The business marketing has seen a shift in paradigm in the past couple of ears, moving away from traditional advertising towards a more direct and personal customer interaction. There is a focus on finding new and better ways to engage with clients and establish customer loyalty. This is no easy task, especially if you are unaware of your customer base interests and preferences to begin with. Even if you do have access to such information it is most probably dispersed between multiple sources and databases.
A Better Way to Manage Customer Relationships
Companies today are fully aware that they must truly know their customers in order to manage relationships and even attempt to compete in the market. One way to do that is through the notion and discipline of Customer Profile Management (CPM). CPM has become an important advantage for companies today since it provides a common platform and approach to managing multi-channel marketing campaigns and ongoing customer loyalty strategies. Brand leaders like Disney, Nike and Southwest Airlines all use Customer Profile Management as an essential process driver for their success.
A Broader View
The key benefit of CPM is the ability to collect and comprehend customer information, in ways that let you better interact with your audience. There are many categories and characteristics that you need to take into consideration, when devising a customer relationship strategy, such as demographic, geographic, purchase history and the list goes on and on. It pretty much depends on the type of product or service that you are selling.
The biggest challenge for most organizations today is not so much the obtaining of data, so much as collecting it from a dispersed array of systems in a single synchronized and cohesive archive.
Maximize Customer Opportunity
Once a customer profile has been established, each interaction with that customer presents an opportunity to learn more, and make adjustments and decisions that maximize the overall lifetime value of each customer. Collecting, adding to, and constantly reevaluating customer profile data is a powerful tool and activity for improved marketing, decision-making and profitability.
Analytics and Action Customer Profile Management is quickly becoming a necessity rather than a convenient technique for customer analytics since it enables more accurate forecasting of buying habits and lifestyle preferences that can have a very real bottom line effect on organizational performance. Such data management activities can incorporate a magnitude of aspects and elements from simple like credit card purchases to magazine subscriptions. The use of these categories can create a cohesive profile of a customer, containing actionable data that can be utilized when making a business-decision.