By: Tony Coretto
The key to higher revenue in the New Year starts with knowing your customers
Once again it's a New Year and thoughts turn naturally to new ways of doing, being, acting, and thinking; I'd like to add my two cents to the dialogue with five ways to leverage customer intelligence to help you and your business make more money in 2011:
1. Get to know your customers
Banks have been doing this for years because they're required to, but any business can use the same tools and techniques to know who they're doing business with – a name, an address, phone, e-mail address, preferences, likes and dislikes, and so on. With even the most basic data points, you will gain insight into your customers and be able to tailor your goods and services to offer what they want and how they want it, developing deeper, more loyal, and ultimately more profitable relationships.
2. Create a customer referral program
Often your best source of new customers is your existing customers; with some basic knowledge of which customers are your best and most loyal (see above), you can ask them for referrals, cementing their loyalty by rewarding them with in-kind goods and services (they've already shown they love your stuff, you can reward them with discounts or special offers for their referrals). These programs really work, and they don't have to be costly or time-consuming if done properly.
3. Share what you know
Like most of us, your customers feel better about buying a particular product or service if they know others are buying it and what they think about it. If you're a retailer, chances are you have a tremendous amount of data on purchases from your POS system; if you have a website, you're already gathering data on popular pages, downloads, items, and so on; other businesses will have similar troves of purchase data. Running simple analytics and sharing the results of those, in a high-level, anonymous way with customers ("did you know that 49 percent of our customers buy one of these 3 products?") can provide customers with that extra little push they may need to make a purchase, visit you again, or refer a friend.
4. Break down barriers
Most organizations, whether not-for-profits, retailers, accounting firms, medical offices, business-to-business service providers, small or large, have silos – finance, marketing, sales, management, and so on. Often people in these silos don't have much to do with one another – they just do their jobs and try not to concern themselves too much with what's going on in the other silos (hey, they're busy!).
However, this leads to a very fragmented view of the customer or no view of the customer at all; each different business function will have a different view of what's important to the business and what customers look like. You need to break down barriers between different functions and stress a unified, holistic view of the entire customer relationship (as well as a business-wide focus on the customer as the most important purpose of your business – without customers, after all, there IS no business). It's simple to get started, you don't need complex, enterprise-wide systems – just reach out to other team members in other business areas and start the dialogue.
5. Don't over-invest in technology – especially the wrong technology
Often, "customer intelligence" is wrongly perceived as requiring boatloads of investment in technology – and, especially, "magic bullet" solutions (like CRM systems, or MDM, or CIF – pick the acronym of your choice) that are sold by technology vendors hoping to convince you that their solution is the one and only thing you need to make all your customer intelligence dreams come true. This is just plain wrong: while technology is certainly important and an enabling factor in getting customer intelligence efforts off the ground, businesses often get carried away and invest in massive, enterprise-wide implementations that put the focus on the tools and technologies instead of on the customer.
Then, these technologies begin to drive the business and force managers, marketers, sales people and others who use them to fit their thinking about the customer and about the business into the procrustean bed of the technology – technology becomes a massive, expensive distraction rather than a valuable support mechanism.
Instead, start with a clear focus on the customer, understand clearly the business processes needed to know and serve the customer, and implement enough of the appropriate technology so that the business doesn't become a slave to the tools and lose what's most important: the emphasis on the customer.
Here's to a greater focus on the customer and a healthy, happy, safe, and prosperous New Year to all!