Know Me, Show Me, Entice Me

Focus on customer selection, prioritizing campaigns, optimizing customer contacts, channel utilization, and the offer message can help companies accelerate customer profitability and loyalty. To excel in customer management, companies must provide a product or service a customer needs with a personalized, prioritized offer that is delivered at the right time, according to Ron Swift, vice president of cross industry solutions at Teradata. Swift spoke at The Conference Board's Customer Loyalty Conference this week. Finding the "right customer" depends on optimal customer selection based on statistical models, Swift said. Companies need to prioritize customers. Prioritization of campaigns helps maximize leads for each one. The "right timing" of customer contacts helps ensure they aren't excessive or too infrequent. Proper channel utilization helps maximize the best leads for each. Optimizing the offer message means a communication that has personal relevance based on analysis, modeling event detection and message design. Comprehensive data analysis is critical to all of these. This customer management method requires deep, wide customer data to understand the context, drivers, and influencing factors of customer information. The data needs to be based on a complete customer view across all business lines and channels to prioritize and balance offers around customer needs, according to Swift. The data needs to be fresh, so that offers are delivered when the customer is amenable to them, now or in the future. For example, a financial institution customer may be using expensive branch channels in order to conduct transactions (meeting a need). The financial institution could stress the convenience of a lower-cost remote channel, offering an incentive for continued use-this is the prioritized offer. Immediate follow-up after their initial use can help ensure customers don't go back to their previous habits. What customers want is a positive set of experiences. They want to know that the company cares and that it appreciates and values the customer's business. Customers want to be treated an individual, not as numbers. Creating better interactions and experiences helps companies acquire new customers, grow customer relationships and retain customers, Swift added. Customers want firms to demonstrate that it knows them. "Know me, show me, entice me. Don't sell me, treat me as a friend. Create trust and confidence." As companies roll out campaigns based on these factors, it's also important that they learn from their successes and missteps, Swift added. "Customer experience management is a process, not a campaign or campaigns," Swift said. "The most powerful effect of customer relationship management is on the bottom line." Related articles: Teradata Announces a Power Threesome Reaching the Next Level of Performance in Marketing Data Management and Predicting Customer Behavior