A colleague recently bought a new car. He was very excited and eager to arrive within a few weeks. Shortly after delivery, he received an email from the car manufacturer telling him that the car is now on sale.
In just a few seconds, the manufacturer changed my colleague from a brand fan to an unsatisfied customer.
It stands to reason that up-selling or cross-selling other products and services, from auto parts to warranty services, should be a golden opportunity for automakers. What is the reason for turning such a good opportunity into a negative experience, causing this customer not to You might consider buying the company ’s products or recommending them to other consumers.
This may be because the customer's relevant information is stored in a data system that is not accessible to the marketing department, so it has never been known by the marketing department.
Marketing managers around the world are worried about encountering such things because they are not sure whether the data can be trusted. To ensure that your data is trustworthy, please follow the steps below.
1. Know your customers
How to ensure that the right information is communicated to the right customer at the right time? First, you need to fully understand your customers to provide a truly personalized experience. Ask yourself if you know:
- Where do they live
- Who are they connected to (their family)
- What products did they buy from you
- Purchase time
- Place of purchase
- payment method
- Channels of contact with your company
2. Simplify your data
You may find yourself knowing the answers to all these questions. However, where is this information stored in your company? Is it centralized management or resides in multiple systems?
Are you using CRM, ERP and e-commerce systems to store and manage individual data sets?
Have you acquired multiple legacy systems through acquisitions or mergers and acquisitions, and the disconnected data in these systems is still in use today?
Controlling the data will bring you many important benefits and help you cope with the above problems. It can simplify your data and provide you with a single common data source for customers, products or suppliers to help you clear data silos and manage, share and correct data. You will get a single trusted version of the customer, thus avoiding the same risks as the car manufacturer we mentioned at the beginning of this article.
Introducing master data management (MDM) into your company does not necessarily mean that you must migrate data from the current system to the new system. The MDM solution can be deployed on other systems, extracting and cleaning information from it and creating a single trusted version. In other words, it will help you identify, integrate and link customer data across the enterprise.
To gain insight into your customers, you must first understand who they are and be able to identify them immediately upon contact, regardless of the interaction channel. And to achieve this goal, it must be based on a 360 ° omnidirectional customer view.
Once you have a 360 ° omnidirectional customer view, you can immediately begin to understand consumer interests, identify customer behavior, and process information in real time. You will be able to understand more clearly what kind of behavior potential customers are most likely to turn into real customers, now or in the future.
3. Understand customer behavior and history
Once you know the identity of your customers, you can provide them with personalized interaction based on behavior patterns, thereby enhancing brand affinity and loyalty.
You can store each interaction in the central system and analyze it in order to formulate the next best marketing plan and send the right information to the right customers at the right time.
Now, based on a 360 ° omnidirectional customer view, you will be able to increase your operating income through personalized, complete solution sales, product bundling, up-selling or cross-selling plans.
Establish lasting impact and return on investment
Using master data management to deliver the right information to the right customers at the right time has many benefits, including improving the return on investment of each customer interaction and building a popular brand that is popular with consumers, etc., which will have a long-term positive impact on operating income .
