It is almost impossible to talk about customer engagement and loyalty without hearing the phrase “the customer experience”. The term is often used but what does it actually mean? Ask any business leaders and you’ll probably get half a dozen quite different definitions.
Customer Master Data Management (CMDM) offers tremendous potential for understanding the customer and the customer experiences more precisely and at pretty much any level of granularity according to how it is configured. Insights can however elicit more questions than one might have been prepared for.
Pretectum recognizes that sifting through customer data in its sources is overwhelming. That’s why we support organizations picking and choosing just the data they really want and need to be part of their customer master data, and then help them focus on what is relevant to them and what they actually need. This is very important when you have many sources – you need to be able to focus on the most critical data
Principles of customer experience
Customer-centric consultancy, 5one (now MasterCard Advisors) came up with five principles of customer experience to help businesses understand customers better and develop more effective engagement strategies. They described them as simple rules to understand their customers better and develop more effective engagement strategies
Experiences drive customer value. Each interaction, good or bad that a customer has with a given brand has an impact on the way they view that brand. The experience accumulates an impact and determines their value by way of their behaviors. Historically there has been a focus on what consumers buy to understand their behavior at the point of purchase. 5one found that in order to be able to deliver a personalized customer experience, businesses need to analyze more than just this one part of the customer experience journey.
The customer experience is more than the sum of the transactions. Customer journeys are cyclical. The customer experience when considering a purchase, reading a review or having a conversation, and visiting a store or shopping online are all different. The post-purchase joy or disappointment manifests in different kinds of results in conversations, behaviors (returns for refunds/repurchases), and social media activity.
Customer value is personal and social. We’re all aware of the concept of the Net Promoter and we also pay more attention to the personal recommendations of those that we trust. It is essential that customers are not just measured by the value of their basket of goods. They must also be evaluated by their other behaviors that manifest in types of influence, online reviews, social media statements, blogs, and feedback cards and actions. Creating and recognizing advocates is perhaps a key activity that any business could consider in order to maintain a successful business.
The importance of the differentiated experience. Consumers in particular have personal preferences and differentiated situations. The customer who buys food at lunchtime wants a quick and easy experience as opposed to the person who buys groceries during a weekly shop; even though there may be items in the basket that are common on both occasions. The convenience shopper looks for convenience, the weekly shopper looks at expiration dates and value or flexibility. When that same shopper is looking at non-food related goods or services. They may be looking for a much more complex array of factors like brand reputation, expert advice, and competitor comparators.
Depending on whether the retailer is snacks, groceries, clothing, electronics, or services, the customer experience they provide will be very different and so each retailer must offer the customer experience that is appropriate to them. Brands must tailor the experience. In addition, they have to take into account the individual customer and their specific situation to create the most appropriate customer experience.
Measuring what matters. An enhanced customer experience requires measuring the existing customer experience. Marketing campaigns yield a return. They’re launched with the expectation that you will increase sales through segmented messaging and a level of measured response to the message. This could be a change in the website, a mailer, or eCommerce cart abandonment. Pretectum won’t measure these things for you but it can support you in collating and appending your insights to your existing pool of customers and maintaining a view of what is working and what is not working.
Customers demand and vocalize their delight, disappointment, trust, and suspicion of brands every day. Understanding their journey with your goods and services is more important than ever and you have the potential to harvest those perspectives in a centralized way for improved customer analytics within the Pretectum CMDM. Every retailer is different so, recognizing the complete customer journey and looking for ways to enhance it through data-informed personalization is critical. Engage with us to learn more about how we can help.