ITA Group Insights Magazine - Customer Engagement - Volume 23 Issue 1

from the desk of MAX KENKEL

During lockdown periods the past few years, Gartner found that brands committed as much as 80% of their marketing spend on digital. Customers shopped and worked from home, limiting the avenues to reach them.

Now, we’re seeing a need and a desire by organizations to readjust their marketing mix to go beyond only digital. Brands have a big opportunity to grab customers’ attention with unexpected, personalized experiences that center on connecting with their customers.

In most cases, this connection is built through excellent customer service and high-quality products. Brands that do it well have turned their interactions, or their product, into part of the holistic customer experience.

Even among competitive brands that produce comparable goods or services, customers have varied expectations and relationships with each one. The organizations that pair unexpected value with their brand promise create a unique opportunity to win over customers, new and old. Here’s a real-world example. ITA Group worked with a mortgage lender that experienced historic numbers of refinances and couldn’t process the mortgages promptly. To save their customer relationships—and strengthen them—we personalized a customer service experience no one saw coming. The communication campaign recognized the service gap, reinforced customers’ value by thanking them for their patience and sent them a gift for their trouble.

In this case, a package of Omaha Steaks with a sincere message of “dinner on us.” The solution was a hit, reinforcing the brand with almost 100,000 homeowners. It also garnered positive earned media for our client with a blurb in the Financial Times.

These customer relationship trends led us to reimagine our solutions for how customers connect with brands on an emotional level.

Our Breakthrough Touchpoint solution helps organizations pinpoint specific moments that matter in the customer journey, which leads to more positive outcomes. It also shows how going beyond digital marketing can meet customers’ demands for personalized, memorable and meaningful interactions.

According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2020, around 80% of customers are willing to leave a brand after a lackluster performance. That means organizations must play the long game—where each new interaction with customers is the most important yet.

At ITA Group, we help inspire emotional connection for our brands, and create equity in the customer's minds, boosting the brand's odds of increasing customer lifetime value.

Max Kenkel ITA Group Solution Line Leader, Customer Solutions

How Zero-Party Data Can Improve Your Customer Experience

By: Sarah Borchers, Customer Solutions Insights & Strategy Leader

Marketers need to deliver relevant, personalized customer experiences to compete with the many products and brands on the market. But personalizing the experience in the correct way can be tricky.

Done right, personalization contextualizes the customer experience in a way that boosts value to customers. It often involves combining first-party data, marketing expertise and your insider knowledge about your unique audiences. To personalize the experience, marketers need to take what data they have and use it to make informed decisions about how to increase customer value across all touchpoints in the customer life cycle.

And yet, increasing concerns about privacy have disrupted the use of first-party data and launched new opportunities for marketers to use zero-party data (data that is voluntarily given) to not only boost value but make the customer experience more tailored, relevant and better overall.

Zero-party data is the gold standard of data because it’s straight from the source (so it’s extra reliable) and can be used to make the personalized experiences customers crave.

Because zero-party is shared directly, its trustworthy and unambiguous information that can be used for segmentation, personalization engines and product recommendation tools.

The Difference Between Zero-, First- & Third-Party Data

ZERO-PARTY

Direct data voluntarily given by customer to brand in exchange for something valuable

FIRST-PARTY

Direct data gathered by brand based on customer’s past interactions with them

Why Privacy Concerns Are Affecting Data Collection

Until recently, the primary form of data that marketers used to personalize the customer journey was third-party data. Third-party data is data acquired from a data aggregator. Data aggregators don’t collect data directly, but rather obtain it from other companies and compile it into a single dataset.

The problem with third-party data is it comes from unrelated and unreliable sources, such as cookies and click trails.

THIRD-PARTY

Indirect data collected by data aggregator and compiled into a single data set

As a result, it quickly becomes outdated and has no direct relationship with the individual customer. Using this sort of data to power campaigns has been the key driver is growing customer mistrust.

While third-party data is still used (and many marketers aren’t ready to pivot away from that model), its days are numbered.

