Know your customers wherever they are
October 2012
Josh Leibowitz, Kelly Ungerman, Maher Masri
Jane wants to buy a TV and starts her shopping journey with a Google search. She finds an electronics review site, clicks on a banner ad, reads about the product details, and decides to go into the store to see the model. She speaks with a sales associate and posts a picture of the TV on Facebook for her friends' feedback. She also uses her smartphone to do a quick price comparison, and scans the QR code to get additional product information. Welcome to problem #1 for retailers: The company knows that a potential customer has interacted with it across a lot of touch points but it has no idea that all these interactions are with Jane. It can track each of these interactions across touchpoints, but doesn't know how to tie them to an individual customer. Since each touchpoint yields a particular piece of data, this becomes a complex data management challenge. Retailers are desperate to unlock this intelligence so they can make more personalized offers. Research shows that personalization can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend and lift sales 10% or more. Here are four keys to tracking today's multichannel customers. Be systematic Many companies assign unique customer IDs but lack a systematic way to enrich them to form an integrated view of the channel-surfing customer. A systematic approach requires you to identify and evaluate all of the touch points where you interact with a customer. Too many retailers miss out on valuable insights by stopping at either the data that's at hand or data that is already easily matched with a customer, such as purchases across multiple credit cards. When building your enriched customer views, start with priority customers or segments (big spenders, loyal spenders, future spenders, and so on).