Would you like to know how much they’re spending, when they’re spending, why they’re buying with the competition and not you and, what drives their purchase behavior?
This consumer intelligence is fundamentally obtained and analyzed through the creation of a 360-degree customer profile platform, which your organization can create without a lot of effort and without hiring expensive consultants or data scientists.
For many organizations, creating a 360-degree platform which they can feed data into can represent the largest challenge. How do we collect the data? Where will it come from? How do we store it, keep it structured and keep it up to date? Who will own and maintain the data set internally? What privacy protections do we need to put in place, and how will our new market intelligence affect existing business?
While I won’t go into in-depth detail on all of these questions, it is important to note that having a full 360-degree view of your customers is becoming the new norm.
For many organizations, the biggest risk is being late to the party. Not having up to date, real-time information on your customers’ engagement, spending, and transactions with the competition means your organization is at a significant disadvantage. How do you know what your share of wallet is if you don’t know how much they’re spending with the competition? In essence, the opportunity cost of not taking action to create a platform is the biggest expense.
In an early article, titled ‘How to Commercialize your Frequent Flyer Program Data,’ I spoke about how the NSA doesn’t yet run a commercial division where it sells personal user data, and you’ll need to create your own. Engineering a platform to work for your economic goals is key.
The first step is to understand everything about your customers; from transactions, engagement propensity, who they are connected to in their social network; and combining all of this information in a structured format so that you can easily cross-reference and compare it when creating models.
Put on your creative hat and get to work. Consider the channels, partners, and process a user would go through to transact with your competitors.
For example, let’s say you own a small hotel and want to know if any of your previous guests have spent more than $200 at any hotel within a 2-mile radius over the past 12 months.
To answer this question, you would need to be capturing data from external sources which will help you understand the problem.