Google is set to phase out third-party cookies beginning in 2024. Many other popular internet browsers, like Safari, have been blocking them for years. Major publishers, including The New York Times, are transitioning away from third-party advertising data. And Privacy Sandbox, a series of initiatives that began in 2019, is creating new standards for privacy online with safer alternatives to existing datagathering technology. More and more customers are concerned about protecting their data and their privacy from digital trackers, installing ad blockers and changing privacy settings to deny them access.

In fact, a recent survey found 66% of consumers find targeted advertisements generated from cookie tracking to be creepy instead of cool.

We call this the “era of privacy,” and it’s made it increasingly difficult for marketers to build and maintain trusted relationships with customers, who feel like marketers are tracking and taking advantage of them without permission.

However, within this challenge is an opportunity for marketers to switch to zero-party data, which lacks the negative connotations and provides more accurate insights into customers’ behaviors. Because zero-party data requires consent, it’s automatically compliant with privacy regulations as well. It’s a win-win.

What Is Zero-Party Data?

Forrester defines zero-party data as data a customer intentionally and proactively shares with a brand, often in exchange for something they view as valuable. The exchanged item could be something like a personalized recommendation, a price reduction, a prize drawing entry, etc.

Because the item is perceived as valuable, customers will voluntarily give up a bit of information about themselves.

In a survey by Accenture, 91% of customers said they will shop with brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations.

Zero-party data can help you discover what’s relevant to your customer and use that relevant offer to procure additional zero-party data. Each offer is an opportunity to learn more about your customers and their needs. There are many benefits for the brand in this exchange, too. It helps the customer build trust in the brand. Because it’s directly from the customer, you don’t have to guess what the data means.

For example, is this customer buying baby clothes because she’s pregnant or because she’s going to a baby shower? Algorithms might not be able to tell. Zero-party data can give you the full picture. Everyone gets what they want.

For zero-party data to be useful, it needs to be connected to a first-party customer profile. This means brands need to collect the data digitally after customers identify themselves through registering or logging in to a customer-experience platform.

How to Collect & Leverage Zero-Party Data

The first step to winning over skeptical customers who are hesitant to hand over data is to keep them entertained and engaged through interactive digital experiences.

They need to feel they are receiving something worthwhile for their attention and, eventually, their personal data.

Marketers can even speed up the process of collecting zero-party data by incorporating incentives (such as instant wins, gamification and giveaways).

When asking customers for zero-party data, keep these three key principles in mind:

1. Be transparent. Explain why you are collecting the data and how you intend to use it.

2. Don’t force things. Ask just for what data you need, and let them share as they are ready.

3. Deliver a fair value exchange. Offer a meaningful exchange, and make sure what you’re offering feels equal to what they’ll get in return.

When done well, interactive experiences create an engaging process for collecting zero-party data, inviting customers to build trust in the brand and continue engaging throughout the customer life cycle.

ITA Group can help you be creative with how to gather zero-party data and use it to build lasting customer engagement.

For example, we helped one of our manufacturing clients learn about their customers' preferences by developing a sweepstake with a grand prize all-expensespaid trip to attend the Indy 500.

We crafted the sweepstake entry to include a few tailored questions that allowed our client to segment customers and target industry professionals who entered the sweepstakes. Within that professional audience, our client was able to further segment customers who were planning on attending an upcoming product expo.

Our solution allowed the client to organize a targeted marketing outreach to potential attendees found through the sweepstakes promotion—all while adhering to customer privacy laws. The buzzworthy nature of the grand prize garnered incredible media attention, prompting even more people to volunteer zero-party data in the hopes of winning the trip. In the end, there were 4,600 entries, 636 of which were industry professionals planning on going to the expo—they were immediately added to the communications cadence to help customize their experience. This allowed the client to cultivate warmer leads ahead of the expo.

Why Zero-Party Data Is a Powerful Marketing Tool

Demystify the Customer Experience With Market Research Insights

CMB, a Top 30 Insights & Analytics company, and a wholly owned subsidiary of ITA Group, Inc., leverages the best of advanced analytics, consumer psychology, and market strategy to tackle game-changing initiatives. Read below to see how CMB's experts are translating insights into action in a meaningful and memorable way when it comes to data quality, brand health/positioning and subscriptions.

