It’s the Thought that Counts, Right?

You’re trying your best but things don’t always go right with your customers.

You send an email thanking them for their purchase, but they’ve already returned the item due to an issue with the product. Instead of sending that thank you email, what if you were able to send them an offer asking for a chance to earn back their trust before the credit even hit their account?

You identify a high value customer who hasn’t visited your franchise in a few months, so you send out a voucher for one free massage. Little did you know, that same customer just visited another franchise location in the next town. If you had known, would you still send the offer?

Your customer just left a stellar review on your website, but your follow-up email still goes out, asking them to rate their experience. And two days later, another prompt innocently deploys. Ouch. How can you become more nimble?

Closing the Gap

These examples are all symptoms of the same problem: there is a lag time between data and your delivery channels. Some say this is a reality of doing business today. With so many systems operating separately, the use of batch files of data to be exported out of one system and into another is how most companies turn the data they capture into marketing messages.

The ability to act on new data is a powerful thing. It can motivate a customer to return to your business, it can revive the trust of a customer who may have had a poor experience. Perhaps most importantly, it can reduce the reliance on incentives to do those things and more.

A Customer Data Platform Can Help

A customer data platform maintains consistent, up-to-date information for each of your customers, taking in new events and information from all systems every second. But the critical component is for that system to be connected to your marketing channels, able to trigger, stop or adapt a message from reaching those customers.

Those cringe-worthy examples we cited above? Consider them a thing of the past. With data and delivery in perfect union, you’ll be able to:

• Adapt based on new data from online and offline channels like the point of sale or customer service records
• So you’d know about a returned product, sub-par experience, or a good one before you send out that communication
• Integrate data across franchise locations, while enabling separation by location
• So you could run a localized campaign, as well as a global brand campaign without confusing your customers
• Suppress and adapt communication in real-time
• So you avoid eroding a positive experience or further aggravating a negative one

Investing in Customer Experience

The examples above are common across organizations attempting to create a unified, multi-channel experience for customers. The idea, intent and vision are spot on, but when it comes to execution, it’s the lag time between the systems that learn new information and the systems that use it that leads to most issues.

Whatever is to blame, the customer on the other end doesn’t know or care. Unless they work in digital marketing, they probably don’t have any empathy or understanding for what has led to a confusing, annoying or offensive experience. So it’s up to you to continually improve the outcome, and the best investment in time and effort is to bring your data and delivery channels closer together.

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