Much of what I’ve learned over the years about sales, marketing and customer service has to do with the critical importance of customer data, and how those data are converted to actionable insights, and aimed at enhancing components of the customer experience. It’s how companies generate the right customer data, manage and share data the right way, and use it at the right time. It’s also how they use data to the best effect, to optimize loyalty and profitability, that makes them successful, or not, on an individual customer basis.
Culture, leadership, and systems will facilitate effective information gathering, storage and application; and, CRM, CEM, ERP, or other acronyms notwithstanding, it’s impossible to be successful without having as much relevant anecdotal and dimensional content about customers as possible.
Bill Gates, often a prophet, said in “Business @ The Speed of Thought” (1999): “The best way to put distance between you and the crowd is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage and use information will determine whether you win or lose. He might have added, had he really tailored his remarks on how to create and optimize customer loyalty, that what information, particularly customer-specific information, a company collects, and how they manage, share and apply it with customer-related initiatives will determine how successful they can become.
One of my key sources for the uses of information gathered by customer clubs and, particularly, retail loyalty programs, for example, is friend and colleague, Brian Woolf (www.brianwoolf.com). Brian is president of the Retail Strategy Center, Inc., and a fountain of knowledge about how companies apply, and don’t apply, data generated through these programs. In a Peppers & Rogers newsletter, for example, Don Peppers quoted Brian in his article, “The Secrets of Successful Loyalty Programs”: “Loyalty program success has less to do with the value of points or discounts to a customer, and much more to do with a company’s use of data mining to improve the customer experience. Top management hasn’t figured out what to do with all the information gleaned. You have all this information sitting in a database somewhere and no one taking advantage of it. You need to mine the information to create not only relationships but also an optimum (purchasing) experience. The best loyalty programs use the customer data to improve not only promotions, but also store layout, pricing, cleanliness, check-out speed, etc. Firms that do this are able to double their profits. When these elements are not addressed, all you’re doing is teaching the customer to seek out the lowest price.”
An understanding of the real value and impact of customer information, and a disciplined plan for sharing and using the data to make a company more customer-centric, is needed more than ever. A good analogy, or model, for CEM and loyalty program effectiveness or ineffectiveness in building desired customer behavior, may be what can be termed the “car-fuel relationship.” A car, no matter how attractive, powerful and technically sophisticated, can’t go anywhere without fuel.
Not only that, to reach a desired destination, the car must have the right fuel for its engine, and in the right quantity. For customers, the car is CRM and its key data-related systems components (data gathering, integration, warehousing, mining and application). The destination is optimized customer lifetime value and profitability. The fuel for making the engine function is the proper octane and amount of customer data.
Leading-edge companies are focusing on customer lifetime value as a finish line. They are collecting the right data and using the right skills, processes, tools and customer information management technologies to make sure that key customer insights are available wherever they are needed, in all parts of the enterprise. Jeremy Braune, formerly head of customer experience at a leading U.K. consulting organization, has been quoted as saying: ” … organizations need to adopt a more structured and rigorous approach to development, based on a real understanding of what their customers actually want from them. The bottom line must always be to start with the basics of what is most important to the customer and build from there.”
I completely agree. Though there are many contributors to marketing success, optimizing experience and downstream customer behavior is (almost) all about the data.
