Tag: Personalization

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Customer types, patterns and segments

trendy young asian women choosing cotton bags in fashion boutique

Whether you’re in Product or Service management, Sales, or Marketing you know that having an understanding of the customer, analyzing, and keeping track of their behaviour is critical for the effectiveness of your business.

Customers make thousands of calculated and spur-of-the-moment decisions every waking hour of the day from deciding what they will eat to what they’ll wear. It is easy to think that the many ‘buy’ decisions, in particular, are made without too much thought, particularly the less significant ones.

Decoding the thought processes behind customer decisions is no mean feat, particularly if you don’t have the data to back up your hypotheses around why customers do certain things.

The Customer Data Model - Click on the image for a better view
Click on the image for a better view

We try to decode the thinking because ultimately it can help us understand how customers arrive at their decisions and choices. In the study of customer behaviours, in particular, you’re looking at the processes customers apply to choose, use and dispose of your products and services and this includes factoring in their emotional, mental, and behavioural responses. Behaviour analytics examines the customer through the analytical lenses of psychology, biology, chemistry, and economic practices. For marketers, these analyses help in understanding what influences the acquire, buy and discard decisions. This in turn leads to a rehoning of the message, branding, positioning, promotions, advertising, and even what is ultimately formulated as a product or service.

Only through an in-depth understanding of the customer can businesses hope how best to decide on products and service offerings and how adequately they fill gaps in the market and are needed and wanted.

Revealing the customer

There are three categories of factors that are considered an influence customer behaviour:

  • Personal: the customer’s interests and opinions as influenced by their age, gender, ethnicity, and culture.
  • Psychological: the customer’s reaction to particular kinds of messaging, which is dependent on their personal perceptions, attitudes, and mentality.
  • Social: factors such as family, friends, education level, social media, income, and socioeconomic status all have an influence on customer behaviour.

In addition, there are four principal types of “buy” behaviour outcomes amongst customers; complex, dissonance-reducing, habitual, and variety or variability buy behaviours.

Complex buying behaviour is typically associated with infrequent big-ticket product or service purchases. Such buy activities are complex in that the customers of engaging in a great deal of research before committing to the investment. Examples are purchases of high-end luxury goods, houses, cars, and holidays.

Dissonance-reducing buy behaviour sees the customer encountering difficulties in determining the differences between specific products or brands. This ‘Dissonance’ often occurs when the customer fears making a bad choice. Clothing purchases may manifest this but equally, this can be present when buying appliances or electronic goods. Habitual buying behaviour.

Habitual purchases typically involve very little preference, bias, or influence in the product or brand category because the risk is relatively low and there is no major emotional or cognitive investment. While grocery brands will often suggest that this implies brand loyalty, the reality is that in many cases the customer chooses based on past positive experiences which may be tied to price, look, feel, scent, taste, or overall experience. The repeat purchases are habitual rather than carefully thought through.

Variety and variability in purchase behaviour are typically directly associated with past frustration, disappointment, or a bad experience with a previous purchase decision.

Click on the image for a better view of the platform
The highly configurable Pretectum CMDM schema – Click on the image for a better view of the platform


Pretectum believes that for you to have the best effect in terms of influence on the subscription to your services or the purchase of your products, you need to have the best possible understanding of your customer through the customer master data repository. This can help to inform your business in relation to how to target customers, what their purchasing power is like, their likes and dislikes and who influences their decision-making processes.

The Pretectum CMDM enables you to decide the aspects that you need to maintain within the customer master, from an understanding of buying patterns to what they are buying, where, and when they buy, and how they pay.

Consider what you store about your customers today and consider what you could store with the Pretectum CMDM to help your business in getting closer to your customers and being able to more appropriately understand and provide them with the goods and services that they want.

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Are you ready to take your one shot?

man love people woman

Think about a brand that has surprised you lately. You may be surprised. Your own reaction might simply be one of a shake of the head or an “aha” moment. It’s a tough world out there, trying to get headspace with customers and brands that do it well are leaving an impressionable mark.

On the one hand, it is about the specialism that a particular brand might have, on the other, it might be the solid experience and reputation that all customers have with that brand. Whichever it is, brands recognise that being clear, present and unambiguous will likely win them loyalty and repeat business.

The pandemic, for example, will have left many of us unclear on some aspects of our lives like debt management, travel and health care.

