Digital Screen Marketing - a cost-effective route to efficient customer service

One of the buzziest words in marketing these days is engagement; the need to engage with your customers or clients. This imperative, to build a relationship with potential clients, has never been more important in days when marketing messages can be out there in front of millions of people within minutes, circulating around the globe.

Twitter and Facebook and other forms of Social Media, are all about engagement. Your website should ensure that potential clients are invited to engage with you as soon as they hit the homepage. Emails, personalised with clients' names, should entice each recipient to maintain their relationship with you, encourage them into your world. If you like, the days of good old customer service have returned with a vengeance; the days of the grocer who dealt with every customer personally, collecting products for them off the shelves and knowing every customer by name.

But we are not returning to the yester-year of retail; we can't, simply because our customers expect to be served with ever increasing speed and efficiency.

However, the technology is available now for every business, no matter how small, to bring back the best aspects of the golden age of customer service, and those businesses that ignore this technology do so at their peril.

In previous articles, I have talked a lot about web and social media, and today I want to throw digital signage and digital screen marketing into the pot. Mention the word "digital" and many businesses will recoil in horror at the thought of yet another expense. However, let's look at a few examples:
Some years ago, one of my clients was a major private health insurance company. Whenever I visited them, I had to sit in their reception area to wait to be greeted. There were magazines on a coffee table, beautiful photographs on the wall, and Sky News playing on a screen. I could have been in any corporate headquarters anywhere in the world, as there was absolutely nothing that told me where I was, or what type of company I was dealing with. Was this complacency or arrogance? An assumption that the mere company name was enough to tell me all I needed to know.

Another national company had their foyer lined with press clippings of their Chairman greeting the Great and the Good; great for the Chairman's ego, but is this good for the company as a whole?

I thought then that what these companies needed was a television-quality presentation product that did a number of things:

• Entertain waiting clients (in the same way that a magazine on a coffee table might);
• Inform clients, but without the heavy and relentless news content of Sky News or CNN;
• Tell clients about company products and services, without expecting them to read through books of press clippings or corporate brochures; 

In so many instances, businesses leave clients and potential clients hanging around without considering the effect that this might have on the ongoing relationship. Good customer service is all about making every customer feel valued.

If you have an area where customers wait for any length of time, think about a screen. I know that many of you have already got televisions in waiting areas or reception areas, and have a Freeview box so that customers can enjoy "Good Morning" or "Under the Hammer".

What a waste of an opportunity!

By all means, entertain waiting customers; it helps to pass the time. But use that time to tell people about your business; present your new products; show how successful you are as a company; tell that client how valuable they are to you. Above all, engage with that customer as they sit there waiting for you; it is a golden opportunity and one that is too valuable to miss.

If you would like more information on a range of cost-effective screen marketing solutions, please contact us at Argent Ram Media - www.argentrammedia.com. Email design@argentrammedia.com


"The average recall of a brand advertised on Wal-Mart television is 66%, compared with 24% for brands advertised on in-home television."