Pull Marketing

July, 2018

Push vs Pull
Social marketing is one of the newer forms of pull marketing. People trust information when it comes recommended in some way by someone they know.

As discussed in our last blog (June 2018) about the rise of the pull strategy in preference to push, contact centers are increasingly looking to attract contact from customers rather than trying to elbow their way into customers’ consciousness/view/focus of attention.

The pull method has many benefits, not least of these being that the customer feels they have made a choice to engage with the contact center.  Of course, there has to have been something that provoked that decision in the first place and this is where pull marketing weaves its many forms of magic.

One of the newer forms of the pull method is social marketing.  An appealing, interesting or educational image, video or message can quickly become viral, shared by many people who want their friends to see it and enjoy the experience with them.  People trust information when it comes recommended in some way by someone they know.  This is good news for a contact centre as the lead will already be ‘warm’.

When those warm leads want to make contact there are many convenient ways for the media that has been shared to provide a smooth path to an agent. Clicking on a link might open a chat session or a WebRTC audio or even a video call to the contact center, and their social media profile may be used to direct their call to the right agent with the right skills.

There is one group of social media apps that have been under our noses for many years, masquerading as messaging services.  WhatsApp, LINE, Telegram and others created their messaging services as alternatives to SMS but they quickly gained features that are more ‘social’ such as being able to send to groups and send media such as photos and videos.

WhatsApp has been in the news in the last few weeks as being the latest to provide an API to integrators.  Others such as Telegram, and LINE have already done so.  This is great news for contact centres that have integrated session distribution systems as it means they are able to treat incoming chat sessions as just another item of work that needs to be distributed to an available agent with the right skills.  For consumers this is also great news as it allows them to use a media type that is very familiar to them when contacting organisations and perhaps in time may even surpass voice as the preferred method of communication.