What Are Your Research Partners Doing to Ensure Data Quality?

At CMB, we strive for the highest standards of research and data collection. But all of us are dealing with historically high rates of data fraud. While there are many ways of mitigating your data fraud risks, when you are looking to implement strategic projects that involve data, considering asking these questions to your trusted research partners to ensure that they’re doing all they can to combat data fraud, including:

1. In field reports, are you willing to share total completes and subsequent “actual” completes [how many were lost after quality check (QC) process?] Can I routinely see into the QC process and how many respondents are being removed and replaced?

2. Which third-party sample fraud tools are you aware of? Which ones are you investigating? Which ones are you using? Do you have agreements in place with specific sample vendors for this?

3. Do you have success stories to share that illustrate your ability to tackle fraudulent data?

Communicating openly about the percent of fraudulent respondents uncovered is akin to a badge of honor these days, and clients appreciate the honesty and transparency in our process.

Finding and removing imposters with everimproving tools can be achieved. In B2B research, this is even more necessary because much higher incentives attract much more sophisticated “incentive-harvesting” operations. For tough audiences in Tech, B2B “panels” are often abandoned and instead rely exclusively on Expert Networks and other specialty recruiters to ensure data quality.

Kudos to all those implementing third-party tools. Speaking from experience, it’s tough onboarding these data tools. If sample providers and third-party vendors do not have existing agreements in place, it can wreak havoc on study launches. There are plenty of moving parts on a questionnaire script with invites, redirects, and quotas. When additional third-party programming is implemented, there are new potential points of error with the up-front data fraud screening. On a recent study where we had multiple tools implemented with one third-party vendor, three individual tools in the programming were not working with the redirects.

In cases like this, if programmers and vendors are not properly aligned, they may substantially delay a study launch.

Having multiple QC measures in place to prevent fraudsters from making it to your survey is a lofty but attainable goal. While it may not sound like success, revealing that 50% of the respondents were proactively prevented from taking the questionnaire with third-party tools and another 10% of completes failed internal QC and needed replacement is an example of success when you know you’ve improved data quality to an extent that could have altered the key findings of a study.

So, what are the best pieces of armor for protection? It’s most likely that the more layers of protection implemented, the better.

Are your partners using a three-pronged approach at minimum?

1. A strong, smart questionnaire containing red herrings and other internal QC pieces

2. Third-party sample fraud tools as appropriate

3. Internal, proprietary QC protocols to ensure the best data quality for your research

Let’s abandon the old trope of “garbage in, garbage out.” How about high-quality respondents into the questionnaire, quality data out? Time to ask your vendors what they are doing to help combat data fraud. Transparency is key. And if your vendors are failing you, you can rely on your partners at CMB to do what’s right.

Leslie Rich, Ph.D AVP, Tech & Telecom Account Management

Brand Health Audit & Action Program

Strengthen Your Brand Health & Positioning for Long-term Success

Trackers have been a core component of brand research for decades. They provide important KPIs that help brands evaluate how they perform with consumers and the impact of their campaigns and other market actions. In a nutshell, trackers help explain past performance to the business.

Amid the present climate, a 3-year pandemic from which we are still emerging, the Great Reshuffling that has consumers rethinking their priorities, and ever-changing consumer journeys, CMB believes trackers need to look forward and work harder to not only explain the past, but to guide your business’s next bets, actions and re-actions to a rapidly transforming market.

CMB’s Brand Health Audit & Action program fuses behavioral psychology with best-in-class analytics to construct a program that is purposefit to your objectives. The dedicated team works with you and your key stakeholders to craft a bespoke Audit & Action program. If you’re not starting from scratch, CMB will preserve the value of the KPIs in your current program while introducing new modules that identify forwardlooking actions to achieve your strategic goals.

Drive your business forward with advanced analytics

CMB’s advanced analytics approach allows you identify drivers and model outcomes to determine where your next marketing dollar should be spent. Having a better understanding of your customer’s emotion journey is critical to your business. Leveraging behavioral psychology helps uncover that and provide you with a comprehensive emotion action plan. It also helps identify opportunities to re-engage customers who currently have negative emotions towards your brand, and tackle or prevent neutral emotions from hinder your acquisition efforts.

