Embracing Customer Profiling and Data Management

Defining Exceptional Service

Organizations always aim to give their customers the best experiences. There are several interpretations of what constitutes good and excellent service, and sometimes these terms are used interchangeably. However, many companies fail to achieve exceptional service because they do not understand their customers.  

Delivering any level of service requires that we anticipate what the customer is expecting. Sometimes they do not know what they want – so businesses use insights to predict what might be most useful to them. There have been many good companies with great products that have failed because the customer experience was terrible. The need to understand customer expectations and deliver products and services that meet those expectations is what defines exceptional service.  

Profiling and Managing Data

To fulfill the needs of our customers before and after a purchase, we must gather all available data. This data must be structured in a way tailored to the customer and the service. This requires understanding marketing, transaction, mobile, and organizational service data. Some examples of marketing data would be the customer’s name, demographic information, age, financial characteristics, and online activities. Transactions data can give us a deeper understanding of their buying preferences and behavior. Mobile data from devices like phones, which have sensors, may show us where the customer is located, their distance from us, as well as their pulse and motion. To maximize the effectiveness of the data, we must combine marketing, transaction, and mobile data with the organizational service data. This includes service, applications, infrastructure, platform, and capabilities. The data must be sourced from a variety of places such as cloud, on-premises, and IoT devices, including third-party sources. It is essential for accurate customer profiling to collect data from all sources. 

Knowing your customers better requires you to surface patterns and information that help paint a picture of who our customers are at any moment in time. Understanding buying habits creates the ability to use analytics to predict customer behavior and move them through the journey. Predictive behaviors based on historical data analysis can inform decisions that can be used to influence and create trust with the consumer by reaching them at the right moments with the right messages. 

Enhancing Data and Decision Support

To enhance data for profiling decision support, first, we collect the data from as many sources as possible. Across all clouds, on-premises, and any other data sources. Enterprise-wide data collection capabilities are critical to capture the customer as completely as possible and profile them for your services or products. The data must be analyzed quickly so that you are engaging your customer with the right message at the right time. Everyone is mobile, so as data is collected, you need the ability to communicate and influence your customer as quickly as possible.  

The more you understand your collected customer-related data, the better you can use automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies for effective customer engagement. These emerging capabilities all begin with having a clear data strategy, the technology to support the strategy, and the enterprise’s daily data collection operations.  

Discover how the Actian Data Platform can empower your data-driven enterprise with its data management and data integration solutions. The Actian Data Platform delivers unparalleled analytics performance for the data-driven enterprise, no matter where your data resides. Built-in services connect and orchestrate data movement across all your applications, so you can make those real-time connections with your customers.  

About Traci Curran

Traci Curran serves as Director of Product Marketing at Actian focused on the Actian Data Platform. With more than 20 years of experience in technology marketing, Traci has previously held senior marketing roles at CloudBolt Software, Racemi (acquired by DXC Corporation), as well as some of the world’s most innovative startups. Traci is passionate about helping customers understand how they can accelerate innovation and gain competitive advantage by leveraging digital transformation and cloud technologies.