Why Loyal Customers Expect You to Collect Data

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Customers expect you to collect their data. That’s half the reason they sign up for a loyalty card. They swipe or scan it every time they make a purchase, and they receive personalized rewards, coupons and discounts, all of which they expect to be tailored to the needs and preferences they’ve shared with you on every previous purchase.

The key now is to make sure that you are collecting (at minimum) the data customers assume you are already utilizing. One method of doing so is to implement a customer loyalty program.

Customer loyalty programs present numerous benefits for marketing and sales, but less commonly referenced is the propensity for such programs to aid companies in collecting actionable data from customer interactions.

Data Customers Expect You to Collect

Data points that customers expect you to collect are primarily limited to things that, when collected and used at the opportune moments, directly benefit the customer experience.

Name, address, and phone number are all basics that customers are accustomed to providing when making purchases online or when signing up for a loyalty card.

The importance of this information in terms of quality service is that you should ask them for it as infrequently as possible. If a customer who’s done business with you calls about a product support issue, or you call them, then you should be able to identify them by the phone number and simply ask them to confirm their identity without having to awkwardly ask them to again spell out their first and last name, phone number, etc.

Payment methods with online purchases are expected to be tied to a customer’s account.

Whether this means your ecommerce website has its own user account system or rely on PayPal integration online purchases, users prefer to re-enter their credit card information as little as possible. This is both due to convenience, and a lingering security concern in the back of their mind.

Purchase history is something customers mentally link to the primary purpose of loyalty cards.

The customers signed up for the card anticipating the cash rewards and discounts you offered them with it. When it comes to discounts and coupons, customers don’t want coupons for things they’ll never buy. Data on past purchases and preferences allows you to specialize coupons for specific customer interests to maximize their satisfaction. One of the main benefits of tracking this data is that purchase history can help you identify fringe products a customer has not purchased yet, but may be interested in with a little encouragement (think coupons or limited time discount codes).

Data Customers Won’t Mind You Collecting

Locations of customer purchases can be used to identify the exact store that a customer is most likely to visit regularly.

Using location history, you can market location specific discounts and promotions to individual customers. This has the double bonus of helping you make sure the right portions of your customer base are getting region specific marketing, which increases sales by fostering a more personal relationship.

Customer support calls usually cover topics like troubleshooting, security, or allow for necessary transactions. None of which are typically enjoyable for the customer.

But if all your customer identification data, loyalty data, and previous support call data are collected in one place, then you can expedite the process and be better prepared to provide the customer with a solution. This improves the quality of the call and service in solving the customer’s problem, which conversely makes customers more loyal.

Collecting and utilizing call data may even lower the costs of support by minimizing the amount of time spent verifying identity, explaining past customer support calls, and repeatedly verifying issue specifications.

Oh, and it’d probably be best not to demand answers from your customers either (that would be bad data collection).

Use Collected Data to Delight

All data collection should in some way benefit the customer. The purpose of the loyalty program is to keep customers engaged long-term with your business.

If your loyalty program doesn’t provide enough tangible benefits and you never get around to delivering relevant promotions based off of purchase history and preferences, then you’ll lose the customer’s interest, and they’ll cut you off wondering why they ever gave you all their information in the first place.

If product suggestions and targeted discounts don’t match your business model, you can still benefit customers with the data you’ve collected from them, just in a different way. For example, Nissan collects data with permission from drivers of Nissan Leaf cars and returns reports of the driver’s efficiency and how they compare to other Nissan Leaf drivers. Nissan gets the data they want about their cars, and drivers get potentially useful (or at least amusing) information about their driving habits.

Nowadays, nearly every function of your business needs be evaluated at least partly on how it fits in with your company’s data strategy. If you previously ruled out a loyalty program, reconsider it, and keep in mind the additional benefits for both your company and your customers.

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