In the shallow end of the pool, the little tykes are splashing around with their water wings. You wade in waist high, trying to avoid horseplay as your fingertips and toes turn to prunes. The deep end where the big fish swim is another world entirely. Divers plunge, some reaching the bottom of the pool. Patricia Czech explains why staying in the shallow end and overlooking opportunities is a mistake that you can't afford to make.
It's a lot like that in e-business today. Companies have reached a point where they're trying to move beyond a shallow, cursory view of their customers, and are plunging into deep, rich customer relationships. Their goal is to offer better customer service, sell more goods and services, and target the needs of specific, lucrative customers.
So what's considered deep? For an organization to deliver value, it must learn from every customer interaction, and adapt to how the customer wants to interact — via e-mail, phone, Internet, or in person. What's more, if a customer calls a company, they want to be dealt with in the context of their last interaction with the organization, regardless of the channel they used to contact the company. This requires gleaning sales databases, and tapping into transactional systems for the most relevant data on the customer — basically implementing a combination of operational and analytical customer relationship management (CRM). Retailers and catalog companies are good at this, and at building a unified view of their customers.
You need to be able to develop more targeted, focused, and relevant interactions with your customers, as well as their partners, suppliers, and employees. During a new product launch, you should be able to look at your customer base and launch a cross-sell or up-sell campaign. Banks or credit card companies that merge with other financial services companies need to scour their two customer sets and identify opportunities to provide new services to them. By looking at their demographic information they can determine which customers are worth targeting for, let's say, a mortgage. E-tailers, such as Amazon, Ann Taylor, and The Gap notify their customers when preferred products are available.
It's extremely important to target specific customer sets. Technologies such as cookies, clickstream tracking, electronic surveys, and campaign response management all provide a wealth of data that can be captured, analyzed, and acted on through all phases of the customer life cycle. This wealth of data allows for better, faster, and smarter decision making when marketing to your highest value customers, prioritizing service resources, and anticipating and preventing customer defections. Customer insights can be used to drive results across each functional area of your business.
By asking about the “who, what, when, why, and where” of customer interactions, you can extract meaning from rich customer data and market accordingly:
- Who are our most valuable customers by segment? Who are the unprofitable customers?
- What has worked, and is predicted to work, in campaign and selling tactics?
- When is the most effective time to launch a cross-selling campaign?
- Why do some customers respond to product bundles or packaging while others don't?; and
- Where do specific customer segments prefer to buy or seek customer service?
The electronic channel — when linked to such powerful capabilities as knowledge management, analytics engines, and event-driven applications with defined business rules — enables truly automated customer interactions. Combine this with event-triggered applications, such as automatic e-mails or notifications, and you have the foundation for a new way of driving profitable customer relationships.
Staying in the shallow end and overlooking the opportunity to develop deeper, more profitable customer relationships is a mistake that you just can't afford to make.