Simple questions like, “if my employer goes to the wall, will my bank come after me for settling my credit card bills or call me out as a heightened risk of mortgage default?“; if you booked to travel during the pandemic and were not able to fly, what happens to the value associated with those airline tickets and more importantly, what happens to your air miles and perhaps your air mile status if you’ve not been able to maintain topping up your account? With health care, it becomes even more fundamental. Will my health insurer pay for my treatment if I contract COVID-19 or one of the many variants?

Savvy brands have cottoned on to these anxieties. Some financial institutions have reached out to customers to provide them with assurances that they won’t come after them; some airlines have banked the value of your flight anticipating that you will travel later, or have frozen your airline miles account expecting a return to normalcy at some point and healthcare insurers have provided updates to their members informing them on safe practices, self-diagnosis and what to be aware off if members suspect COVID-19 illness.

All of these approaches hinge on three very important aspects of understanding the customer.

The first is, “who exactly is my customer“; do I have all their basic details and more? If your systems carry only the most basic of data, perhaps now is a perfect opportunity to revisit your customer master data management strategy. Get rid of the duplicates, and take stock of the overall quality and completeness. What do you need to have in terms of customer data records and how can you gather updates as quickly and as effectively as possible?

The second aspect, is that you may have a lot of customer data but is that data current and relevant? It is not unusual for companies that have had customers for literally decades, to still have some of the most geriatric data in their systems, some of which may paint an entirely incorrect picture of the customer. Here again, consider what should you have, how current should it be, and when last did you update it.  If it is old and potentially irrelevant,m what’s the plan for it?

The third is the general usability of data. Again, this isn’t a particularly astonishing fact, but the reality is that people do change, their email address, phone number and physical address and yes, there is the concept of customer churn.

Would you reach out to former customers assuming that they are still current customers? Probably not, but you would be surprised at how many marketing departments still send marketing materials to households blindly without a clear understanding of the relationship with the customer base. To maintain brand awareness, you need to be pushing more than just the logo and a story of what your business does, you need to also consider personalization and in particular, targeted personalization. 

It is probably worth considering the meme below as another case in point wherein some data is used to inform machine learning and AI algorithms but falls short of the need and in fact, could be very frustrating for a customer, when their buying journey has long ended. This implies that all data management should be considered important, not just customer data management but it also means that the ecosystem of supplementary data needs to be considered too!

43 Hilarious Amazon Memes That Poke Fun at the Company | Work + Money

SAP, the sellers of ERP software reputedly once used a slogan that is perhaps super resonant. “Your best customers leave quite an impression. Do the same, and they won’t leave at all.” – I couldn’t find the original but it seems appropriate.

Do you subscribe to the belief that we find and maintain an allegiance to brands with which we find affinity? Being impressed is something that builds affinity. If we meet someone we like, we will want more of their time. If we watch a television program and enjoy it, we will likely spend more time watching that program and if we read a book that we enjoy, we are likely to seek out that author’s other writing. 

With the level of messaging that bombards each and every one of us every day the number of real opportunities that each brand has at its disposal has become severely limited.  Gulf Business News in the UAE posted an article in mid-2021 that suggested that a survey by Cisco Appdynamics App in the Attention Index research series offers up statistics of 73% of consumers giving one shot to brands ith their digital experiences before they switch to another provider. This likely translates to more than that market and more than just digital experiences. 

we want more customers like ….

Overall, everything suggests that as we move through 2022 we are likely to see very few retail industry improvements for example; supply chain problems will continue to be aggravated, stocks will remain low, and prices will rise. Customers will move on to the competition if you don’t improve their experience at every touchpoint. 

Consider then, what those touchpoints might be. Your systems likely contain three types of customers. The prospect, the past customer, and the active customer.

Customer Touchpoints

ProspectingActive EngagementPast Engagement
AdvertisingMerchandising in storeWarranty Support
Social Media/InfluencerPoint of Sale/BillingMarketing emails
Product ReviewsWebsite/eStoreOnline help
Referral/Word of MouthCustomer Assistance/BOTDocumentation
 Marketing EmailsInstallation/DeliveryService Delivery 

Not all of these will be particularly relevant but what you should do is examine these and perhaps even other touchpoints that have not been considered and examine what you can do to help those touchpoints with data on the customer, about the customer, and for the customer.

