As each digitally-empowered individual travels from prospect to customer to repe
ID: 342560 • Letter: A
Question
As each digitally-empowered individual travels from prospect to customer to repeat buyer and loyal advocate, they will encounter a brand and its competitors through countless channels defined by limitless touchpoints and devices. To capture and retain their business, companies must meet them at each decision point in the customer journey with targeted, relevant offers that speak to their individual buying criteria. Foundational to the ability to do this is a new technology called ‘Identity Resolution’.
Consumers engage with brands today in countless ways, both offline and online, through an ever-increasing number of platforms and devices. At each stage of the buying process, customer interactions may be associated with ‘identifiers’. The challenge is putting the customer’s entire buying picture together, since some identifiers may be unique to a specific interaction with a company but never intersect with any others.
Additionally 80% of consumer-facing companies simply don’t understand their customers beyond basic demographics and purchase history and 4 out of 5 consumers declare brands don't know them as an individual, according and IBM study.
You have been hire as the new Marketing Director for a struggling sunglasses company, task with resolving the lack of identity resolution around current and prospective customers, in fact the company has struggled to identify who their customers are and what they want. Utilizing the frameworks and readings from the course, how would you tackle this challenge, levering Identify Resolution technology?
Explanation / Answer
We are living in the world of analysis where every decision that is made is based on data that is collected over a significant period of time.
It has become essential for companies to look beyond the traditional method of identifying their potential customers that were more or less based on subjective experience and move into the digital world where everyone is connected together. They have to maintain their competitve edge over their rivals and thus they need to invest in technologies like Identity Resolution.
Everyone is leaving digital footprints when they move online and surf different websites. It has become very common for companies to invest in techniques that help piece together the mood and the needs of the customer and emulate what sales personnel traditionally used to judge with years of interaction with multiple people.
If a company has to succeed then it needs much more information than the basics of name, address, gender and occupation, prior purchase history. All these do provide generalistic insights into the lifestyle of the individual but does not take into consideration that there could be multiple people with similar backgrounds but they could be worlds apart in terms of their personality and apparent needs.
As the MD of a sunglasses company that is struggling, it becomes all the more pivotal to invest in the following practices if they need to survive in the market.
There are a variety of tools that can be used to help tackle the aforementioned issues that have been plaguing the company in their quest to understanding their customers and come up with a customer identification system. Various analytical tools can used to collect data like what the customer is searching, the number of times the search has been made, how long has the customer hovered over the page and try to find a link between these different parameters to identify the conditions that led to the customer making those querys. Various algorithms can be developed to gain insights into the personality of the customer and provide custom made buying options of sunglasses for them to choose from. These algorithms could be based on certain information that the customer provides like their favourite colour, the face shape of the customer, if they wear spectacles, if they need it for a particular occasion, the budget that they have and so on.
It becomes very important for the company to experience the path to buying a product from the eyes of a customer, to identify various points during the process of buying that cause stress and hinderance. The aim then would be to make changes that lure customers into making that final plunge of purchasing the product. If real time data collection is used then the company can offer discounts on the spot to the customers which also helps in gauging their behavioural pattern to such offers.
The company can use online feedback forms and surveys that would help them directly collect the data of a larger audience than can ever be possible by offline means. It helps in finding out the current trends in the market and then respond effectively that would lead to greater business.
Another tool that can be very helpful is to keep accessing the widespread opinion of the company in the public eye. It helps in knowing if there is anything faulty in their designs from which they can remedy any error in the system.
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