Tag: CX

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Good customer analytics starts with good data

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The Importance of Comprehensive and Correct Customer Data

Consumer data helps companies a great deal to improve nearly every aspect of their business. With proper data analytics and a data-driven marketing approach, brands are able to gain actionable customer insights, generate quality leads and increase customer loyalty, among other things.

According to a survey done by Harvard Business Review, 58% of enterprises have experienced a hike in customer retention and loyalty by making the right use of customer analytics. 

Elevating the quality of your customer data can benefit your business in a number of ways and here are a few thoughts on aspects you might want to consider:

The enhanced customer experience (CX): There is evidence to suggest that businesses that are customer-centric tend to be way ahead of their competitors. To follow a customer-driven approach, you need access to comprehensive customer-specific data. The gathered and enhanced customer data can be useful in being able to understanding and predicting customer behaviour which in turn can be used to improve customer experience through customized offerings, messaging, interaction and services. Without the data, it is hard to provide anything more than a generic message or offer which may not resonate.

Precise targeting and lead generation accompanied with a lower CAC: Effective marketing can translate into a shorter sales cycle, greater sales volume, or appeal to a wider customer audience. For a marketing campaign to be effective though, it needs to have good data to support the estimation of the potential target market or market segment. Having good customer data opens up the opportunity to segment based on customer demographics, showing where the customers are, their age group, their gender, education, likely income, potential disposable income, and other critical traits that you might consider for targeting.

Drawing customers in for multiple engagements or appealing to new customers is made more likely with comprehensive and correct customer data that allow your business to focus on customer-characteristic-based marketing strategies to generate quality leads.

According to Thomas Griffin Co-Founder and President of OptinMonster in a piece on Forbes – customer acquisition cost (CAC) can be lowered if you have the right targeted message aimed at the right audience, whether it be PPC or contact-based marketing campaigns. To have that message, you need to know something about your audience, particularly if you’re running contact-based campaigns

Brand Improvement: Customer feedback and reviews form an important part of customer data but for this kind of data to be really useful, it needs to be tied to the best possible customer master data. To run effective customer review and survey data analytics you want to be able to paint a complete picture of respondents. Survey submissions that support uncovering the strengths and weaknesses of your brand and offerings can be effective in isolation by conveying a sense of general measures of customer satisfaction but they ultimately reduce their usefulness without reference to customer data.

Survey responses may impair your ability to derive maximum value from responses by being unable to tie them back to the respondent’s lifetime customer value. The CLV model informs you on whether the commenting customers are actually high-value customers or one-off customers who bought on a deal or opportunistically and that may never buy from you again.

Tools matter: we’ve talked about tools before, principally tools like your Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution where you store large amounts of data and consumer profiles. You may even have an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system or a CDM (Customer Data Management) platform. Your business may in fact have all of these., but the question of whether they are fit for purpose or suitable for all the jobs that your business needs to undertake needs to be carefully considered.

We’ve observed that there is a lot of enthusiasm about using AI for data collection accompanied by scraping tools and social media trawlers and transaction aggregators to increase the volume of data collected.  What we’ve also observed is that some of the fundamentals of knowing your customer remain missing or incomplete. This is partially due to poor data collection, collation, and assessment processes but it is also a function of the nature of the tools. Some tools are better suited to transaction processing, interaction or engagement, etc. Very few of the tools that we’ve mentioned, are suited to mastery of the digital customer and if they are, it is typically in the service of a specific application objective.

Customer data is presently experiencing a revolution in the business world. Data for every kind of business, from B2B sales and eCommerce brands to digital content creators, service and hospitality, healthcare and financial services, and a number of others too. All depend on gaining a source of appropriate and correct customer data to increase their leads, opportunities, and ultimately business., Knowing the audience, creating personalized marketing strategies, generating quality leads, and reaching a wider audience is the brass ring that leads to business success.

There is no exaggeration in saying that in today’s world of digital advancement, your company cannot survive without the best possible proper and relevant customer data. We believe you can achieve that with a Customer Master Data Management (CMDM) platform like that offered by Pretectum.

Contact us today for more information.

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Confused about customer data management?

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What do you have? An ERP, a CRM, a CDP, a loyalty system, a webshop? Chances are if you are in a business that has been around for some time, you may have literally dozens of systems (including spreadsheets) that contain customer data.

When your data repositories are siloed and fragmented, held in different systems with a variety of purposes in mind, it is difficult to converge on a single understanding of who and what the customer is and consequently, it is even tougher to work on an optimized customer experience across all the systems and repositories that your business may have.

