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Improve your customer database and refresh your customer journey

More than three months ago businesses across the world had to change their ways and transform day-to-day operations, because of the COVID-19. Cases varied, from those being heavily impacted and forced to shut their doors, to those who in the best case, were being able to adjust and re-focus for the time being.
During this challenging period, it looks like businesses and individuals were doing the same; shifting their focus on smaller things in life, possibly neglected, trying to slow down. The focus became the quality of what we do and how we do it in all aspects of life.

We decided to jot down a few helpful steps to remind impacted data-driven and customer database dependent industries on how to use this time to improve workflows and business outcomes.

‘House-keeping work’ and optimising workflows

There has never been a better moment to improve every step of your communication process. From reviewing and updating the source of customer information (i.e. your customer database) to refreshing the communication plan for each customer, including written correspondence, calling scripts, or just investing more time in understanding your customer and perform research.

Step 1 – Optimise your communication workflow and messages.

Each industry or role has a recommendation framework or specific guidelines around a total number of customer touchpoints per month. If strategically mapped-out, even though you can’t anticipate all situations, you can be well prepared to handle most of them. So, the first step would be working out your customer journey and see what the pain-points are and which stage of that journey might be the bottleneck.

Step 2 – Quality vs Quantity
In the situation with COVID-19, timeframes and goals of your day-to-day operations might have changed. Maybe, the goal was previously to be fast and achieve a high conversion rate, but now it might be the quality of the relationship and services provided.

If that’s the case, and you are trying to uplift your customer relationships, being a retail business, utility provider, finance company or not-for-profit organisation, you will have a customer database which is a dynamic tool and changes daily.

Step 3 – start from your source database
We recommend two options:
1. Set-up, a regular check-up and improvement process, to confirm, validate, or append new attributes to the customer database.
2. For businesses with a less dynamic customer communication cycle, set-up a once-off data cleansing.

Step 4 – Analyse
Now that you have a fresh and shiny data source, you might get inspired to match better some of your usual messaging to new contact points, you will find in your new database. It can be a missing or updated landline or mobile number, missing or updated email or even a new surname.

Step 5 – Learn more about your customer
We knew from our early start-up days that, the right technology, secure data management processes and a deep understanding of a customer is key to every good business relationship. Therefore, we partnered with the RDA Research, Australian grown market research company. That way, with their extensive research and best practices, we complemented our already powerful platform with a competitive twist of geodemographic types of data.

The social profile indicators such as disposable income, debt service ratio, financial distress, housing and many more, can drastically influence and improve the communication flow and modelling to the right tone of the message.

Step 6 – Emails & Calls
With all these tools and options at your hands, you will have enough information to improve your customer database, tailor your journey and create the process that will help to achieve better business outcomes. Your communication flow might get better just because you have a customer email which might be their communication preference. Maybe the bottleneck in your success rate was the fact you didn’t know that your customer moved five times in the last five years. Whatever the missing puzzle might be, there is a way to find the matching piece.

Step 7 – Get in touch with us!
If you are reading this, and you are not sure where to start, the simplest way is to give us a call or get in touch via email. Our clients come from various industries, and our passionate data wizards are just waiting for a new challenge. Sometimes, this might mean just helping you with establishing the API process between our platform and your customer database. Still, very often, this means tailoring our service or our solution to your specific business goals and requirements.