your colleagues across the organization and ensure increased customer satisfaction and future sales.

3. Investing in the right tools can make all the difference.

The reality for most marketers is that they are already overwhelmed with too many technical solutions that are costly and often poorly utilized. However, there are a lot of up-and-coming solutions out there that are reasonably priced, easy to use and complement your current technology stack, which warrants the initial research and investment. The right investments in your customer experience will always pay off.

Here’s the bottom line: It’s very expensive to retain existing customers, but even more costly to acquire new ones. The smart money is spent on ensuring a positive and consistent customer experience across all channels so when something does go wrong, it’s an opportunity to deepen the relationship. New processes, guidelines and technical solutions are almost useless without team collaboration leading the way. Breaking old corporate habits and barriers is not easy, but once you collectively agree that a consistent customer experience must come first, it will be that much easier to then work together and make the necessary changes. Another benefit aside from improved customer experiences and sales is that when you break down the artificial barriers between internal teams, everyone across the board tends to be more engaged, motivated and ultimately successful.

As they say, happy employees mean happy customers!

Previously published on Forbes.com as a Forbes Agency Council Post.

Digital transformation is accelerating faster than ever before, resulting in a race to not only keep up but also come out ahead of the competition. From what I’ve seen, many brands are struggling to differentiate the shopping experience and meet their customers’ evolving needs and expectations — and they risk eroding loyalty for their brand.

As consumers assert more control over their preferences and how brands interact with them, not only is it essential to keep them engaged, but brands also have an opportunity to turn their customers into advocates to drive ongoing organic growth. The ultimate sign of customer loyalty is when customers share their excitement for the brand with their families, friends and colleagues. According to Nielsen, recommendations from people we know and trust are the most credible form of advertising.

One tactic to sustain and grow your customer relationships is developing an emotional connection with your customers. It’s been said that brands that get this right receive three times as much word of mouth as less emotionally connected brands. The key is to be authentic, helpful and timely.

Here are three ways to create brand experiences that foster an emotional connection and encourage word of mouth:

1. Provide an experience beyond the conversion. Move away from the traditional “shop and stop” attitude and start creating post-purchase experiences that drive longer-term connections and enable peer-to-peer activity. For example, consider creating an automated email series that goes above and beyond the order confirmation or “complete the look” type cross-selling. Think videos or illustrations on personalized product care or how to use and get the most out of products. And be sure to make them shareable. Referral offers and competitions are another great way to get customers engaged and talking with their peers.

2. Get the customer involved. User-generated content is one of the most trusted forms of marketing content and can have scalable marketing benefits for any brand. UGC can be a fun way for brands to emotionally connect with their customers and at the same time humanize the brand or product, drive awareness to prospects and ultimately get the conversation going. Consider going a step further than ratings and reviews or customer satisfaction surveys, and allow customers to offer online advice and feedback on products or services in real time.

3. Make customers feel good about themselves. Publish editorial content across your digital platforms that informs consumers about what you’re doing to make positive changes in the world. This could include a range of content that aims to drive awareness of the positive environmental impact of purchasing from your business. Consider actively pushing content that describes ways in which people can make a difference in their everyday lives. This strategy can help you inspire people to support a cause and generate feel-good sharable moments. Sometimes it can be tough to motivate customers to get involved, so consider gamifying the experience. Create a fun, interactive environment for consumers to calculate their own eco-friendly scores when they purchase products that are environmentally friendly or if they recycle or trade in old products at the point of purchase. You can use this initiative to automate cross-channel messaging that provides updates, encouragement and rewards, while at the same time building emotional momentum that’s worth talking about.

Many brands may already have some of these strategies in their toolbox, but just don’t realize it. Some marketers tend to focus on selling when they should focus on sharing. When you create opportunities for customers to engage with you by providing content and experiences that are worth sharing, those same customers will often take it upon themselves to advocate on your behalf.

The brands that understand the value in building these connections will reap the benefits, and those that ignore this opportunity do so at their own peril. The pace of digital transformation will likely only increase in the years ahead, but it’s not too late to catch up if you can pivot to creating authentic emotional connections that foster both customer loyalty and word of mouth.

Previously published on Forbes.com as a Forbes Agency Council Post.

Though our ability to collect data and thoughtfully target customers has jumped leaps and bounds over the years; the reality is most brands don’t break down their approach at a truly local level as they simply don’t have the time or resources. This represents a missed opportunity to both nurture authentic relationships and create a more seamless customer experience.

