Organisations are making increasing use of data and analytics to build a more comprehensive picture of their customers. Everyone recognises that the benefits of this are potentially substantial. But the challenges to achieving are just as significant. How does an organisation make the crucial shift from processing data and reporting to gaining valuable insights? How does one become a data-drive enterprise that delivers exceptional customer experiences?
One management system to rule them all
Customer Experience Management (CEM) revolves around one fundamental concept – the “single view of the customer”. For most organisations, creating a single view of the customer is driven by a practical need to consistently interact with customers in order to identify which of them are of high or low value to the business, provide a better customer experience, or to support some kind of research or analytical work to improve performance.
According to Katie Gove, managing director for Trellis, outsourcing consultants and analysts, it’s something that too few organisations do or do well. She comments, “Customers may have wildly different experiences or flavours of a company depending on the environment. Whether they are at a sporting event and the company is sponsoring, to the experience of dealing with the company’s help or information line is often worlds apart.”
The challenges are great, particularly for large, long-standing organisations that have grown through mergers and acquisitions and have accumulated a plethora of customer management systems, databases and product IT platforms that may or may not be fully integrated and compatible. Part of the problem as Gove sees it is, “organisations don’t see customer interactions as opportunities to generate revenue.”
The biggest challenge to creating a single view of the customer, however, is of course the customer. At times they may be inconsistent or contradictory in their consumption patterns vis-a-vis their economic status or social standing and other demographics. This results in conflicting views of him/her in various departments of the company that compile customer data for their own purposes.
“The problem is”, as Katie Gove points out, “because a company’s processes and operations are decentralised and segregated, each department has its own small picture of the customer and their behaviour.”
Behavioural models
“Many companies try to make extensive use of behavioural models to draw a profile of the customer, drawing on both internal transaction-based information and customer interactions with company representatives, as well as on external demographic data”, says Gove.
From these, the company attempts to come up with a single view of a customer as a data structure with one record that contains core customer information, such as the customer’s name or company name in business-to-business (B2B), as well as all related information, including demographics, firmographics, purchase orders, service records, interactions with the company and the like.
The company assigns to each customer a unique identifier usually called a customer ID or customer key and continues to work on the process of making the single customer view up to date and accurate to ensure the Customer Management Experience is as pleasing to the customer as it is profitable to the company.
Benefits of Customer Experience Management
Creating and having a single view of a customer enables the company to deliver greater value to the customer through quality personalised customer interactions across all channels and touch-points[i]. By ensuring accurate information about each customer, a company can respond to his/her individual needs in a timely and relevant manner.
The company can be more efficient and more effective by fine-tuning its marketing models and making the elements more customer-specific through these interactions, allowing it to respond quickly to emerging customer buying trends.
A single customer view of all sales, marketing, customer service and enterprise data will enable a company to know what’s working and what’s not and what it should do to improve performance. Achieving this, however, is easier said than done.
Customer information stored in numerous systems
The different data-gathering processes and analytic systems used to create a customer view operate at different levels. Consumer-focused companies, for example, generally use an “Address-Household-Individual” hierarchy while business (B2B)-focused firms prefer to use an “Organisation-Site-Contact” hierarchy.
Insurance and finance companies generally have the biggest issues around households, retail is more focused on the individual, while the primary concern of high-tech industries has to do with organisation and site. The choice of a hierarchy to use for a customer is critical to the process of creating a single view.
The information required comes from several different systems, each of which supports a subset of the overall business data bearing on the customer and usually assigns its own customer ID or key. Often the data collected to identify a customer is different from system to system. It is rare to find a single system’s customer ID that is of generic use across the systems. Quite unavoidably, there is a need to match customer records to determine which ones are similar enough to be deemed to represent the same customer.
Single view of customer from different sources.
There are many sources of data, both internal and external that a company can use to come up with a single view of the customer.
The internal sources are its in-house systems and databases. ERP systems yield such data as sales and marketing reports, commissions paid or due, customer service or supply contracts and financial accounting data, particularly accounts payable to and receivable from customers.
CRM processes requests made by customers contain records of appointments as well as track and measure marketing and sales campaigns over multiple channels, including telephone, e-mail and social media. CRM can also keep track of transactions to identify and reward loyal customers over a certain period of time.
External sources of data may be in the form of tweets or comments made via a customer’s social media network.
The business, the customer and the process
Organisations need to aggregate and consolidate information from numerous sources into a single repository and apply advanced analytics to decipher the information and search for clues about the customers’ buying habits.
A single view of the customer not only has to be built but also maintained as an ongoing process. Mary Myles, from Experian marketing services, comments, “It must be integrated into the different business processes within the company to be effective. The cooperation between the different business process owners, as well as between business operations and IT is therefore necessary”.
“The solution requires the integration of customer information from across the company’s enterprise sector, business partners and data providers”, adds Myles. With this single repository, the company can acquire, distribute and manage enterprise-wide customer information and, by applying advanced analytics, gain valuable insights, such as customer trends and affinities, and identify new opportunities.