CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Know Your Customer:
Marketing And CX Friend Or
Foe?
By Carolyne Gathuru
K
now Your Customer (KYC) has
become the auto strategy for both
customer experience and marketing
spheres, with both parties preaching the
need to not only know ones customer,
but go the extra mile to find out minute
details about them in order to drive both
sales and service. If one doesn’t know ones
customer, then business development
and service delivery are in jeopardy, for
communicating from a vacuum cannot
deliver exceptional results.
KYC in business circles forms such a
basic fundamental upon which sales and
customer experience strategies are built
and executed, with continuous efforts in
place to devise creative ways and means to
find out customer types, needs, preference,
behavior, attitude, inclinations, and
peculiarities; all geared towards delivering
marketing, business development, and
customer experience results.
And although KYC in its original form
was a risk management strategy initiated
by the need for businesses to verify client
identity and assess potential risks of illegal
intentions for due diligence purposes, it
has since taken a life of its own and is
the go to core factor for understanding
current and potential customers.
Technology today has broken the
knowledge banks, and information on
customers is that much easier to access,
collate, analyze, create simulations
and trends, and ultimately make more
informed marketing and customer
experience decisions. However, as with all
good things, the shadow of unpleasantness
always threatens to creep in if not
checked. Knowing customers is a quite a
competitive differentiator and with the
high tech state of the art tech solutions
in place to further understand customers,
unchecked inroads are serving to crease
What is done with the customer information
needs to be outward facing angled toward
listening to the voice of the customer, with
a view to tapping in to suggestions for
improvement of products or services, tweaking
deliverables toward what the market will receive
enthusiastically, and identifying specific
customer focused opportunities.
20 MAL25/18 ISSUE
customers’ brows.
Delightful customer experiences happen
where a brand knows exactly who their
customers are, what they need, when they
need it, how exactly they need it, and of
course where they need it. These delightful
tech based solutions for personalized
marketing and customer experience,
towards
new
customized
product
development, niche marketing initiatives
and creating lasting impressions are
evolving daily.
Recent happenings indicate though, that
there is need for brands to actively draw
the line between the much touted "KYC"
initiatives and being invasive. Customers
who have customized marketing material
thrown at them online by brands, and
conversations directed to them that
are highly personalized, have not only
indicated great discomfort, but gone
forward to describe these as ‘creepy’.
Now as we all know, customers are human
beings, and human beings are highly
emotional and irrational creatures, with
emotive decision making the norm, it is
therefore in no way positive for customers
to feel this way. This is not a feel good
feeling that will draw customers towards
continuous patronage and use. Nothing
could be further from the truth.
Whereas the EU has made headway with
the General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR) that seeks to protect personal