How well do you really know your customers? 3 ways to leverage the right data at the right time to enrich customer relationships
According to an eMarketer study, most marketers have only rudimentary data about their customers. In fact, 80% don’t have much customer data beyond basic contact information and product purchases). This greatly limits the ability of organizations to know customers well; to predict purchase patterns, preferences, and potential lifetime value.
It’s not surprising that deeper customer insights bolster customer satisfaction and loyalty. The challenge is how to capture insightful customer data and integrate it into actionable strategies across an organization. Often times, even the data that is captured is often siloed and inaccessible, leaving marketers without a consolidated view of customers.
Think of all of the ways customers are “touched” within the typical marketing/ sales / service/ processes. With all of these systems, it’s difficult to gain complete and consistent insight that prevents organizations to deliver a unified message that reflects an understanding of where the customer is on his journey. New innovative marketing technology enables real-time understanding of the latest transactions, messages, and communications and brings everything into one unified view . This allows all customer facing aspects of an organization to consistently and seamlessly engage with customers across channels, devices and departments.
Here are 3 ways to leverage the right data at the right time to enrich customer relationships
1. Get creative about capturing deeper customer insights
In most cases, customers are very protective about sharing their personal information, unless they perceive a proportionate value in doing so. Finding ways to make the exchange of information worth it for the consumer takes creativity as well as insight into the customer.
First step to capture deeper insights is to identify your customers at the point of interaction. if don’t know who are interacting with, you can’t deliver individualized experiences and you won’t be able to properly attribute that interaction to the correct customer. Identifying ways to identify and capture insightful customer information in exchange for value is critical.
ASICS running shoe company successfully solved the problem of collecting the right customer data by getting around the natural customer tendency to keep personal information and preferences private. They did this by offering a truly value-added Foot ID program. The program measured the customer’s feet and put them on a video treadmill to analyze their running pattern. This in turn allowed ASICS to make personalized shoe recommendations. ASICS capitalized on the customer data, gaining insight through POS and website to learn how, where, when, and how frequently customers made purchases. This enabled proactive communication about new products rather than generic outreach. In other words, ASICs gathered invaluable customer information by offering a service.
2. Real-time analysis and response to opportunities
Once you ask the right questions and collect the right data, it’s only useful if it’s accessible and actionable across the organization. In today’s digital world, people are generating mounds of data with every interaction, organizations need the ability process large volumes of data very quickly. And have the advanced analytics to interrogate the series of data to look for opportunities. The window of opportunity to identify and respond to customers is getting shorter, customers are just another click-away or finger tap away from your competitors.
In the case of the National Hockey League (NHL), bringing together various siloed systems (ecommerce, data, ticketing, Yahoo! Fantasy NHL site, and others) helped streamline data collecting and enabled deeper analytics across the organization. The NHL already had rich customer data (such as favorite team and player, and preferred way of interacting with the fantasy league), but initially lacked the technology to turn this information into more sales. Until they brought the customer information with the analytics under one system, they weren’t utilizing the full potential of their customer data.
A new breed of marketing technology changed all that. Once data collection and analysis was coordinated and streamlined, the NHL could mine customer information to identify fan opportunities and to react in real-time to create unique and deeply personal customer experiences. For example, a customer might receive an email about an upcoming game, with related analysis and ticket offers. If they attended a game where their preferred team won, they could then receive real-time merchandise offers relating to their favorite team or favorite player. Capitalizing on this post-win euphoria allowed the NHL to drive them toward real-time merchandise opportunities (their favorite player on the winning team, e.g.) while the fan was still in the sporting venue. The NHL’s ability to consolidate data in real-time and gave them the tools they needed to act quickly to take advantage of sales opportunities.
3. Leverage advanced analytics to gain deeper customer insights
By leveraging new marketing technologies that incorporate data management capabilities customer behavior insights and preferences management can be utilized to develop customer strategies . But it’s not enough to capture and then consolidate data. You also have to leverage the right analytics tools that enable machine learning, predictive analytics, and visualization capabilities, to be more accurate in targeting and delivering enriching customer experiences. Otherwise, all the data in the world will lend zero intelligence to the marketing endeavor.
