If you sell products or services and you have repeat visits or buy actions from customers, is it clear why they’re coming back for more?
The answer you might present could range from, reliability, to consistency, to price, convenience, or a host of other possibilities. But have you considered that the reason you’re having repeat encounters with a customer, may be tied to loyalty and the customer experience that reinforces that loyalty?
Of course one of the challenges is that I am assuming you actually know if you are enjoying repeat purchases from the same customer.
If you don’t have a loyalty card scheme or some way of identifying the customer every time they shop with you, then it is hard to discern who those loyal customers are. Upon closer examination, the question that has to be asked, is why exactly is it, that you don’t have a customer database of known-to-you customers?
Your answer here may be somewhat straightforward, perhaps you don’t have enough customers or sales or service events to justify maintaining a database of known customers, or perhaps you have concerns about having to maintain or protect potentially regulatory compliance-bound data. The real answer may in fact lie somewhere in between.
One of the observations that we have, when looking at sellers and service providers, is that actually there is very little that is actually holding you back from maintaining some sort of repository of customer information that can service you and your customers better.
If customer experience is where you might settle your thinking as to why you have repeat customers, have you considered how you might deconstruct that ‘experience’ to make it something that every customer might want and pursue?
In my local coffee shop, the customer experience that I particularly relish is the knowledge that whenever I show up there, which is almost every day, I will be greeted with a warm friendly smile and a welcome message. The baristas know me, they actually even know a little about me. Those with a good memory remember my order from the last time I was there, often earlier that day or the previous day. They’ll suggest my order to me and ultimately that reduces friction in them taking my order. They remember my name, they write it on the paper cup and I always get the same brew experience.
In a nutshell, it is a personalized experience. Now imagine if I could have the same experience at every merchant or service provider.
The great news is that you potentially could. Imagine if you will, a situation where you could store details of many attributes of your customer or simply an ID and a beverage preference. You could then give that customer a barcode, a QR code, or whatever and that could be the key to you knowing at the scan of a code, what they like.
Indeed you could even use that as part of your Point of Sale system to work out the Customer Lifetime Value of that individual and have that identifier push messages to the cash register operator to track loyalty points or even cross-promote other products that customers might find interesting.
Take that a step further, and get consent to gather more than just a beverage preference, like an email address or phone number and you’re in a stronger position to send promotional material to those same customers based on their beverage preference and of course an opt-in
At Pretectum we believe that every business can leverage some degree of customer master data management (CMDM) to improve the customer experience (CX). You can start simple or you can do something more elaborate. The choice ultimately is yours. Without a doubt, whatever separates your business from its competitors, needs to be more predictable, and something you can influence and we believe this is best done with data.
Contact us to find out more.