So where does all this tie into customer data management you might ask? That answer may lie in your understanding of what customer data management really is. Vendors will tell you that their technology stack is customer data management. That might be true, but it might not be true for your organization. Ultimately, customer data management isn’t exclusively about technology, it is also about business practices (think processes); roles and responsibilities (of people), and of course a bit of technology to help control, evaluate, track and distribute whatever it is that your team(s) are working on.

Focusing on the people

Your business may be in the luxurious position of having a data office and a chief data officer (CDO). More likely it has a Head of the DMO (Data Management Organization). Whichever it is, doesn’t really matter that much. Either way, if you have people with job titles that contain the word “data” and they’re not lowly data analysts, then your organization is likely well-placed maturity-wise. It is likely clear who is in charge of the data and accountable for resolving issues.

If you don’t have this kind of structure then the fundamental question is going to be, who is responsible and accountable for the management of the customer data entity. This could be the role of people in Sales, Marketing, Service, or Support; but ideally, it isn’t IT.

Setting standards

There are a number of solid industry standards that your organization could consider in relation to customer data management. The Data Management Association (DAMA) International defines data management as a domain aspecific term as the “planning, oversight, and control over management (sic) of data and the use of data and data-related sources.” That’s a broad expectation for the objective of managing data assets.

Master data management (MDM) is a sub-discipline and requires some very specific data governance activities namely: agreement on people that will be accountable for the mastered data, agreement on the processes and policies that will be implemented and applied, and agreement on the tools and technologies that will be applicable.

One should also not be confused by the subtle but important differentiation between governance and management.

Governance establishes policies and procedures while management enacts those policies and procedures to compile and use the data, ultimately in service of the business needs. So while your business may have a governance policy, does it have a way to execute that policy with a management approach? It could be manual, but it could just easily be automated or semi-automated.

Putting the gears in place

There’s a view that breaking down the silos or at least overcoming the limitation of silos is the first hurdle to address in any organization.

You may be lucky, if your organization is small enough, this could be a deftly meted-out edict from the Chief Executive Officer but the real question is going to be how do you follow through on that intent in a meaningful and productive way?

There is a school of thought that suggests that you should try to corral all the business functions (sales, marketing, service, support, accounting, eCommerce) and make sure that they are all aligned, but that may be impractical or unnecessary.

What’s more important is knowing that those divisions exist and knowing what they have and understanding what the commonalities are for each of them. A well-implemented and well-considered approach to Customer data governance doesn’t have to hamper, hinder or detract from the way that they currently gather and manage their customer data but what it can do, is it can help make their process and data capture activities a wider audience.

Compliance serves as an important aspect of the end to end process of customer data management and this is not easily achieved if there isn’t a clearly designated boundary in relation to who owns which parts of the data puzzle. Further, if you don’t actually have a centrally managed repository of customer information how on earth do you service things like Data Subject Access Requests? With a CMDM, Pretectum believes it is much easier.

If you’re curious about the implementation approach then you’re recommended to have a read of a Pretectum piece on this very topic – getting started…

Why bother?

The “why bother” question, is very important to respond to, and I’ll try to do that here In the general schema of things you might wonder why the marketing team would need to know every shipping address a customer ever used. You might also question why they need to know whether the customer is a pre-pay or postpay customer? The key may lie in the convergence of these two pieces of data accompanied by perhaps the volume of business that the customer generates for the business. Consider that piece of insight as to the CLV.

An effective marketing campaign, for example, is one that has the highest likely yield or return in response to very targeted and specific measures and objectives. Customers may live in one place and take delivery in another. They may even live in one place, take delivery in another and yet shop in a completely different place (in-store pickup).

Customers who prepay might yield a greater or lesser margin for the business as compared to postpay and you may in fact have a campaign that is looking for prepayers based on where they live rather than where they shop. The power of analytics for customers is only improved when you have as much data as you need, easily accessible and unified to those that need it most.

Identity at the core of customer engagement

We’re not talking creep intrusive stuff here, though understandably that might be of concern to some. What we’re considering here is the fact that a collection of anonymous events, wherever they come from, is much less useful than an activity that paints a useful picture of the interests and tastes of known customers.

The alternative is clear, every sale made, a deal brokered or engagement had, is either serendipitous or is part of a larger and more elaborate deliberate business plan.

You want to remove the luck and chance elements and start putting a little more predictability into your deliberate behaviour and shaping the potential customers and markets that need to underpin your business growth plans.

Data, and Customer data, in particular, is often considered in the context of how it might inform digital transformation or how much of a burden it represents in terms of privacy or compliance. Those are all good reasons to consider it, but data for insights which can help to guide business growth plans, reduce organizational friction and elevate the personalization of the customer experience should actually be front and centre to why customer data needs more of your focused attention.

Pretectum thinks that centralized customer data management, the kind provided by a CMDM like that offered in the cloud by Pretectum, is one of the best ways to wrap all those diverse requirements up and package them for the general use of your employees and the technologies that they use, support and deploy.

