It’s imperative that brands reach out to customers on their channel of choice. Be it online, voice, chat, or any other platform, your customer expects you to be there when they need you. But when you are where your customer expects you to be your brand is given the unique opportunity to leverage the customer’s immediate interests and needs. Your most powerful marketing asset is to know something about your customer.  And the contact center and your voice channel know a lot. In fact, with the right tools your online marketing and offline marketing efforts can easily tie into each other to create more touch points, preserve the customer experience, and generate new leads for your enterprise.

Leverage the same offers through your online and voice channels.

Would a customer that reaches out to your company online versus a customer that calls into your customer service or sales call center be looking for completely different offers of information? Probably not. Although their preferred method of communication might differ, their end goals are going to be very similar. Your online channels and your voice channels can be used to present your consumers with the same or more relevant, complementary products and services.

For instance, when customers book a flight online, they often see a rental car offer on the confirmation page, or even as part of the flight booking process at the very beginning of the transaction.  That same offer could be used in the voice channel, so that when a customer books a flight with an agent over the phone, they can hear the same rental car offer.

Create special promotions with each of your partners.  Partner with multiple companies to target your customers specific needs at the time.

Most enterprises have established partnerships with some number of companies in order to present the most relevant offers at the right time.   For instance, a home insurance provider could develop promotions and offers with home security system providers, home warranty services, or cable / satellite services.  These offers can be presented on a case-by-case basis based on the reason for a customer call, recent purchase histories, customer demographics, etc.  Thus,, creating an even more unique customer experience. One of the advantages of marketing in the voice channel is that one-to-one personal interaction between agent and caller. You don’t get that kind of personal experience with most online marketing efforts, no matter how personalized the offer might actually be; the voice channel is uniquely human.

Prioritize offers based on consumer interest.

Once you’ve created a partnership marketing network with a variety of relevant partners and have invested in various special promotions it’s important to prioritize those offers based on consumer intent. Not every offer is going to have the same kind of impact on your customers and target audience and you don’t want to waste your customer service and sales agents’ time, or turn your customers off, with the wrong offers from your partners. The same logic has to apply to your voice channel efforts. Being able to personalize products and services presented to your customers based on interest, purchase history, demographics and other data gives your enterprise the ability to customize and enhance the customer experience.

The major success component in any cross-selling campaign is relevancy. The right offer at the right time to the right customer. Therefore, it’s important that you keep in mind that cross-selling doesn’t just have to be about upselling your own products; for instance, a cable provider might try to upsell a new customer with a DVR package deal. Cross-selling can also be cross-brand selling, in which two relevant and related enterprises form a mutually beneficial partnership where one brand provides new leads for another. This will dramatically increase the product/service offerings and improve the relevancy to the immediate customer need. The lead seller enhances the customer experience by becoming a “concierge” service, while the lead buyer improves their customer acquisition program while simultaneously controlling their budget.

Success Factor: Only form marketing partnerships with brands that can provide relevant offers/services to your customers.

When it comes to cross-selling relevancy of products and services is the key to success. It would not make sense for the nutritional supplement provider for build a cross-selling campaign with a cell phone provider. Yes, in theory those two businesses might target a similar demographic but the offer is not nearly relevant enough to do well. Especially when timing is factored in. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer; if you were trying to upgrade your cell phone plan would you want to be presented with an offer for vitamins? Sure, you might take vitamins but that offer has nothing to do with the situation you are trying to resolve with your phone company. A non-relevant cross-selling campaign seemingly comes out of nowhere and your target audience isn’t ready to hear what your offer. In fact it will likely be perceived as a distraction.

It does, however, make sense for a nutritional supplement provider to partner with a weight loss home meal delivery company. They both target the same target audience and one’s offer can be used to enhance the value of the other. For example, customers who sign up for 3 months of home meal delivery could be presented with an offer to order 3 months worth of nutritional supplements that would aid in their weight-loss plans. You never want your customers to feel like they are being “sold to” with your cross selling campaign. Relevancy helps ensure that your cross-selling partnerships actually help improve the customer experience!

Success Factor: Know your customer and pre-qualify callers for purchase trigger events.

