Yes you can. And your customers expect it!

Back in the day of the corner store, proprietors used to know their customers. They didn’t have to ask the customer’s name or address, and probably had a pretty good idea of the customer’s likes and dislikes. If an order had to be delivered, the store probably even knew what time the customer was likely to be home. And customers appreciated that knowledge, and the personal service it made possible.

Flash forward 50 years, and everything had changed. The corner stores were gone; relationships had become impersonal. The store didn’t care who you were, and if you wanted something delivered, you had to supply your name and address (every time, even if you’d just bought something there the day before). Despite a greater selection and lower prices, store loyalty and customer satisfaction declined.

Flash forward to today. Thanks to computers, there is no longer an excuse for uncollected or inaccessible information. And customers know it. So customers have every right to expect the same kind of recognition and personal service their grandparents used to get from the corner store. It doesn’t matter whether they are buying face-to-face or online. They want the fast, easy, personalized service that a well-networked database makes possible.

Sure there are exceptions. Some of us have information we don’t want companies to store, like birthdays, social security numbers, and financial access data. But apart from those, customers have the right to expect you to know them, and treat them like the individuals they are.

So think about your transactional systems (and this goes way beyond purchases to systems which handle functions like customer service, billing, and shipping). When someone gives you information, do you store it? Do you pre-populate forms with known information? Do you keep track of customer preferences, and make suggestions based on them? Do your all of your (appropriate) people have access to the customer’s history? In other words, do you treat customers as the valued individuals/corporations they are, or as anonymous, unappreciated “buying units.”

It takes a lot to turn a prospect into a customer, and to keep that customer. A well designed, well networked, well used database can make that effort a lot easier.

Your CMO has extensive experience in using data to create a more user-friendly customer experience, and can provide some great examples from places “doing it right.” Let’s sit down sometime and talk about how that experience can help improve your customer acquisition and retention!