Identify how your customers interact with your brand

Understanding how consumers are interacting with your brand via our Connected Consumer module can uncover many ways for you to be proactive with your brand strategy. This has been an area of particular focus as consumer interactions rapidly changed and evolved in response to accelerated digitization triggered by the pandemic. Evaluating the multi-channel experience to better measure the effectiveness of target market messaging and in-channel performance will help you to confidently target media through mapping consumers’ brandengagement touchpoints and the impact they are having on marketplace perceptions .

Mobilize insights and ignite action within your organization

You’ve leveraged both advanced analytics and identified how customers interact with your brand, and now it’s time to mobilize these insights and ignite action within your organization. With role-based dashboards, you can deliver the right insights to the right person in a context that better enables them to make informed decisions that drive the desired outcome. Additionally, you can take your insights further by designing custom, multi-media immersive experiences for your stakeholders that may include visuals, video, audio commentary, music, etc. These experiences are designed to bring your results to life and help your decision-makers internalize the insights and inform their decision-making.

Trackers will continue to be a core component of marketing strategies in tandem with market research. How you leverage your trackers will determine if your organization lags or propels forward. Don’t look back, move forward and strengthen your brand health and position for long-term success with CMB’s Brand Health Audit & Action program. Let’s continue the conversation, contact us today.

Richard Scionti VP, Product Development & Innovation

How Brands Win Against Growing Subscriptions

Subscriptions have become the norm. Beyond the expected streaming services, there are a range of products that are now available as subscriptions, including meal prep delivery, razor blades, and even jerky to name a few. Subscription services have really shifted from a novelty to a mature category. In fact, even Taco Bell is getting in on the action. As brands grow and evolve, here are a few thoughts to consider as they seek to enter in this space:

Find the “white space”

As some of these categories are getting increasingly crowded with competitors, brands need to move past the low hanging fruit categorybased benefits (e.g., convenience, savings) and find “white space” that is also competitively distinct. When cost savings is a category driver, there is a risk when competitors enter to have a “race to the bottom” with price cut after price cut…with service and quality then suffering…and everyone losing. Brands need to identify the elements of their value prop that are both compelling and competitively distinct.

For example, some brands in the subscription space distinguish themselves as “curators”— helping consumers wade through the overwhelming amount of alternatives to find the best choice for them.

Retention is the new growth

What got people in the door (ex: cost savings) may not be a reason they stay. With an increasingly uncertain economy, and increasingly crowded competitive spaces, consumers face hard choices in their daily lives. Brands always need to be tweaking their offering(s) and its benefits to stay relevant. For example, in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Amex Platinum successfully shifted from travel-related to adjacent benefits like streaming service savings, Uber Eats credits, etc. This kind of attention to a consumer’s shifting needs keeps customers loyal and leads to greater advocacy, which further leads to acquisition.

Make it easy

In a consumer-centric world, brands are learning how to be easy to do business with. For example, I believe Netflix actually increases loyalty by, ironically, making it easier for its members to quit. Their service is made easier by not having an annual membership and making the cancellation process as simple as a couple of clicks. In fact, if they notice you haven’t used your account for 12 months, they automatically cancel it. That’s going above and beyond. I wish my gym would do that for me and put me out of my misery.

Create habits

The dynamics of COVID-19 resulted in so many changes in consumer behaviors, and brands are investing so much in identifying which ones will stay as the time goes on (and if you aren’t, you should!). Our clients find that CMB’s Habit Loops framework helps bring the above elements all together to uncover opportunities to trigger routines that support their brand, disrupt habits that don’t, and help make their brand become a part of customers’ everyday lives: automatic and hard to disrupt.

The growth rates in subscription services over the last few years may not continue at this pace, but these services aren’t going away. Brands that leverage insights to help with the issues above will be in the best position for success…although, their success does nothing to help my already crowded monthly credit card statement (taco, anyone?).