In addition to being relevant, a successful cross-selling campaign needs to be timely. In order to present the right offers at the right time it’s helpful to craft your message based on a certain trigger event that would spark the need for your product or service. For instance, someone who just purchased their first home might need a new home security system. The first purchase triggered the need of the second, creating a perfect opportunity for your cross-selling partner to provide value when it’s needed.  Or for an existing home owner, the birth of a couple’s first born child may be the trigger for another set of needed services. Your enterprise could actually form multiple partnerships with different brands based on the most common trigger events your customers will experience. That way you ensure that each customer gets the most relevant offer (going back to the first point) for their unique situation AND they get it at the right time.

Without that trigger event, your cross-selling campaign might fall on deaf ears as your partner’s offer has little to do with their current life situation. For instance, if their child is already seven or eight years old and you present them with a offer more suitable to the parents of newborns you have missed your opportunity to connect.

Success Factor:  Engage the product experts – in the case of call transfer programs, transfer the calls to partner product experts.

Customer service teams and sales teams are responsible for very different things within an enterprise and attract very different kinds of people. If you’re asking your customer service call center agents to handle your cross-selling campaign no wonder it’s not profitable! Customer service agents are great at calming down an angry customer, solving service issues, putting a face (and voice) to your brand and so forth. They aren’t necessarily trained to sell; they are supposed to help. But in order to successfully cross-sell someone else’s product you can’t just be a good people person, you have to be a great salesperson. Could your customer service representatives successfully sell one of your enterprise’s products? If the answer is no, how can you expect them to sell on behalf of a company they don’t know?

Call transfer programs through contact centers allow you to transfer the call to the best trained, skilled, and knowledgeable person once a customer has demonstrated interest in your partner’s offer.  By handing off a qualified and interested lead to the right people, your enterprise can avoid training issues, hiring issues aligned with sales skills, and product depth issues.

Nearly 3/4 of all busi­nesses say they invest in cross-selling pro­grams of some kind, but as many as 70% of those programs achieve lower than expected results. Without the right components your cross-selling campaign could be next!

Here are some of the blog posts for marketers and contact center executives that we’ve recently found interesting. Hopefully you’ll get something out of them too!

For Marketers

How to Sell More by Focusing On Less
I remember flying to Pittsburgh in the year 2004.

It was a 7am presentation in front of about 40 people who I didn’t know. And who didn’t know me, either. And by the time the presentation was done at 7:45am, I asked the crowd a simple question.

“How many of you would like to buy this product?”

And over 50% of the hands in the room went up. Which, by the way, wasn’t the most interesting part. The most interesting part was that I hadn’t told them much about the product, or the price, or the delivery. So why were so many of those in the room willing to buy the product?

Pitching vs. Selling: Five Tips for Doing Either Better
I don’t know about you, but I grew up with the image of a “sales guy” as a kind of smarmy, ingratiating fellow who would say almost anything to make a sale. When I finally moved into a position within a sales department, the folks I met there weren’t actually like that. They were organized, likable and focused.

Your marketing includes way too much you
One of the most common mistakes marketers make is that they think their customers and prospects care about them, what they sell and how it works. The human truth is consumers really do think, feel and ask “what’s in it for me?”

For Contact Center Executives

How to Treat Your Customers Like Prospects

So how do you know if you’re successfully upselling? When it doesn’t feel, look or sound like “upselling.” Upselling is most effective when the customer is treated like a prospect. In other words, you don’t take them for granted. You strive to give them the advice, resources and education to broaden their horizons and hit a new level of achievement. As a result, they’ll naturally want more of your product.

Does Your Business Need a Customer Service Tune-up?
Just like your car needs regular tune-ups to keep it running smoothly, your small business’s relationship marketing techniques and customer service isn’t something you can “set and forget.” These days, customers are pickier than ever, and they have dozens of ways to spread the (bad) news if they’re not happy with your service—from Yelp reviews to an outraged tweet. What can you do to make sure your customer service engine is purring like a Ferrari’s?

Bad Customer Service: When Talking Back is a Good Thing
Social media has been the biggest customer service game-changer in recent memory. Now, anyone can get on a computer and share their feelings, both good and bad (but it’s usually because it’s bad). Who cares? If you’re a business, you should. Depending on who that person is, that information can influence a lot of people and your (probably no longer) potential customers. How about a Google search? When you’re looking up new information about a restaurant, a retailer, a product, etc., you do a search on the #1 search engine. What if a bunch of those negative reviews came up? You can bet it’ll impact whether a customer walks through your door.

