Changes that the Pandemic has had on Customer Master Data

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The Global pandemic brought a fundamental change in the world. It changed the way we interact with customers, prospects, and each other. Things may never be the same again.

While the initial thoughts of retailers were to possibly hold back on making any brash decisions and instead wait for things to settle down. As time passed, some retailers folded and others were left with very few options to mitigate the situation.

Across all industries, the global pandemic made it necessary for business owners and leaders to consider how their businesses communicate with existing and prospective clients.

Failure to communicate, and failure to communicate appropriately meant business survival would have been impossible. Some have still not quite perfected their approach and Pretectum thinks that customer data is a root cause.

The general consensus seems to be that we are likely to suffer this “new normal for years to come and if you think your business is going to be immune to the change effects on customer behaviour, it is worth considering how it has impacted these industries’ examples.

Retail

The retail industry possibly felt the effects of the pandemic possibly more than anyone, at least initially. Bricks and mortar (B&M) shops were closed, and when they were open they often had to contend with extreme control measures that limited the number of patrons, the management of facilities, and related activities.

According to Mastercard Spending Pulse, traditional retail sales dropped by 6.3 % in 2020. The pandemic changed the fundamentals of how many businesses sell and how people buy. For retailers, it became necessary to renew their go-to-market approach to develop opportunities; failure to adapt meant an inability to thrive, and ultimately failure became a real threat.

Traditional retailers had, for many years, been content with the anonymous consumer but when they implemented eCommerce in response to sagging B&M sales, they suddenly found that data was now present but often still misaligned or completely divorced from their POS and logistics execution systems, this massive change caused significant data deficits to become apparent.

Logistics and travel

During the pandemic, nearly 90% of the world’s population was subjected to travel restrictions, and airlines and carriers saw a drop in demand and curtailment of flights. Airports were largely shuttered and many air carriers were forced to offer customers credits or refunds on existing travel bookings. In short, the travel industry as a whole was really badly affected.

2020 saw logistics contract by ‘only’ 3.3%. However, with time when consumers pivoted from going into stores to instead shopping online, demand for logistics, particularly domestic, grew. With so much online activity, the sector required systems that streamlined business operations further and gave clarity to not just supply chain managers but also retail operations and consumers directly. eCommerce retailers needed to be able to answer questions like: “Where is my parcel?“, and “When will it reach me?

Ecommerce

The global e-commerce market jumped over $26.7 trillion during the pandemic.

The industry ultimately has mixed feelings about this apparent surge, with outbursts of demand accompanied by the expectation of zero transportation costs but at the same time having to cope with a highly fragmented and challenging domestic delivery network. This saw carriers that had already established themselves, flourish. This also saw the emergence of some repurposing of related but not directly involved carrier involvement trying to grab a piece of the action. Some that had dipped their toes in logistics doubled down as their ride-sharing business sagged.

It was at this time, that many businesses started their first journey into the realm of ‘the digital‘ and this required setting up a structural data foundation that helped them gather all crucial information on when buyers visit their online store, add products to a shopping cart, or engage in shopping activities.

All this information was crucial for effective execution and ultimately retargeting. Some held out, others leveraged partnerships and even others launched whole new businesses whose whole model was eRetail.

Hospitality

The hospitality industry, for the most part, came away just as battered as the airline industry. Hotels, particularly resort hotels saw their business vaporized by the knock-on effects of restricted travel. In addition, they had to subject their operations to specific health and safety mandates. In some locations, hotels were smart enough to repurpose themselves as quarantine hotels, in particular in countries or locations where quarantine orders were in effect for suspected risk cases or the infected who did not require hospitalization.

Business travellers now stayed at home, didn’t use car rental, didn’t fly in a plane and didn’t stay in a hotel or have a corporate lunch or dinner and instead resorted to Zoom, Gotomeeting, Skype, Microsoft Teams and Webex calls.

Consumers became hesitant to go out to restaurants, cinemas and taverns, fearing catching the virus. In some geographies, these businesses were told to shutter their operations unless they could service their clients with takeaways. Even high-end restaurants suddenly discovered that they needed to offer an in-home dining option in whatever way they could.

The hospitality sector has been considered relatively slow in adopting the latest customer data management frameworks, in part because many of them have long-established customer and customer loyalty databases but nonetheless they too could benefit from improved data management and all that it offers in support of more qualified decision making.

As is witnessed by the differing impacts, some businesses withered, and others saw a decline but then switched their way of working based on increasing pressure to work in new ways. At the heart of all of these though, is the question of how each of these businesses and industries as a whole, look at and consider their customer data management. For some, they had to look at a different set of values that mattered. For others, the most important piece of the puzzle was to embark on a program of gathering data that they had never gathered before.

All of these efforts drive towards improving the ability of the organization to thrive, accelerating digitalization in support of changing customer preferences and working out what methods are the most appropriate for engaging with, and communicating with customers. Some have already matured quite quickly and started to harvest the benefits through better analytics and targeted messaging, others are just starting out. The question is for your business, do you know what the expectations are and how well are you meeting those expectations?

