Collecting and maintaining the best possible customer data has the potential to enhance the understanding of the customer for marketing purposes. A good understanding of the customer, in marketing, is helpful in actualizing a robust customer marketing strategy. Good customer data also has the potential to enhance customer service and sets up a way for change.
A coherent customer master data management strategy helps companies and businesses to provide a good experience to the customer and allows them to stay ahead of the competition or at the very least match them.
The collection of customer data is a business procedure in which detailed information about customers is collected by making use of several data collection techniques.
Feedback
The collection of customer feedback data can be quite helpful to get an idea of customer thoughts and opinions regarding product and service offerings. Appropriate analysis of that feedback can then be used to inform future decisions and strategic plans for product features, product lines, and service offerings. Consider how your business collects customer feedback and in particular the ways that customers provide you with updates to their contact information or personal circumstances.
Individual, behavioural, and population analysis of customer data gathered through the process of customer engagement or through acquisition from 3rd parties is helpful in building up or supporting the customer database but it is not as valuable as data collected firsthand. Overall, you may have more data than you could possibly need
A vital feature of gathering customer data is to also have knowledge about the relationship of what you provide as goods and services in relation to any particular customer. If the goods, as well as the facilities, are not good enough, how would you know? What would you change? The absence of insight from customers removes opportunities for product or service line development and advancement. Consider how you gather that customer feedback and where you store it.
You could do down the path of sifting through, allocating, and aggregating your transactional data to make inferences but ultimately getting direct feedback from the customer will help you to recognize the services and goods that are a low performer or not meeting expectations.
Your eCommerce application (if you have one) should help with this process but if it doesn’t there may be other ways to connect the dots like through ethnographic research or surveys.
Customer data is also helpful in the launch of new offerings by helping to inform you on who you might target or single out as potential early adopters.
Pricing
Pricing is actually considered to be a daunting task because unless you are already seeing something similar or there are existing competitors in the market, you could over or undershoot on the price point.
Disciplined market research, product management and pricing teams will often test the waters by having conversations with new or prospective customers on features, form, function, and pricing but where do you get those candidates from, unless you use an agency?
One way is by delving into your customer buy history and looking at purchasing behaviour. Another way is to perform analysis and solicit feedback after the purchase. Again, these would be expected to be facets of your eCommerce application but they may be something you can collect as data points separate from the buy and rate process. However you get your hands on the data, making data structures available in your master data that could be leveraged by internal teams for outreach campaigns removes friction from the conversation candidate acquisition process.
Leveraging automation
Automation of back-office processes and even front-end journeys in the shopping cart, checkout and buy process can elevate the relationship you have with customers and can help with customer retention. Take your eCommerce customer data, enhance it, and turn it into actionable steps in the end-to-end customer journey.
Every eCommerce retailer would want marketing automation and logistics automation. Having automation of customer data removes friction in revenue generation processes.
Every marketeer would hope that the quality of their customer data is sufficient to build and execute high-performing targeted customer outreach campaigns that yield maximal ROI.
The Pretectum CMDM view is that any customer data that you hold and retain has several key objectives – the first of these is of course retention, you want your hard-earned customer loyalty to translate into recurrent business. This could be through repeat purchases, cross-sells, or upsells. Longer retention of the customer holds the promise of greater customer lifetime value and customer loyalty which can also be viewed in the context of advocacy and promotion of your brand.
How you handle your customer data also translates into how trustworthy customers view your brand and this again translates into greater potential customer satisfaction. At the end of the day, all of these aspects can help provide you with a competitive advantage over existing competitors or prospective competitors eyeing your market for potential.
Build stronger relationships with your prospects and customers by maintaining and leveraging the best possible customer master data. Reach out today to find out how Pretectum can help.