Customer journey becomes more and more fluctuant. How many times did you start on the website to finalise your purchase in the store? How many times, being in a physical store, you’ve looked for more info on your mobile device? At the same time, our companies are organised around the “channels” or “touchpoints”. So we have an eCommerce team, a call centre unit, a store division, media guys etc. This makes a lot of sense since every team has different capabilities, requires different skillsets and metrics. But, simultaneously, they see customers only through their narrowed lenses, limiting the organisational potential. And by not having one common denominator, they start to compete with each other.
It is easy to fall into the trap of focusing only on the data available for your channel. It gives a fragmented view and may lead us to a wrong business decision (e.g. send a message about an abandoned basked, while the customer already bought the products in physical store on their way from work). But it can be much more harmful—impacting our segmentation, media investment, or reporting.
Your role as a Loyalty owner is to build a channel-agnostic, reliable single view of the customer. Regardless of how people interact with your company, your part is to collect all members’ traces throughout the channels and time. It is not the simplest task, and jour job will never be done, as people constantly switch the channels, devices, or web browsers. Regulators and technology providers play hide-and-seek in the data privacy game. And, on top of that, people constantly change their home addresses, mobile phone numbers, or emails—and you are probably the last on their priority list to be notified.
But if you do your work well, you can fuel back your organisation with high-quality data and become the single source of the truth. The eCommerce team can upgrade their recommendation engines by including offline sales and gain efficiency in personalisation. Your marketing team can plan media better, knowing where your customers are and thus converting them more easily. Your CX team can understand better NPS results based on a more extensive customer context. And your finance team can understand the value and profitability of every customer to help your company better navigate and steer customers to a more desired path.