Pretectum Customer Master Data Management is all about providing your systems with the necessary information to support these touchpoints. Using a combination of APIs and direct integrations, you can have the Pretectum C-MDM operate as the customer master data hub to your touchpoint engines serving up insights on the details of customers’ social media identifiers, their associated product reviews, and personalized emails. In-store personnel has the opportunity to directly engage with identified customers in a much more personalized way that conveys a sense of care and attention that your competitors may not be able to offer.

Shopping carts and point-of-sale can extend promotions but only if the customer is known and their loyalty identifiable. Finally, when customers engage through help, service, or support; by phone, email, or chat – having a relationship that demonstrates familiarity and understanding may just draw that customer a little closer and extend the customer lifetime value to your business.

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Taking customers by the hand

couple holding hands while walking on sand

The retail world has pivoted since the COVID-19 Pandemic in many parts of the world. Despite the fact that brick and mortar stores won’t entirely disappear, the nature of how businesses engage and transact with the public for the exchange of goods has transformed and will likely evolve further.

The impact has been palpable and pervasive; home delivery services for groceries, fast food and the like have mushroomed, accompanied by the proliferation of services and mobile apps and websites to support order capture. Vendors have had to either build or buy services to integrate and the impact on the back office has been varied.

Market analysts even say that the e-commerce industry itself will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the coronavirus pandemic. Penetration rates, which are currently at around 15%, are expected to increase to 25% by 2025 (MarketWatch, 2020). A 67% increase in a short five years.

Product and service vendors have never before had this much opportunity for insight into customer behaviour and the same time the opportunity to influence what others will buy or use. The opportunity is extraordinary for those who are ready to seize it and who have the data and intent on gathering data.

It is important then, to consider the impact that all this has on the potential for customer retention and loyalty. Consumers have even more choices now, and their decision to buy is going to be influenced by product and service availability, price, past and anticipated quality and brand and business placement.

All indications in industry statistics suggest that existing customers may easily jump ship in response to finding your price higher than that of others for ostensibly generic goods and services or as a result of a bad purchase experience.

Conversely, if your business makes bold use of testimonials, has a high upvote or customer satisfaction rating on shared platforms and has good reviews, then the chances of you poaching customers from others is greater. You also have better potential in building a larger loyal customer base and being placed higher in search rankings

There is a lot of noise and interference to now contend with, as a consumer, so this makes attracting new customers increasingly difficult – will they hear your message? The choices are plentiful and unless you have a niche offering, quality is potentially less impactful. Where you are likely to really win, is on message, a customized and closer interaction experience with your customers and superior service and strong past customer recommendations and reviews. 

Brand becomes of heightened importance

Customer actions, a product or service or vendor rating, the use of referrals and referral concessions and coupons, social media sharing, viral brand-related content sharing and advocacy- they’re all super important under ordinary circumstances.

With at least 10% of any given workforce now potentially working from home or in a hybrid setting at least, there is much more of an opportunity to get their attention. Using these elements of how people express sentiment and their favour in relation to brands is essential to build and understand.

These same customers will be looking for personalization of every interaction that they have with your brand – In 2018 Bazaarvoice found that 50% of shoppers  felt a personalized online experience is important. Almost three-quarters of marketers around the same time, according to Evergage, also believe personalization has a “strong” or “extreme” impact on advancing customer relationships.

The demographic of your customers likely will also be different to what you might have had in conventional retail. For example, a 2020 Shopify survey found that two out of every three (67 percent) consumers aged 18 to 34 are spending more money purchasing items online now than before the pandemic; their behaviour has therefore changed.

There has been a change for older age groups too. Consumers from 35 to 54 years of age increased their online shopping expenditure by 57% and 41% for consumers aged 55 and above.

To achieve an understanding and develop a customer brand advocacy program your business needs data to help identify advocates and influencers and unpaid spokesmen and referrers. The best bet for building and managing this data is by using a centralized customer master data management system like that offered by Pretectum.

You’ll want to take the data that a customer provides you with and harness it for future communications, to extend offers, provide promotional messages and of course, hone, refine and customize the customer’s experience every time they visit your website, your storefront or a system that you have, that they might need access to. A solid execution plan will have this data held centrally in a hub that disseminates it to whoever and wherever it needs to be; webshop, support portal, billing system and even point of sales and mobile app.

With the Pretectum CMDM your business has the flexibility of deciding what you want to track and of course who you want to track and why.