A Voyage of Discovery
Adding Value with Customer Insights
Ask a Recruiter what they typically expect from their recruitment software, and most often the response is anchored to the need to manage high volumes of candidate data.
Ask a Recruiter how they manage their customer data and the response is completely different “We know our customers pretty well already”.
Assuming you have a good relationship with your customers, consider for a moment an occasion where you lost a placement to a competitor, or you discovered that your customer expanded into a new market, but you missed the boat, because they assumed it was not your industry sector specialism and so they went to a competitor instead. Then you learn that the candidate you placed with your customer a few years ago, has recently left the company and they replaced her with someone internally, so the ship has sailed on that opportunity too. How confident are you that you really know everything about your customer’s business, challenges and potential opportunities?
More Meaningful Customer Conversations
So, if you could anticipate your customers’ needs or next move in advance, how might that shape the conversations you have with your customer? In short, the more we know about our customers before we engage, the more meaningful conversations we can have. These are conversations that steer towards targeted opportunities, that improve our customer’s business and have the highest propensity to achieve a successful business outcome.
There are other advantages too. Knowing what our customers want and need in advance, means we can offer a more personalised customer experience, tailoring our services and customising our approach. We can become more agile and responsive to our customers’ needs, which builds trust, leading to increased customer loyalty and retention. We can also target our marketing activities more effectively.
As you consider your data management strategy, ask yourself whether your technology has evolved from simply telling you what you already know (transactional-based data), to providing deeper customer insights that are actionable, so you can sail away from the safe harbour and take advantage of new untapped opportunities.
Stay on Course
Steve Jobs once said “Get closer than ever to your customers, so close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” This sits at the very heart of a customer-centric philosophy, but in a fast-paced, competitive environment, where our customers’ behaviour can change rapidly, how do we get close and stay close to our customers? This is where innovative technology can bridge the gap.
Actionable customer insights connect the dots between fragmented pieces of customer data and action-based tasks, tying it altogether into a single holistic view, so you can quickly identify and capitalise on untapped opportunities for new business. For example, by combining social media insights such as your customers’ LinkedIn and Twitter activities, with enterprise database analytics such as placement history, we can uncover patterns of customer behaviour that draw attention to potential areas of untapped white-space opportunities for cross-sell and up-sell of recruitment and HR services.
The right technology equips your Recruitment team with the insights they need to sustain a competitive advantage and stay close to your customers’ business.
Catch the Trade Winds
According to The Telegraph, the average time spent in a job in the UK is between 3-5 years, which means that our customers’ will need to replace the role and candidate on a frequent basis. Using predictive modelling and data analytics to identify when existing candidates may be looking for their next opportunity, enables you to plan ahead. Proactively engaging with your customer in advance for succession planning, minimizes potential business risk and impact for your client and ensures you maximise opportunities.
From Bow to Stern
Customer insights can play a big part in helping us to understand where our customer is in the recruitment lifecycle, including the degree to which they adopt and use our services, their propensity to invest with us in the future and uncovering opportunities for expansion. Having leveraged customer insights to successfully manage the customer at every stage of the lifecycle, as contracts come up for re-negotiation, we reduce churn and increase the likelihood of keeping them on-board.
Equally important, is threading intelligent customer insights into the Recruiter’s day to day workflow experience. Ensuring insights are delivered at the point they are needed and in the format required, increases productivity and ensures recruiters are fully prepared ahead of engaging with the customer.
Threading into the workflow experience means that as the Recruiter makes a phone call, schedules a meeting or carries out an any action-based task, vital customer insights are delivered exactly at the right time, in the right format, with actionable alerts and notifications, accessible through any desktop or mobile device.
Full Steam Ahead
Recruitment software of the future extends beyond storage of transactional data. It goes deeper to deliver customer insights, through predictive modelling, with ‘at-a-glance’ visual graphical interface, that supports fast and efficient decision-making, so you are fully prepared to have the right conversations with your customer and convert opportunities as they arise. A win-win for you and your Client.
Recruitment companies investing in an insights-driven customer data management strategy, will be the ones sailing off into the sunset, leaving the competition in their wake.
