We all know that data is essential to creating a great customer experience. However, getting your data and subsequent processes right can be overwhelming. It’s the biggest problem that IVE solves for our clients. Almost all brands now have customer data available to create seamless, intuitive, and memorable experiences. They can very effectively analyze and segment the data to understand their customers better than ever before.
The challenge they face is effectively using that data in processes that are efficient, repeatable, and measurable. We often hear clients say that they’re “drowning in data.” So, what are the steps you need to take to ensure the coveted seamless customer experience? Here’s our checklist:
- Clean up your data and keep it clean
Before you do anything else, clean up your data. This is an ongoing project that requires dedicated resources. Everything starts with the data, every campaign, every interaction, and every brand experience. It has to be accurate and ready for processing. This could include merging multiple bases into one master base, de-duping, removing invalid records, populating blank fields, and updating customer information.
This process never ends. To achieve this, you need to ensure sufficient import/export functionality that updates regularly. When collecting new data, put validation measures in place to ensure that the data collected is high quality and reduce the need for data cleansing down the track. One such measure might be having data entry operators select values from pre-defined options rather than free-typing text.
- Ensure secure and private data integration and processing
More than ever, because of laws in place around consumer’s personal data, you must ensure that the systems used need to be 100% secure when processing consumer data. This is even more important when using a third-party supplier. As we all know, breaches in security can have massive implications on your brand, as well as your bottom line.
It goes without saying that this needs to be avoided at all costs. You need to ensure that the right quality controls exist in and around the movement and processing of data, ensure that at all times access to the data is protected, guaranteeing the integrity of the data as it becomes part of the communication you are sending to your customer.
- Ensure real-time responsiveness
Once data is cleansed and security is ensured, processes need to be put in place to ensure real-time responsiveness. In other words, speed to market. Data can change quickly, and keeping data up to date is one of the most significant challenges of working with highly personalized messages.
Once you have the data prepared, you must be able to quickly post or blast the message. With intricately segmented data and electronic channels, often marketers are required to produce a greater number of highly personalized but smaller campaigns. The production processes must be, whenever possible, automated and integrated into your CRM.
- Enable single customer view (SCV)
A single customer view provides businesses with the ability to track customer communications and response across every touchpoint, significantly improving the end customer experience. The benefits to an organization are extensive: improved customer service, increased customer loyalty and retention, and improved customer lifetime value.
How a brand handles the move to a SCV requires a paradigm shift to a customer-centric approach that factors the customer into every operational element of how the business runs. Getting the infrastructure in place to gain a single customer view is a significant investment for most businesses, but because of the benefits already listed, there will certainly be a positive impact on the bottom line.
- Insightful reporting
It’s not just about data going in, but what comes out too. The data, or insights that flow from customer interactions, are invaluable and shape the experience moving forward. Customize your report building to your brand and the insights that will ensure ROI for your business, rather than using off-the-shelf reporting