A Customer-MDM creates a unified framework to connect customer data across the organization, breaking through business silos and streamlining processes and making all the necessary data available to all those that need it, in a secure and managed way.

Collecting and maintaining high-quality customer data will give you a better understanding of your customer and in all likelihood help your business to more adequately address the needs and expectations of your customers. A single source of truth for customer data will help your business units like marketing, logistics, sales and service to not only be appropriate and relevant but in fact, even take advantage of aspects of customer data that had previously never been considered.

The Pretectum CMDM helps businesses of all shapes and sizes with the challenge of customer data curation in pursuit of improved personalized customer relations, improved compliance, improved marketing execution, collections, logistics, sales and service.

In the long run, the objective has to be the augmentation of customer lifetime value accompanied by a customer sentiment of trust and loyalty. Contact us to learn more.

Stressing or Impressing – how brands fare in troubled times

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We can’t sugar coat things, some brands did pretty abysmally during the pandemic, from political parties right the way through to your local favorite beverage manufacturer or even your corner store.

The pandemic put a bunch of people out of work, ejected millions from the relative comfort of the office or place of work and put many of us in closer sustained proximity to friends and family than would normally be the case.

Three lines of business that did exceptionally well under the circumstances were those that managed to keep us connected to the office, our place of work and our colleagues; and those that kept us and our families entertained.

While the fallout from the SARS COVID-19 pandemic is still being assessed and calculated and there is the likely risk of further variants, the reality is that for many who would typically be office-bound; the effects of being forced to work from home had mixed results.

IT organizations likely had more anxiety around having so many more remote workers than ever before. Many sleepless nights were spent putting in the further infrastructure to create network resiliency. Of course, this was not limited to the corporates, schools, and educational institutions had to do exactly the same.

There were some outages some disruptions and some technical challenges but by and large transitioning to an administrative back-office function that was almost 100% remote was surprisingly smooth. Perhaps far smoother than it would have been if it had happened just a few years ago.

Of course, some brands tanked and some businesses were completely annihilated or at least very severely battered and bruised. Aviation, airport companies, pleasure cruises and many in the travel, food and beverage and hospitality industries are still licking their wounds and will continue to do some for a long time.

On reflection, the brands that consumers will have related most closely to would have been the infrastructure providers and the retail brands. This would be because those would be the brands that they would have had to rely upon the most. So the question, is how exactly did those brands do, during the pandemic and how would you personally assess them in terms of your relationship with them?

An oft-overlooked aspect of brands is the perception of how they take care of their employees. In some countries, furloughs alleviated the financial burden on employers with a significant portion (often more than 50%) being provided by the public purse to ensure that people didn’t go hungry while their jobs were put on hold.

The question, then, is did this in any way impact your perception of the brands you favour and has it influenced your post-pandemic allegiances, shopping or eCommerce habits?

How did your business fare?

Most importantly, if your business is one of those that are unsure of how you came out of the pandemic in relation to customer sentiment, how would you ever be able to determine whether your customers are still in love with your brand or have moved on to a competitor or completely changed their interests?

Brand successes and failures depend on the “bond” with the customer. This encompasses the brand image, promise and positioning. The customer gets to decide the fate of a brand irrespective of the effort your brand goes through in marketing, PR and all the other communication and brand-building levers that might get pulled. The relationship your customers have with your brand is an emotion-based one that is heavily bound up in consumer-brand perception.

Brand agency, Visualfizz cites a couple of interesting crashes from 2019 as a result of ad campaign failures and then pulled a couple of beauts out in 2020 and again in 2021. It will be interesting to see who makes the list for 2022. For brands, certainly looking at the most recent brand challenges, a lot of the topics seems to be closely related to social issues and the relative “wokeness” of brands.

Accordingly, companies that are still clinging to their business activities in Russia, like those cited in the NYPost article might emerge severely damaged outside of Russia even if within the confines of the Russian border their brand is reinforced as having solidarity with the Russian government and perhaps a segment of the general population. Airlines too likely will have to reconsider their approach to providing flight credit rather than a full fare refund, and the same is likely to be true to package holidays.

From the Pretectum CMDM perspective, there isn’t a lot you can do to avoid some of the mishaps that some brands suffered during the pandemic but on a very personal and individual level, you can make a difference with each individual consumer that your brand deals with, either through sales, service, billing or support, by thinking carefully about what the data is that you hold for each customer, and how that data can help or hinder your business in giving each customer an optimized and personalized experience when dealing with your brand either through a website, an application or an interaction with one of your associates.

Strong brands tend to recognize that a good familiarity with, and knowledge of existing and repeat customers gives them a distinct advantage over competitors because they already know something about those customers. Quite apart from what your business does in marketing through the use of platforms like CDPs; a customer master data management platform like the Pretectum CMDM gives you a leg-up to provide a more customized interaction experience.

Learn how you can use the Pretectum CMDM to your advantage by contacting us today!