Even with the rise of online customer service channels, contact centers still handle a growing number of the more complex customer sales and service interactions today.   And with the growing volume of calls driven by mobile adoption, new and innovative marketing programs are emerging such as click-to-talk functionality, connecting web visitors directly with the call center, and performance-based call transfer programs.

Consumers often choose the distinctly human interaction of the voice channel to answer their sales and support issues; over 45 billion call transactions annually by some estimates. This is a huge marketing opportunity that smart enterprises are already taking advantage of. Remember, many studies show that consumers tend to respond well to human contact during the sales process. Though they may conduct much of their research online, many of these purchases still take place offline.

Greg Sterling, an analyst at Opus Research, told Business Week that “The naïve assumption that people made in the early days was that e-commerce was going to decimate other kinds of customer contact. When there’s a human connection, there’s a lot more that can be sold, and those customers are a lot more valuable inherently.”

Live, one-to-one interactions in the voice channel give enterprises greater insight into what the customer is actually looking for. There’s a give and take between caller and call center agent during phone conversations you simply can’t get with an online purchase. This is one of the primary reasons that the enterprise voice channel is still so powerful, especially from a marketing perspective. In the voice channel your contact center agent is in control of the customer experience (for better or for worse!) and can use that one-on-one time to address any customer service or sales concerns, build a stronger rapport with that customer, and even leverage some cross-selling opportunities in the conversation. The latest voice channel opportunities for marketing allow companies to leverage customer insights, demographics, purchase histories, etc. to drive added service and sales value for consumers and enterprises through company call centers.

Given the fact that call volumes into customer contact centers are growing driven by a mobile savvy consumer and new voice / data applications there is   growing value and need for marketing professionals to leverage the enterprise contact center as an untapped customer engagement channel.  For instance, live calls typically convert at a much higher rate than other advertising channels, such as web advertising alone. Enterprises that take advantage of the unique marketing opportunities to engage customers through their call centers stand to create a new source of revenue and improve their brand.

Cross-selling became a popular marketing and customer acquisition technique through customer service and sales contact centers back in the 1990s.  In the past ten years it has become a common practice on web sites based on an understanding of consumer insights learned from navigation patterns.  The travel industry, for example, is a huge proponent of cross-selling, both offline and online. For instance, have you ever made reservations at a hotel and been asked if you needed to rent a car or make dinner reservations? Perhaps you were offered a deal to a local tourist attraction simply for being a guest of that particular hotel. Think back to the last time you booked a flight online and the corresponding relevant offers you received in your confirmation email, your “time to check-in” email and even on your boarding pass itself! That is a prime example of cross-selling. You purchased item or service A and that company pulls together a short list of other items or services you might be interested in based on that first purchase. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some of the blog posts for marketers and contact center executives that we’ve recently found interesting. Hopefully you’ll get something out of them too!

For Marketers

THE DIFFERENCE IN FAN AND CUSTOMER ACQUISITION
The CMO of a large retail brand stood on stage recently, proudly showing off a fan acquisition campaign that had successfully driven tens of thousands more “Likes” on Facebook. A hand went up in the audience. “Those ‘Likes’ are impressive, but how many of your products did you sell as a result?”

The CMO shrugged and said, “Well, that really wasn’t the point of the campaign. It was about acquisition.”

Do you have the Right Marketing Team for Customer Acquisition?
Few marketing teams of $100M+ companies are built for modern demand generation.

Marketing team structures too often are remnants from the days of print ad dominance.  Sure they’ve evolved, but the core structure is often the same.  Modernization has been performed by adding ‘vertical’ skills onto existing structure.  Few organizations have retooled.  New skills such as SEO or Social expertise were added to existing structure and/or outsourced.

Hey, B2C Marketers: 7 Dead-Simple Ways to Reduce Your Cost of Customer Acquisition
As with most marketing efforts, “converting” followers and web traffic into customers comes at a cost. Specifically, a “customer acquisition cost,” CAC for short. In order to keep the lights on and the product (or service) shipping, it’s necessary to keep this cost low by focusing on high-impact, highly efficient activities that boost the amount of traffic and the overall number of conversions you receive during a discrete time period.

