This is an opinion editorial by Frankie Wallace, a freelance writer from the Pacific Northwest.
Bitcoin has been in the news a lot recently, for both good and bad reasons. Recent declines in bitcoin values have fueled intense speculation about the currency’s future. At the same time, the expansion of bitcoin into markets around the world and the rapid development of the system’s capabilities suggest that reports of bitcoin’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
While much remains to be revealed about the future of bitcoin, what is becoming increasingly apparent is its huge potential to revolutionize the customer journey. This article examines the use of bitcoin to promote customer engagement, support customer satisfaction, and ensure an exceptional customer experience.
Bitcoin and hyper-personalization
Bitcoin proponents tout the technology’s potential to offer customers a level of customization impossible with traditional monetary systems. Customization capability derives primarily from the mechanisms by which bitcoin circulates through the system.
Because bitcoin platforms offer breadth and transparency, they allow stakeholders, from merchants to service providers, access to the complete record of every bitcoin transaction ever made by a consumer. This gives companies unprecedented targeted marketing power, to users who have chosen not to use certain (often recommended) privacy practices that would otherwise make it nearly impossible.
Promotional materials and online advertisements are only targeted at consumers for whom they are most relevant. This means potential customers will hear about the products and services they care about, without having to wade through a chaotic jumble of irrelevant ads.
In addition, blockchain transparency allows transactions to be documented and reported in real-time, which is expected to dramatically improve the customer experience with loyalty programs.
With traditional loyalty programs, customers often had to wait for transactions to be processed and recorded before earning points or other rewards. Loyalty programs that operate through bitcoin, however, can allow users to access real-time rewards.
Best of all, because of the comprehensiveness of the ledger, merchants, banks, service providers and other entities can better customize loyalty program offers. This holistic and evergreen profile of a customer’s transaction history means that loyalty programs can be truly hyper-personalised, ensuring that the program’s loyalty incentives are truly meaningful and effective for customers.
And as every marketer or business owner understands, there’s no better way to attract and retain customers than to show that you know your customers as individuals, that you care about serving their unique needs and goals through services tailored specifically to them.
Empower customers
Bitcoin platforms don’t just support the customer journey through hyper-personalization. They also improve the customer experience through empowerment. For example, bitcoin frees customers from the constraints of national and international currency systems, allowing users to engage with any entity that accepts bitcoin, whoever and wherever the parties are.
This not only eliminates the need for currency exchange, reducing, if not completely eliminating, transaction fees, but also decentralizes capital, taking economic power out of the hands of controlling, and often autocratic, agencies and transferring in the hands of the consumer. .
Improved protections
Just as bitcoin allows consumers around the world to engage with others on the platform however and whenever they choose, technological advances also serve to protect consumers in times of crisis. For example, the new Border Wallets technology allows customers to memorize seed phrases in a simple way to access funds.
This provides a much more reliable, accessible and secure approach to accessing and using funds when crossing borders in precarious situations.
This is especially critical for users in crisis, such as those who have been displaced and are forced to urgently and unexpectedly cross international borders.
The peace of mind of knowing that bitcoin users will have access to their funds when they are needed most urgently is perhaps the biggest improvement to the overall customer journey. This is particularly true when organizations that have adopted bitcoin also put in place advanced information security programs to protect customer data and especially to preserve the integrity and privacy of their bitcoin account.
The food
Improving the customer journey is often key to ensuring customer loyalty. Bitcoin offers commercial and public entities unprecedented opportunities to optimize the customer experience. This includes an exceptional ability to personalize the customer experience for those who opt in, from increasing the effectiveness of targeted marketing efforts to improving the customer experience of loyalty and rewards programs. In addition, bitcoin supports the customer journey by empowering, decentralizing capital and ensuring that consumers can securely access and use their funds whenever, wherever and however they want.
This is a guest post by Frankie Wallace. The opinions expressed are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
