Hey Mr ‘iNsErT cUsToMer NaMe’
Imagine this at your local market; this is what we frequently do online.
Hey Mr ‘iNsErT cUsToMer NaMe’, I saw you looking at bananas (the customer has just bought a banana). Would you like some bananas with your purchase? You seem like the kind of persona that likes bananas, unknown male, age 24–30. The market stall owner then proceeds to email the customer about bananas, even though they have only just bought bananas and won’t need more bananas for a few weeks.
For obvious reasons, the customer politely asks not to be contacted again about bananas by opting out of an email campaign (which is often now also, for obvious reasons, a legal requirement). The market stall owner proceeds to follow the now ex-customer around with a large banner that says, ‘Hey, do you like bananas?’ – following them into social situations or while they are booking flights. It doesn’t matter, just wherever and whenever the market stall owner can fit his big banana sign.
The customer finally runs out of bananas and actually does like the market stall owner’s bananas, but he now comes back to the market stall with a large Harry Potter-style incognito cloak in the hope of being able to buy some bananas in peace.
This would be insane in the real world, so why do we continue to do it online? It’s because, at scale, it can work enough of the time to be viable. Of course, we don’t experience the obvious embarrassment first-hand for all the times it doesn’t work and ends up driving potential and repeat customers away.
How we extract, collect, transfer, and share this data is now often to use a specific tool called a customer data platform (CDP). The CDP acts as the connector and collector for the various data points collected at various stages by the organisation for use in various marketing tools.
To show how this can work, here is a case study from Acquia, a CDP company working with Wickes.
Acquia CDP: Wickes Boosts Shopper Engagement, Customer Support
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Wickes, a home improvement retailer with 240 stores across the United Kingdom, had two goals in mind when they started the search for a customer data platform: reducing costs related to the outsourcing of marketing functions (such as targeting and database management) and to take control of the company’s customer data, which includes both Wickes’ ‘DIY’ and trade customers.
Hayley Clifford, Wickes’ senior CRM and loyalty manager, and her team ultimately decided that the Acquia CDP could help them accomplish these goals and more. While marketing teams traditionally use customer data platforms, this was not true for Wickes. In fact, Wickes’ CRM team was the primary user of the CDP for the first two years. Seeing the benefits of the CDP realised by the CRM team, the platform is now also being used by the marketing insights team, who use it to analyse customer purchase behaviour, as well as by the social media and digital teams. The ability of various teams to leverage customer data has had the effect of creating a seamless and more efficient cross-team approach to serving Wickes’ customers, raising the quality of engagement both online and off.
Source: CMSWIRE - 4 CDP Case Studies: Acquia, Arm Treasure Data, BlueConic, Lytics
Wickes’ goals for their online retail operations included increasing customer engagement and conversion through more relevant email campaigns and decreasing cart abandonment. Before deploying the CDP, they had no way to mitigate cart abandonment. After deployment, Clifford and her team were able to:
· Map the top 1,000 search terms to the product category
· Capture browsing behaviour using the AgilOne webtag
· Send personalised emails to customers who browsed but abandoned a site.
The results of their new engagement and conversion strategy delivered beyond expectations:
· 108% increase in email opens
· 116% increase in email clicks
· 275% increase in purchases on the website.
They also wanted to empower call centre agents. As a large omni-channel retailer, Wickes’ number one goal is keeping their online and in-store (DIY and trade/business) customers happy. Call centres are a vital customer touchpoint for Wickes, generating revenue and contributing to customer satisfaction and retention. Wickes can provide more personalised customer service by using Acquia’s platform to surface specific information, giving the call centre agents a complete picture of the customer, including previous support calls and transaction history, so they can personalise the call experience and resolve inquiries more quickly.
Before the Acquia CDP, agents only had visibility of purchase history and previous communication with the call centre. Agents had to ask the IT department for customer details and loyalty programme memberships. Agents now use the CDP to identify whether the customer is part of a loyalty programme. Agents tailor the phone conversation or email based on the caller’s profile. Agents can now manage tickets without needing to involve IT, and there has been a 98% increase in operational efficiency.
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In this practical example, we can see how navigating through and crossing ‘The GAP’ can be possible and the potential rewards for doing so for both our customers and us. Acquia is just one of the potential CDPs we could consider as part of our MarTech Stack and future solution designs.