Enabling your local teams, such as store managers, district managers, franchise owners or field staff to deploy select marketing messages can help scale marketing reach and support your over-arching corporate strategies, all while injecting regional nuance and touchpoints into your messages, providing a more personal connection to subscribers.

Common examples of local marketing messages, whether email, text or direct mail, include the following:

1. Invitations to visit the nearest store
2. Introducing the local team/new team members
3. Invitations to upcoming local events
4. Sharing local-only products, services or offers
5. Sharing community support initiatives and updates

Nobody knows local markets better than the team members based in those markets, and giving them the ability to contribute and be a part of the greater marketing team pays huge dividends in customer engagement and retention. Campaigns sent by local teams are typically twice as engaging as promotional campaigns sent at the nation level, and are particularly effective at driving in-store visits.

Though implementing a distributed marketing approach may sound complicated — Sageflo not only makes it possible, but practical. It’s an easy-to-use, web-based tool that empowers local teams to quickly and easily create professional, on-brand marketing campaigns without needing corporate support. It works in tandem with almost every marketing platform on the market and has the necessary built-in functions and guardrails to minimize errors, all while ensuring a consistent experience aligned with global brand guidelines.

Utilizing a distributed marketing solution with your local teams provides marketers with the ability to scale influence and audience reach, without needing to increase the size of their team. It’s like having dozens (or even hundreds) of new members on the marketing team with no corresponding increase in headcount cost.

Equally important, it’s a great way to enhance the customer experience by better connecting the many ways your customers may be interacting with your brand across channels. Your customers are craving authenticity, consistency and connection; and local, personalized marketing is one of the best ways to make this happen.

Click here to learn more or schedule a demo.

Over the years, we have frequently seen one team excited to start using a new off-the-shelf marketing or CX technology solution, only to have another team suggest that they build it in-house—often resulting in a prolonged stalemate and missed opportunity for a competitive advantage. The question is never about whether they can, but whether they should? The answer almost always boils down to which option, buy or build, will check three critical boxes: better, faster, and cheaper?

The end goal is to help everyone get on the proverbial same page. Just as we want to create a better experience, reduce friction, and drive ongoing success for our customers—the same applies to our colleagues. Hopefully, this will help generate some thoughtful discussion that leads to the truly best outcome for your organization.

Which will be better for the company?

The reality is all companies have specializations and should focus their core energies on investments that drive the business forward. If you’re a finance company, having your organization focus on finance-related challenges and opportunities, rather than building a niche marketing solution, will likely make the most sense. Almost all off-the-shelf technical solutions have years of research, engineering, and enhancements behind them. Oftentimes, it is better to tap into that knowledge so that your organization can stay focused on core mission deliverables. This is where all the teams involved need to unite on what’s best for the company versus an individual team.

Which will be faster for the company?

Most companies do not have the time to wait for an internal solution to be built when there are often multiple “off the shelf” options available now. More importantly, almost every organization already has many mission-critical demands to focus on, causing a new internal solution project to be easily deprioritized and delayed. Additional time will always be needed to research and plan before the first line of code is even written, much less tested. In most cases, by this point, your company could already have been up and running with an off-the-shelf option. What it really boils down to is: when do you need it, and will it be impacted by other equally or more important projects in motion?

Which will be cheaper for the company?

It can be difficult to do an exact apples-to-apples comparison here, but a solution that is already built and ready to go is by nature almost always more affordable in the long run, particularly when factoring in ongoing maintenance and enhancements. One of the core benefits of using an outside technology is that almost all updates are a shared cost with your ongoing retention as a customer. Will your company have the same focus and commitment to improving an in-house solution when new projects come up? Most internal teams are already over-extended, so going with off-the-shelf is usually a smart strategy to save both time and money.

At the end of the day, every team within a company is trying to extend their footprint and influence—that’s human nature. The key for everyone to remember is that quite often, buy is truly the right decision when it comes to better, faster, and cheaper to help drive the business forward and meet each team’s collective goals. This doesn’t mean there are no legitimate arguments for building in-house, but unless your company is in the business of marketing and CX, then in most cases the answer is clear.

We know these conversations can be challenging, and we’ve helped many teams decide which approach is ultimately best for them based on their short- and long-term needs, team capabilities, resources, and budget. We work with brands big and small and can help your team arrive at the right decision (even if that means going with another competitor or building in-house).

Not sure how we can help? Contact us to learn more or schedule a demo.