Customer Database: A Priceless Asset

Innovation has played a vital role in many years for the success of an organization. However in the present state, reports have shown that more than 80% of new products brought into the market are destined to fail. This shows that innovation is fleeting and capturing competitive advantage is getting tougher. No matter what innovative products your organization sells today will most likely be a commodity tomorrow.

Organizations today need to go beyond the traditional innovation process. Other than product or service innovation, customer innovation also plays a very important role. How does an organization achieve customer innovation? It derived from DATA and customer insights. Lots of organizations either don’t keep customer data or keeping loads of it.

Most organizations with plenty of data don’t know how to take the advantage of the insights and analysis it can offer. Innovative ways of using customer insights will enable organization to maximize the value of each customer interactions by delivering a great customer experience.

Below is an excerpt from the Sales Ninja blog regarding customer database which I fully agreed upon which I would like to share:

Retail is a highly competitive business. Traffic to the store is one of the primary sources of business. Most leads are generated through walk-ins – either from passer-bys, advertisements or from referrals.

Typically, food businesses thrive thanks to referrals.Whenever a colleague or associate plans a lunch treat for us, often enough, they already have a r.e.s.t.a.u.r.a.n.t in mind. As a restaurateur, the one million question is how can we stay in people’s mind so they will remember our eatery as THE right place to dine.

A prominently-placed advertisement shows up in the newspapers one day. Obviously, not everyone would be attracted to the ad, prompting the question, “how can retailers get to the top of the mind of shoppers” so they would not leave empty-handed whenever they v.i.s.i.t an outlet or even if they do, they are likely to return in the near future to make a p.u.r.c.h.a.s.e.

Many retailers make the mistake of failing to apply this one very powerful strategy – they fail to collect personal details of their visitors or customer for their database.

Grave mistake. Everyone who walks to our store is a potential buyer. Something must have attracted them to walk in. A lady shopper may like our coffee mug but it may be too pricey to her budget at that particular moment. So she puts her buying decision on hold.

Retailers have to remember that people b.u.y on emotions and back their decision with logic. In the context of the lady shopper, she may have the desire to come back but may not remember this anymore upon leaving the store due to her many commitments.

As such, if we keep details of this shopper in our database and put her in our mailing list where we can periodically but consistently mail her our new arrivals via e-mail, postcards, SMS or newsletters, then we would have “entered her world”.

You can view the whole blog by visiting the Sales Ninja. From the above, we could see that by having a proper customer database, organizations can strategize by using customer insights such as descriptive, behavioral, interaction, etc. and thus innovate at touchpoints across the customer lifecycle to enhance the customer experience.