The Art of Pulling the Trigger: Upselling Done Right
Upselling is like bringing a gun to a knife fight, or a knife to a fist fight. If you’re doing it right, and your competitor isn’t, they lose.

For Contact Center Executives

Social Media Best Used for ‘Damage Control’ by Call Centers, CFI Group Study Finds
In its annual Call Center Satisfaction Index, the Ann Arbor-based customer satisfaction measurement firm CFI Group reported that call centers are rapidly transforming into contact centers — incorporating the Web, email, and other sources — and that social media play an important role in raising customer satisfaction and likely recommendations.

The Thing Nobody Mentions that is Vital for Good Customer Service
Situational awareness is key in great customer service. In order to take advantage of opportunity, you have to be knowledgeable about what is going on in your environment – emotionally, physically and spiritually.  Here’s a few ways it can help:

Close the loop: Turn customer feedback into customer insight
Regardless of the products it sells or the work it performs, no business can be successful for long if its customers aren’t happy. To learn where they stand in this regard, many companies issue satisfaction surveys in the hope that analyzing a collection of aggregated results will eventually lead to a positive return on investment.

Upselling and Cross-selling by Customer Service and Support Teams
While sales teams have long had goals for upselling and cross-selling, more com­pa­nies than ever are ask­ing their cus­tomer ser­vice reps to do the same. And they’re ask­ing their sup­port engi­neers to  rec­om­mend prod­uct upgrades and con­tact cus­tomers to renew war­ranty agree­ments. This grow­ing trend is par­tic­u­larly true in the finan­cial ser­vices, telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, high tech­nol­ogy, and ser­vices industries.

Here are some of the blog posts for marketers and contact center executives that we’ve recently found interesting. Hopefully you’ll get something out of them too!

For Marketers

Where’s The Leak in Your Customer Acquisition Funnel?

The analogy of a customer acquisition funnel is ubiquitous within the digital marketing and web analytics community. Visitors go in and lifelong customers come out– it’s a simple visual representation of a slightly more complicated relationship between organizations and people and it gets the message across. While simplicity has its value, the idea of a perfect funnel actually paints an inaccurate picture of what’s truly going on.

3 Tips to help you get massively better sales results

No matter how great your product or service is, unless it’s marketed with compelling copy (wording), you will struggle to achieve the sales results you want. People need to read your message and then feel inspired to take action; to buy from you, call you, email you, visit your store, etc

The New 4Ps of Marketing

In a day where customers seem to know everything about your business, the old marketing mix that the 4Ps offers is increasingly at odds with how business is done today.

First, we need to look at the fundamental problems with the old way of doing things. Then we need to identify a framework that can cover the same fundamentals, but that is more aligned with how business is conducted today.

New species of marketers in the marketing kingdom

“As a marketer, you have two choices: adapt and survive, or stand still and die. The ones who do the first the best will emerge at the top of the marketing food chain.”

That’s the concluding quote from Gord Hotchkiss’s latest article on MediaPost: Evolving On The Fly: Growth Hackers, Agile Marketers, Bayesian Strategists And CMTs.

Gord’s Search Insider column is my weekly go-to source for big picture thinking in the evolution of marketing. This week he proposed that such evolution is following a pattern known as punctuated equilibrium, which I’ve illustrated above.

For Contact Center Executives

We read this story of customer service, and we’re wondering how to duplicate it.

Remember when you were 7-years-old, waiting all year for Christmas to come, because when it did, you just might be getting the coolest-ever, most-enviable, life-changing toy you could ever imagine? In the case of Luka Apps, this toy (a term that is surely a gross understatement to him) was the LEGO Ninjago minifigures kit. And he didn’t just receive these tiny wonders for Christmas; he actually spent all of his Christmas money on them. So, again, imagine being a 7-year-old boy and losing (yes, losing!) one of these tiny treasures just days after purchasing them. Heartbreaking.

The Need for More Functionality Pushes the Contact Center Market in EMEA

As enterprises have offered their customers ever more channels for interaction, including telephone, Web, email, social media and SMS, the need to coordinate service acros these channels for consistency, accuracy of information provided, and management of the customer experience has grown exponentially. “This challenge will require IVR and voice portal solutions to be more tightly integrated with other customer contact and business applications in order to effectively manage the growing use of multi-channel customer contacts,” concluded Bhattacharjee.

