During the time in my business days I used to dominate in my niche business as I was the standalone shopkeeper in my area. Area was not much developed as there was only one source of income for people, that was farming and making items out of bamboos. In mid of 1980 an oil company visited our land and bought several Acres of land, installed oil refinery and no sooner people and the area started to prosper. A small town started to grew into a city and now it’s an 1 Million population state. Many other new businesses came in town , competition began to grow, some old businesses had to close down as the new ones were cleverer and ahead of them. Coming back from the old times, My father owned a bakery shop and with new competition opening up in every street, he survived this competition and we earned enough bucks to expand our business. Along with the bakery, we opened up a grocery store attached to our bakery. The reason behind our sale instead of our competitors was that my father knew everyone and what they like. He had insights of what Mr. Brian’s choice’s was regarding his coffee and what Mrs’s Joby orders were for church prayers on every Sunday. Today city grew double, more population, more businesses and I do not know anyone like my Father did . Digitization changed everything in our business , now cash counters are automated, credit/debit cards are the easiest way of payments, and everything has gone online. Surviving a business is tough. Still, we have the bakery and grocery store. Being a graduate in Computers I had come across several technologies I can implement with my business. Customer Profiling was a term used with big ecommerce companies. They create unique personas of their customers which help them creating their marketing campaigns and personalizing their store according to their customers. These personas/Profile
has information about their customers, their interests, likes, shopping history and based on these data points they analyse what’s trending or what people usually buy.
With the help of digitization and a degree in Computers I opted Customer Profiling tactics and combined my grocery and bakery business. For few months I gathered user’s interests via surveys and analyzing my inventory. 80% of my customers were regular , 10% were randoms who were in the city for few days , and 10% were no sale customers who were just for inquiry for new products. I took my business online and provided the facility for ordering cakes and some groceries via my website. As it is convenient for people to order without leaving their house so it added a boost to the business. This was one of the questions I asked my customers , whether they prefer coming to shop for buying or getting delivered. Few of modern generation customers suggested me this option. I had written down needs of those 10% customers who were in my store just for inquiry, I asked opinions on those products and it turned out most of the customers aging from 2535 preferred those products over their current purchases. Customer Data Management was an issue for me but as I said I am an Computer’s graduate, I had it sorted too. I had my offline and online inventory synced and in the end of each month I analyze my sales and according to sales insights, every half yearly I do surveys offline and online and try to get more valuable customer insights. This is my experience regarding customer profiling and how I adopted it. If you have any similar experiences or want some suggestions you can mail me at lrjacob.54@aol.com. Jacob Mandice. Source: http://donbon.tumblr.com/post/147092228023/howoptingcustomerprofilingwasthebestthing