Another great week during IBMbigdata’s #cxo chat. This week’s topic brought up discussion around utilizing the customer’s digital footprint to enhance the customer’s experience. Much discussion centered around integrating data and using all data sources to develop a complete view of the customer. As expected, the discussion moved to the customer’s offline experience and how to:
- Integrate offline and online data sources
- Doing so from a customer-centric point of view
Much data discussion is centered on the big data areas of unstructured data and social data. It seems that the integration of transactional data from a customer-centric POV is taken for granted. From our observations, that assumption is a big oversight.
IMS believes that from a transactional data perspective, you have product-centric data and fan-centric data. Aligned much like most corporate business and support lines, the vast majority of transactional data resides in separate, product-centered databases. Disparate POS systems, e-commerce systems, catalog systems, even ticketing systems contain their own data. The world is viewed from the outside into the customer. We think that data tracking and capture should be from the customer-out. If we really want to improve the customer’s experience, we need data that are customer-centric.
So offline, how do we generate customer-centric data? First, the customer must have some type of trackable, scannable identifier that’s unique to them, and use it throughout their shopping/purchase journey. These issues present 2 very different challenges. Getting every customer to have a unique identifier, while a large task, has been happening for years. Just check your key chain and see how many retailer key fobs you have on it. The bigger challenge is getting the customer to use this ID every time they engage with you. This engagement starts the customer-centric data engine. The more engagement that’s ID’d, the more customer data that’s generated. The big opportunity is mobile. As smartphone penetration and usage continue to grow, and as mobile continues to integrate into the offline shopping experience, the more fan-centered that data will become.
Loyalty programs have attempted to create a reason for customers to ID themselves, but generally, the typical loyalty reward program/system has been too little, too late. No one wants to have to spend a thousand dollars to qualify for a free bobblehead. A more relevant platform like STADIS©, which can deliver diverse, immediate as well as progressive rewards for customers to ID themselves, and generates real-time customer-centric data, must become central to your promotion and engagement activities.
Let us know what you think!