How the Wall Street Journal and Comcast Penalize Loyal Customers and Create Anti-Evangelists

New customers get rewarded for “trying” the service for the first time, but loyal, committed customers who have spent a lot of time and money with you, to the exclusion of your competition…they get punished with price increases for the exactly the same service you were delivering yesterday. Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal will have the same kind of material — and likely the same quantity of it, give or take — as yesterday’s. Except it will cost three times more.

How to survive customer service blunders in the world of social media

The basis for handling any customer complaint is believing that the customer truly thinks they have been wronged. Will customers lie? Are there really people out there who are so isolated, frustrated, or even perverse they would want to destroy a business? Of course the answer is yes, but for the most part the best way to handle a customer complaint online, by phone, by email, or in person, is to stop and listen. Too many agents begin speaking before the customer is even finished, but taking a deep breath, relaxing, and listening becomes an integral part of any problem solving, since we can’t figure out a solution until we know the problem. Next the seasoned customer service representative will want to repeat the problem back to the customer. In cases where the customer is rude, angry, or even vulgar, the better part of valor dictates one waits until the customer calms down.

SalesPortal today introduced a proprietary offer personalization engine. Offer personalization enables consumers to receive targeted product offers relevant to their immediate needs at the end of sales and service calls. The new personalization engine segments consumers by demographics, purchase history, and/or pre-dispositions, and presents relevant offers customized to the individual. It is the voice equivalent of ad personalization for online ecommerce.

SalesPortal’s partnership marketing platform enables companies to collaborate with other brands in order to engage their customers with relevant, end-of-call offers from partner brands. The result is a much improved customer experience by virtue of satisfying the consumer’s immediate interests through a broader set of products and services delivered through partnerships and across brands. The latest capability allows enterprises to leverage CRM data to deliver highly relevant offers to customers. Just as CRM data transformed call dispositioning and routing, it is now transforming customer engagement by delivering the right product or service offer to the right person at the right time.

“This is a game changer,” said Sujay Rao, SalesPortal’s vice president of product management. “Leading ecommerce companies like Amazon and eBay use personalization to present targeted advertising to consumers. We’ve brought this vital functionality to contact centers, making customer phone engagement as personalized as online transactions. For marketing organizations, we generate higher ROI on their customer acquisition spend.”

Offer personalization uses filters to determine which callers should be presented with an offer and which offer is best suited to the specific caller’s needs. Filters can include customer demographics, purchase history, reason for the call and any criterion that resides within a CRM application or other data sources.

With SalesPortal’s offer personalization engine:

• Brand marketers can provide highly targeted, relevant product and service offers to qualified consumers.
• Enterprise contact centers can generate revenue and improve customer engagement by anticipating and responding to callers’ needs.
• Consumers receive targeted offers of the most relevant products and services.

The SalesPortal platform can receive data from any source, including CRM applications, and is available immediately to enterprises in North America and India.

A customer trigger event is a major (although it could be a minor) event that happens in a consumer’s life, such as buying a house, that triggers the need for additional decisions  regarding products or services. For instance, prior to buying a house, a consumer might give thought to buying flood insurance, installing a home security system, or even something as seemingly straightforward as purchasing a lawn mower of their own. Now that they have a home (and a yard) to protect for years to come these other purchases suddenly become incredibly important—all because of that one trigger event. Brands that are able to anticipate and respond to these customer trigger events stand to improve both the customer experience and turn a profit. The solution lies in your marketing partnership network.

Marketing Partnerships Enhance the Customer Experience During a Trigger Event

Depending on the other companies you partner with, your partnership network can enhance the customer experience after a customer trigger event by evolving your brand into a concierge-type service, or trusted advisor. For instance, someone who has just purchased a home is probably swimming in the amount of things they need to do/are supposed to do/want to do after buying their dream home—your partnership network can make their next few steps that much easier by presenting them with relevant and timely offers directly related to their trigger event. Your partners could include a mortgage company, a locksmith (definitely need to get new locks!), or even an arborist (tree) inspection company—in theory the possibilities are practically endless. As long as your marketing partners exist in a relevant (but not directly competing) niche and can provide your customers with the right offer at the right time (i.e., the trigger event) your network could have no limits.