Mark Doherty VP, Retail & eCommerce

3 Steps Marketers Must Take to Improve Customer Engagement

By: Sarah Borchers, Customer Solutions Insights & Strategy Leader

In fact, 80% of customers say the experiences provided by a company are as important to them as its products and services. In other words, organizations that prioritize and measure customer engagement will see improved customer retention, loyalty and advocacy, setting themselves apart from the competition.

According to Dan Gingiss, author and customer experience expert, “Most companies must realize that they are no longer competing against the guy down the street or the brand that sells similar products. Instead, they're competing with every other experience a customer has.”

CUSTOMERS GRAVITATE TOWARD PERSONALIZED EXPERIENCES

Customers want to feel the brand understands them on a personal level. And the personalization must happen from the point of first contact through product purchase, support, upgrade, renewal and any additional transaction phases. For example, here’s how Delta Airlines personalized the customer engagement experience for my colleague in a way that surprised and delighted them.

While on their first flight after the COVID-19 pandemic began, they posted on social media and tagged Delta Airlines saying, “so glad to be back.” Once they boarded the plane, the flight attendant welcomed them on board and said, “We’re glad you chose Delta for your first flight back!” The engagement didn’t stop there. When my colleague returned home, there was a handwritten note in their mailbox from the pilot who flew the plane that day. Wow! Now that’s pristine customer engagement.

The demand for customers’ attention is at an all-time high compared to the last few years. They have more power than ever to choose how and when to engage with a brand. Relying on a good product to grow brand loyalty isn’t good enough anymore to engage customers.

Moral of the story: Delta listened to the customer through an engagement platform and responded in a personalized way we typically haven’t seen in the past. My colleague said it best, “Delta will always be my first choice for any flight in the future.”

Talk about long-term brand loyalty.

3 STEPS TO IMPROVE CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT STARTING TODAY

Delta took the time to listen to my colleague— their customer—and provided a memorable experience. Implement the following three best practices so you also can create a personalized customer experience with your brand.

Capture Customers’ Attention in The Moments That Matter Most

We all receive or see countless digital ads every day. Cut through the clutter by reaching customers at key moments along the customer journey with a surprise-and-delight engagement. We like to call those moments “breakthrough touchpoints.” The touchpoints can be used in a variety of ways, such as:

> Customer or subscriber onboarding

> Milestone or thank-you gifts

> Service or product recovery

> Stagnant loyalty

> Rebates

> Reactivation

Breakthrough touchpoints deliver unique customer experiences at any point in the customer journey. Going the extra step for personalization ensures customers hear your brand’s message and see the value you provide.

In the end, your brand stays top of mind, and you improve retention, generate loyalty and build affinity.

Promote Your Core Values, Not Just Products & Services

Customers decide when and how to interact with brands or whether to ignore a brand based primarily on how brands are positively contributing to society. Customers want to hear from brands beyond just products and services to form deeper connections.

When they’re more connected to brands, 57% of consumers will increase their spending with the brand and 76% will choose that brand over a competitor.

For example, footwear and apparel retailer TOMS believes in philanthropy and addressing issues that matter. The beliefs served as the foundation for a postcard-writing campaign advocating for gun reform on its website and social channels. Within the first year, TOMS estimates consumers sent 750,000+ postcards to state legislators.

Customers crave authenticity and real connections with brands. The key to effectively reaching them by taking a social stance is making sure the stance is authentic to your brand’s mission, purpose and core beliefs.

Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits between 25–95%.

—BAIN & COMPANY

Do you have a loyalty program that needs some rejuvenation? Read how we helped a leading financial institution develop a creative recovery tactic.

info.itagroup.com/our-work-customer-journey

Measure Specific Metrics to Personalize Purchasing Experience

Organizations have access to data by surveying customers regularly and putting the feedback to use. Focus on metrics like what customers value and how they realize the value. Then use that data to understand what ensures customers stay and are willing to buy more. Unified reporting and analytics tools can measure customer engagement levels at every touchpoint.

Instead of just thanking customers for sharing feedback, show them how you’re using it! By evolving beyond basic demographic information and purchase history, you'll collect more zero-party data to make every customer experience personal, relevant and enjoyable, ensuring the brand and customers both win.