A deliberate Customer Experience

To improve the customer experience, your business needs to be able to recognize the individual and spot their omnichannel interactions with your brand. You need to use identifiers, traits and potentially a slew of other aspects of the customer profile to do this. All of that requires data.

An incomplete customer profile limits your ability to categorically identify the customer when limited data is on offer. An inconsistent or downright wrong profile attribute from any given source can make a truly unified understanding of the omnichannel customer well-nigh impossible.

Industry analysts, Gartner, suggest that your customer data management processes and infrastructure must be flexible and adaptable. Flexibility lies in the ability to take the single dimension of customer and facet it according to the needs of use. Can you do that with what you have today?

Pretectum feels that the rigidity of CRM and ERP, which are largely for transaction processing, make this difficult.

For CDPs, there are overlaps but the greatest challenge is likely found in the fact that CDPs are generally targeted at a narrow group of organizational users for whom the capabilities of the CDP are either too prescriptive or don’t cover enough divergence in terms of alignment with the individual business user’s need.

This is where CMDM may serve as a better hub and datastore with connectivity to all and any systems you might have through a variety of integration methods.

Contact us to learn more about how CMDM may be a great addition to your data management landscape.

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Customers and their First Impressions

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It doesn’t really matter too much what the first touchpoint is with a prospect, what matters is how you and your brand come across in that first touch.

It is said one should never judge a book by its cover and that you really need to forge a deeper relationship with someone before you can really get to know them but unfortunately, first impressions do count and that first impression could be the moment that they step across the threshold of your bricks and mortar store; the first email that they get from you; a flyer or ad in their mailbox or a local rag; a TV or radio slot or a cold call.

Whatever the mechanism or whoever the messenger, what is being delivered by your employees in marketing, sales, support, or service, how confident are you that your prospects are being greeted warmly and with a direct invitation to do business with you and your brand?

In the not-so-distant past, the receptionist, concierge, or front of house greeter answered all the calls and greeted every walk-in. Their effectiveness was measured by their friendliness attention to detail and attentiveness and service. Everything was semi-scripted but often there wasn’t actually a script, there was a particular work ethic that these types of people subscribed to and executed on. They are more difficult to find these days, but we still crave that kind of attentiveness.

We may still see glimmers of this kind of reception in hotels and restaurants, medical offices, and the dentist, but it isn’t really that common these days anywhere else and if it is there it is probably because of distinctive personalities or extensive staff training.

In fact, most office complexes these days intercept you in the lobby before you even get to the elevators, often with barriers and insist on you checking in with perhaps an auto-attendant. Walk-ins are rare and advance appointments online are pretty normal. Something in the personal touch that was there before has perhaps been lost for the most part.

In a previous piece, we remarked on how bad impressions stick, it’s human nature to really only see and more importantly remember, the negative. Negative introductions, negative first-time use, negative renewal, negative payment settlement. It is also crucial to communicate and recognize that every employee is responsible for working towards making a positive first impression. The question top of mind, is how do they do that?

Focusing on the CX (Customer eXperience) is recognized as something that doesn’t just happen naturally. Rather, a good CX doesn’t materialize by accident. Companies that provide an above-average CX have often invested heavily in making sure that the CX is important enough that the revenue and business returns almost become secondary. The reason that they do this, is because the CX is closely tied to the brand and the brand is deemed so valuable that it shouldn’t be compromised. We believe that personalization is a critical piece of this puzzle, but for that you need data.

Brand literally takes decades to build and develop, and a bad customer experience can effectively ruin it overnight, especially if the brand kicking goes viral. So, from this, we can conclude that brand or reputation management is critical and expensive if not maintained and protected well.

At Pretectum we recognize that the more you know about the prospect the more informed you can be about the way that you want to interact with them. We also recognize that how you gather that information is varied. You could obtain a lead from a marketing event, a trade show, a webshop visit, a cold call, or a walk-up. What you do with that lead at the time of capture and every subsequent step of interaction matters. A lead can quickly become an opportunity and then a deal or it can disappear forever depending on many factors, some of which are within your control, some of which are not.

The point is, the moment you capture something, you need to consider what you can do with that piece of data. You also need to act quickly. A fresh lead has a limited shelf life. Can you verify the attributes, can you standardize them, can you enhance them? All of these changes to that data can help to hone the kind of message you want to convey in the next step. With a customer MDM platform, we believe you can. With a customer MDM platform you have many more options than you have if that contact simply sits in your ERP, CRM, or CDP, unverified, un-evaluated, and limited in value.

Contact us to find out how the Pretectum CMDM can help you greet your prospects and your customers in a new way!