Consumers Are In The Driver’s Seat - And They Demand A Ferrari

Thursday, Jun 21st 2018
businessman sitting in car and showing car keys in car dealership showroom

Consumers today have the power. They are not going to wait around for a business to approve them if another can do it in real time. Opening a savings account for example should be a simple operation. If the bank can’t check your data against sanction lists, or perform a credit check automatically, another one can. And it’s the latter that will win the battle for that new customer. 

 

Pulling the data pieces together into a 360-degree view is the precursor to effective customer communication. It allows you to fully leverage data as a strategic business asset, to use this high-quality data within your customer experience ecosystem. With a 360-degree view of your customer, they become fully-realized individuals that the organization can take on a great customer journey. Taking the customer for a spin in a proverbial Ferrari should be the organization’s number 1 goal. So how do you get to the racing tracks?

 

Start small and keep it clean

In a survey executed by the Customer Data Platform Institute, six out of ten marketing professionals said that the lack of a single customer view was an obstacle to their success, surpassing other problems including budgeting and staffing. The good news is that as marketing budgets grow, technology investments are being made in data-driven marketing. And there are great solutions for data-driven marketing on the market today. If you don’t control the budget yourself, though, you may be wondering how to convince those who do that creating a single customer view is a priority. One approach is to break the problem down into consumable pieces while building support within the organization. Demonstrate value along the way to establish trust and confidence. It’s a process, just like building a single customer view. Or a Ferrari.

 

So the first step is to profile the data; categorize your data assets, determine their makeup and their quality, and spell out the risks that poor data quality will have on your results. This gets you organized for the next step and creates awareness of the bigger data problems within the organization. Next, cleanse the data to resolve issues you’ve identified and standardize it to meet your business needs. Do that with each source, and then consolidate the data, matching and merging like entities to create a single view of your customer. This is the starting point for data-driven marketing. 

 

Data may be further enriched by leveraging additional sources. Append data attributes with sources like a directory of national changes of address to improve marketing effectiveness and prevent reputational damage. Or screen customers against sanction lists, to ensure data meets regulatory standards. In an ideal data management situation, this should be integrated into the single customer view solution, rather than tacked on as an after-thought through the use of additional software. 

 

These are the steps towards a single customer view in a nutshell. To explore this topic further we invite you to download this free white paper: “Do you care for customers? Make your marketing efforts data-driven.”