By presenting your customers with these relevant offers you are enhancing the customer experience by taking the legwork and some of the guess work out of their next important purchase brought on by the trigger event. Just keep in mind that it’s your recommendation that your customers are basing their decision on so it’s important to only work with partners that will take good care of your customers and strive to deliver excellent customer service every step of the way. Choosing the wrong partners can actually damage your brand’s own reputation.

Trigger Events Are an Opportunity for Your Brand to Engage the Consumer and Cross Sell Relevant Products

By cross pitching your customers after a trigger event your brand has the opportunity to upsell customers and monetize your organic phone traffic. Since your network isn’t limited to a one-to-one relationship with a solitary partner, your multiple partners are often competing to have their offer presented to your customers after a trigger event. Competition helps increase the value of each live lead you have to send to the winning partner, as each individual partner presents their own offer and bid for your phone leads. This gives your company the opportunity to choose the most relevant offer for your customers, as well as the more profitable offer for your company. For instance, you might be partnered with a credit card company but find that certain trigger events don’t produce the customer need for a new credit card. You can pass over that partner is favor of another. Once qualified customers are transferred to your approved partner your company gets paid for that live phone lead.

The key to taking advantage of a customer trigger event is timing! You partner offers have to ready to go when you have a customer on the phone and it needs to meet their particular needs right there and then. That’s why a partnership marketing network, as opposed to the traditional one-to-one relationships is so powerful—you have a much greater chance of being in the right place at the right time with the right offer.

Here are some of the blog posts for marketers and contact center executives that we’ve recently found interesting. Hopefully you’ll get something out of them too!

For Marketers

Shoppers Will Switch for Customer Service

Consumers know time is a commodity too, like ball bearings and Barbie dolls. So when they’re doing their holiday shopping or are online looking for a good deal on gifts, they don’t want to wait or find problems completing a purchase, and they expect fair treatment from retailers.

For Customer Experience, “Just OK” Is Not OK

Excellent customer experiences fuel growth, drive loyalty, are emotionally rewarding, and inspire people to become vocal champions of brands and the organizations behind them. In 2012, three out of every four organizations recognized this and told Forrester that their goal was to “differentiate on the basis of customer experience.” In real life, most brands scored in the “OK” or “very poor” categories, according to Forrester’s 2012 customer experience index. Only 3% were ranked as “excellent,” a sharp decline that started in 2007 and is now at an all-time low.

What’s your WIFM?

WIFM of course if the What’s In It For Me, and your customer communications need to make that clear.

Is Customer Service the New Marketing?

Today, good companies realize the power and the voice of the consumer. And they cater to them with this in mind. Good customer experiences mean stronger word of mouth and potential brand advocates that can help spread your message more efficiently than any marketer. That’s all true.

Surprising Customers With Exceptional Service

Customer expectations for great service every time they interact with a company are increasing, mainly due to increased competition that’s pushing organizations to outdo themselves in providing a fantastic customer experience.

For Contact Center Managers

Contact Center Management: Hire the Right People

Hir­ing the right peo­ple can make or break a suc­cess­ful con­tact cen­ter team. Find­ing the right mix of skill set and dis­po­si­tion enables faster onboard­ing, and reduces employee turnover. Undoubt­edly one of the most impor­tant tasks for any­one in a con­tact cen­ter man­age­ment role, recruit­ing the right peo­ple for the job can be a tire­some process.

Customer service: the cat and mouse game

In all likelihood, when customers contact your customer service team, they will be searching for a straight answer to what is not necessarily an easy question. Most of the time they will also know exactly what they are looking for: a result.

5 Steps to Improve your Contact Center Results

Even as the contact center continually evolves to handle new channels and greater complexity, improving the efficiency and productivity of your customer experience agents doesn’t have to be complicated.

Turning Agent ‘Best Practices’ into Standard Practice

Best practices are a rarity in the call center environment. And even more so in the work-at-home call center environment. There, I said it. Who’s to blame, the call center leader? What does the at home agent do when they don’t know the answer? There’s no person next to them to ask and training is over. Calling the supervisor is an option, but could eat away at valuable time of two resources that are now unavailable to talk to customers.

6 Customer Service Trends to Watch in 2013

As we look ahead to what will affect and change our customer service priorities in the year ahead, it’s interesting to note the strange tug-of-war going on between digital mastery and the human element. As consumers increasingly spend more of their lives online, businesses and organizations are competing to become a part of it.