OPTIMIZING CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT CREATES LONG-TERM BRAND ADVOCATES

Customers expect more from brands than ever before. Personalizing their experience is no longer a nice to have—it’s a need to have. Continuing to engage with customers after the sale is critical to retaining customers and building brand advocacy. Happy customers drive deeper, more engaged and more profitable relationships over the long term.

REBATE STRATEGY DESIGN The Basics & Best Practices

By: Karli Quesinberry, Customer Solutions Strategist

A successful rebate strategy takes focus. Done right, it can drive increased buyer interest, stronger consumer loyalty, higher revenue and greater profitability. But before we dive into some of the specifics of rebate strategy, let’s first define what we mean when we say rebate, look at when rebates are most effective and identify what parts of the consumer journey this approach can influence.

What is a rebate?

A rebate, also known as a premium with purchase, is an award offered at the time of purchase to incent a consumer to purchase your brand over another.

According to the Promotion Marketing Association, consumers are 75.4% more likely to buy your product if there is a rebate present.

Compare that with promotions like contests or sweepstakes, which only increase the likelihood to buy by 42.5% and by 39%, respectively. Rebates, where a consumer gets a free gift with purchase, have shown to increase their purchase likelihood as much as 82.8%.

When are rebates most effective for brands?

Instead of offering savings with a reduced price at point-of-sale, rebates ask shoppers to complete additional steps to get cash back.

As a sales tactic to drive primary purchases, rebates work best when the direct selling audience (often a sales rep at a store) can use the rebate as a selling tool.

While rebates entice shoppers to buy a particular product with the hope of getting cash back, many shoppers actually fail to complete the process. Rebates often succeed when they are perceived as easy (and valuable) enough in the consumer’s eyes to get them to purchase your brand, but not so great that they redeem.

What part of the buyer’s journey does the rebate impact?

While rebate programs can act as a touchpoint within each of the phases below, they have the most impact within the consideration and purchase phases.

This is when price is most likely to be a factor. If most other features are comparable, then a rebate can help negate price in the favor of your brand.

Awareness Consideration Purchase Repeat Purchase

BUYERS JOURNEY

6 Considerations When Designing a Rebate Offer

Adjusting any of the following considerations during a promotion will influence activation rates, consumer satisfaction, confidence and brand sentiment.

1. Advertising: How will consumers find out about the offer? How do you want them to find out? How are you prepping the direct sales team about the upcoming offer?

2. Rebate Value: The dollar or percent off of a product or service, or the perceived value of the award.

3. Strike Price: The final price of the product or service after the rebate.

4. Effort: How hard is it to redeem? Is the effort worth the award?

5. Consumer Confidence: The consumer’s belief they can submit it easily and will receive the payout without complications.

6. Utility Margin to Income: Individuals spend their incomes first on what they value most highly, regardless if it’s a fully conscious determination. This form of satisfaction is called “utility” and argues human beings seek to maximize their own utility.

Consider the following example, which helps bring these six ideas working together to life.

The consumer walks into a store. She is deciding between two products and sees that Brand A has a rebate offer (Advertising) for 20% off (Rebate Value). Quick math shows her the rebate will be for about $10, and she can submit her rebate on her phone (Effort).

The fine print states some might not get the rebate for up to 12 weeks (Consumer Confidence). But it’s a product she buys regularly, and she’s always wanted a reason to try this brand (Utility Margin to Income). She purchases the product and totally forgets about the rebate.

Even though it was easy, she either didn’t want to wait or couldn’t be bothered to remember to redeem it because it was too small of value. This results in a winning scenario for the brand. The offer enticed the consumer to buy and left the consumer’s award in their own hands.

Best Practices When Implementing a Rebate Strategy

Rebates have proven to be effective consumer promotions designed to generate long-term consumer loyalty and brand affiliation that drive product sales while providing savings to priceconscious shoppers.

The following best practices will help you get more out of your rebate.

> Establish clear goals and an effective method to measure success.

> Train the sales audience on how to leverage the rebate as a tool to help close the sale leading up to the rebate.

