Big Social Mobile enterprises understand this and
therefore have one first goal during every customer
or consumer interaction: uniquely identifying who
they are interacting with. This does not mean that
solving a customer problem is not foremost in their
mind, but rather that they position their ability to
solve a customer problem, or to respond to a
prospect’s inquiry, as most effective when they
know who the customer is. The nuance is of
primary important: great service companies
actually tell consumers they can help them better
if they know who they are—not just existing
customers (who more readily self-identify) but
every consumer. True, some consumers will not
self-identify; they are smart enough to know the
company will track and target them. But if you offer
something of value, usually some type of content
the consumer actually wants, they will.
The concept is not challenging—simply ask the
consumer who they are. But who is a consumer?
Or more appropriately what is a consumer—
truthfully a company doesn’t care who the
consumer really is, what they want is a consumer
that matches a specific profile. Someone’s name, for
example, means very little. There is no one to one
relationship between a name and a consumer. Only
three data points are considered unique, and
therefore acceptable as what I call bridging data:
·
Email addresses: social consumers have
one personal email address that they use for all
meaningful digital activities, such as when they
make a purchase or register a product, and they
will never give it up. They willingly attach their
personal attributes—name, address, age, etc.—to
this email address. Some people may use an additional email address when they are shopping or
researching so as not to be identified, but good
content, effective use of cookies, or an inevitable
mistake is usually enough to ferret these out.
22
Strictly Marketing Magazine September/October
2016
·
Phone numbers: perhaps even better than
an email address is a consumer’s mobile phone
number. Consumer’s rarely change them, and
once identified it exposes the consumer to the
massive amount of data collection that is possible
via a smart device. While mobile phones can be
shared within a household (causing data confusion) this is rare among social consumers—the
main group targeted through the use of analytics.
·
Device IDs: every device has unique number, such as an UDID, that can be pulled from the
device under certain circumstances. A common
time is when they connect to Wi-Fi—perhaps why
so many stores offer free Wi-Fi? This number rarely changes and can be used to associate the different devices a consumer uses to one specific
consumer. It does require greater IT assistance
(such as when setting up the Wi-Fi network, but
for times when a consumer won’t self-identify,
especially for devices that are not also phones, it is
one of the few ways to sort through the consumerdevice relationship.