Customer Analytics
A Step Ahead of the Customer
A customer often has a lot of relations to a company. But information about this is spread over a number of different systems. With Customer Analytics you will get a grip on the behaviour of the customers – and position yourself a step ahead in the marketing game.
It is several times more expensive to catch a new customer than to retain an existing customer. But with more players in the market, pressed prices and increased competition it is not always easy to keep their customers. At Logica helps the company now to analyze the customers to so transform customer information into a strategic asset.
- With Customer Analytics, as it is called, Logica's customers can convert all information about their customers to get a competitive advantage and stay one step ahead, says Mr Andreas Schüldt, Sales Director Information Management at Logica.
Customer Analytics is not an existing system or software. Its purpose is to collect, analyze and act on all customer information that the company already has, sometimes supplemented with external information.
- Basically, most companies already have the customer information needed to analyze their customers' needs and behaviors! Unfortunately often scattered in many different systems and registers.
To explain what a customer analysis really is we can compare it with a game piece in the quiz game Trivial Pursuit. To win the game, the game piece need to be filled with a number of pieces of cake. Similarly, a customer analysis must be filled with a number of information pieces to give an overall picture of the customer.
The first piece of cake in customer analysis is the data stored in the company's CRM system. There is, for example, information about customers' address, purchase history, phone service, age and income. Information is of course different depending on the type of business but in total the system contains the history needed to produce statistics and analysis of customers' past behavior.
- The information that you can pick up from the CRM system is in itself a basis for of Customer Analytics. But the statistics says nothing about the future or what the customer really thinks, says Andreas Schüldt. Therefore he believes that it is extremely important to identify all of the customer relationships / channels in to the company in order to get a complete 360-degree view, which is seen as the next piece of Customer Analytics.
- You have to get a grip on what contacts the customer has with the company. A customer may have several relationships without your company having control over this internally. If we look at a large retail chain for example, a single customer can walk in and act in the physical stores, shop on the online store, call the customer support, email web support and receive promotional messages via email, sms and emails.
The problem in this example is that the customer channels to the company are completely separate in the company. If the customer then is calling customer support complaining about a specific product, the marketing section that sends advertising has no idea about this. Or if a person has purchased loads of goods from the company's online store, the staff in the physical store has often no information about this.
- As a customer you want the company's staff to know who you are, no matter how you contact them. If I call customer support, I want them directly to pick up my name and see that I am a good and loyal customer. By seeing what I have purchased in their stores, they could offer me the right goods and services, says Andreas Schüldt.
But it might not always be easy to keep track of what goods or services the customer actually buys. And here comes the next piece in - loyalty programs.
A loyalty program can be anything from a membership card at a grocery chain, a bonus card at a petrol company to a membership of a mobile operator's online services. Through a loyalty program, the company can tie together a lot of interesting information about its customers through a unique identity and that the customer has approved the information collection. What goods the person shops? In which locations, at what times and in what channels? And so on.
- Through a loyalty program it is possible to identify the customers in a whole new way and adjust promotions and marketing campaigns to suit their personal needs, says Andreas Schüldt.
But the customer information does not end here. To obtain as broad a picture as possible it is also picking up what customers actually think about the product or service after it is purchased. And where can you find this information best if not out of social media. That is the next piece in our Customer Analytics offering.
To make it all more clear, we take a manufacturers such as an example.
The manufacturer will not sell their goods directly to the customer but sales goes through the big electronics stores. The manufacturer could be launching a new product that in its first week will be sold in several thousand copies. However, it turns out that the product has a design fault and many unhappy customers are returning to the electronics stores to complain about the newly purchased item. The problem here is that it takes quite a while before the manufacturer has got in return the information about the design error and have all this time produced a lot more products with the same error. This is a scenario that is actually possible today to avoid through social media.
- Whenever a new product or service is launched this is mentioned in the social media. If there is something wrong, it will be discussed this directly. A recent example was the iPhone4 and its reception problems, says Andreas Schüldt.
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