> Eliminate antiquated payment options to avoid ongoing negative exposure for your brand.

> Integrate survey questions into the rebate and leverage data collected for re-targeting efforts.

> If you have SPIFFs available for the direct sales audience, ensure there is alignment around the products funded and the products on rebate.

Create an Easy Rebate Experience for The Consumer

Customers shouldn’t need to go through multiple steps just to find out they are ineligible to receive the award for some unclear reason noted in the fine print. It’s all about finding the right balance.

Rebate design and the technology that supports it should work together to create an easy experience for the consumer.

Tips to Consider Before Leveraging Customer Data For a Targeted Customer Strategy

By: Max Kenkel, Solution Line Leader, Customer Solutions

Here’s an example: For one client, we collect rebate submissions, which means we see somewhere between 150,000 and 500,000 customer activations through our system. We know the product lifecycle; on paper, retargeting those customers when the product typically needs replaced with a customized offer to ensure they purchase from our client’s brand again *seems* like an obvious approach. Yet here we are over five years later and we’ve yet to maximize that data, despite repeated attempts.

Good customer data is data we can act on, turning it into a behavior change or an incremental purchase—or (ideally) both.

Use the data to inform your engagement strategy, which motivates your audience to do something different or repeat desired behaviors. But how do you know what is good data? In short: data that is clean and complete.

But if that’s not clear enough, continue reading for examples (good and bad), uses and key advice for each type of data.

It still surprises me how many companies underutilize the customer data they have. I suspect even if you polled companies who are “doing great” at leveraging data, they would say they could do better. Even the big corporations who are amazing at leveraging data miss a trick every now and then.

Types of Data

CLEAN DATA (BEST)

Examples of What Can Provide Clean Data

> Stores with universal point-of-sale (POS) data

> Manufacturers who get complete sellout from their distribution or stores

> Distributors and stores who track end-user purchases

> National account info

> Well-conducted surveys

How Clean Data Can Be Used: Clean data can be quickly segmented to target a variety of audiences with a variety of motivators specific to their segment.

Key Advice: Before you go huge, leverage the data to test and learn. Fail fast, pivot and focus on what drives revenue and ROI.

USABLE DATA (GOOD)

Examples of What Can Provide Usable Data

> Stores with widely available POS data

> Manufacturers who get some end-user data

> Manufacturers who get some sellout from their distributors

> Claim or rebate programs

> Warranty registration

> Surveys

How Usable Data Can Be Applied: The data lets you segment and target groups with multiple motivators. It also provides the option for an impromptu approach with some personalization.

Key Advice: Leverage test-and-learn approaches like above, and work on ways to enhance the data to make it cleaner.

INCONSISTENT DATA (POOR)

Examples of What Can Provide Inconsistent Data

> Inconsistent POS data at any level

> Manufacturers with antiquated reporting structures

> Franchise scenarios where the agreement doesn’t require transactional data be shared with the franchise (unbelievable; this is more common than you think)

> Independent channel reporting

> Channel claim programs

> Disparate data storage at any level

> Poorly conducted surveys

How Inconsistent Data Can Be Used: With a little analysis, even inconsistent data can provide the ability to do some partial segmentation and targeting.

Key Advice: When working with this data, balance the time it takes to clean it up with the ROI. Aim for big targets first to justify further efforts.

UNUSABLE DATA (WORTHLESS)

Example of What Can Provide Unusable Data

> Anything handwritten

> PDF or handwritten reports from the field

> PDF or handwritten reports from manufacturers

> Text box surveys to large groups without a plan to consume and act

> Poorly structured data

> Incomplete records (e.g., address but no city/ZIP)

> Out-of-date data that no longer applies to your current products or services

How Unusable Data Can Be Used: It can’t. It’s time to reevaluate what you’re collecting and the form it takes.

Key Advice: Walk away until your systems and collection methods are improved. The cost to capture and clean this type of data is probably more expensive than investing in better collection and storage means.

What Do You Want to Achieve With This Data? (Tip: Start With the End in Mind.)

If you know what you want to accomplish, you can identify what data you need in order to pull off your plan. Nothing is more disheartening than getting to the end of a project and realizing you didn’t actually capture the right information in order to do the things you want to do next.

When that happens, you either have to go back and ask more questions of the audience (which they’ll hate), run an impromptu approach lacking strategy (which will discourage you and your analysts), or do better next time—none of which are ideal outcomes.

Also, when I say think through what you want to achieve, I don’t mean “grow sales” or “change behavior.” I mean, specifically, how do you intend to leverage individual data points or responses to target customers? For example, “We will ask people who enter our sweepstakes what their occupation is so that we can target them based on their response with other products and services across the enterprise.”

Now that I’ve brought you up to speed on what I mean by data quality, it’s time to think about how you leverage the data you’ve collected. Whether you are new to the game of leveraging data, or not yet seeing the benefits and success you feel you should with the data you’ve collected, start with how you would address the following five questions before jumping into large-scale data utilization.

Do You Currently Have Access To the Data You Need or Want?

It’s okay if you don’t. If you are new to leveraging data, there are ways to capture sales and behavioral data through strategic agreements with your channel, claims programs, surveys and market research.

Knowing you don’t currently possess what you need is important to determine up front so you can make a plan to collect it through one of the means listed above.

What Will It Take to Get the Data You Need? Is It Even Possible With Your Current Go-To-Market Arrangement?

This depends a lot on where you are in the channel (manufacturer/distributor/store/ mixed) and who you want to target (B2B, B2C, etc.).

If you are a manufacturer, you may not have great end-user data, but that’s okay. You can put things in place to help you collect usable data.

If you are a distributor, you might have better access, especially if you also have owned stores on a universal POS. But keep in mind: disparity exacerbates cost. That doesn’t mean you should abandon the project.

Just know that the more difficult it is to collect and aggregate good data, the more it will (likely) cost to get a collection system in place.

Do You Have the Right Partners?

A good market research firm and a good incentive partner can really help expedite data collection and validation of your data. It’s even better if one agency offers both services. If your data is inconsistent or lacking value, there are tools and companies who can help glean usable information but you must decide what’s best for your company.

Is it better to pay someone to clean up data, or invest in better systems allowing better collection and more flexibility? Or are both important? A good partner can help you identify the financial risks and benefits for each and arm you with facts to make a confident decision.

What Is Your Solution to Disparate CRM Systems?

Believe it or not, I can name at least five Fortune 500 companies who have disparate CRMs for multiple business units targeting the same customers with similar products. Just amazing!

You don’t have to have your CRMs completely sorted, but think through a plan to get there, especially as new state and federal privacy laws take effect in the next few years.

What are you going to do if a customer tells two of your business units they can be contacted, but tells a third unit that they can’t be contacted? What is your enterprise solution to adhere to these new laws?

After you’ve addressed these questions it’s time to put planning into action. When you’re ready to start leveraging your data, keep the following few tips in mind:

Put the Right Team on the Project

The right team on the project is the team who is going to embrace quick failure. That’s right, failure. Companies who are experts at leveraging data can run multiple tests and learn scenarios in a month, a day or even an hour. Granted, they’ve worked hard checking all the boxes to get to this point, but you need a team to lead this who understands failure is simply one step closer to the magic bullet of success.

Arm the Team With the Right Tools

If you need to dig a basement, you aren’t going to have a crew of people use garden trowels. You’re going to call in a backhoe and dig it in a matter of hours. The same thing goes with leveraging data. There are dozens of tools and partners you can use to help manipulate and extract the key points from your data set, and your investment in the right tools should more than offset the labor you would spend trying to execute big data plays with low-end tools and manual processes. If you have thought through how you want to use data and have a clear understanding of the cleanliness of your current data, vetting a tool (anything from a better version of Excel to AI-powered software) or partner should be relatively easy.

Create Realistic Benchmarks

(Tip:

Don’t Be Afraid

to Ease Into This for the First Few Tests)

Leveraging data can seem insurmountable, especially if you have any of the hurdles above. Don’t be afraid. Start with the cleanest data you have, run a few tests, and see what happens. At first, you’re probably going to be below industry average for open rates and conversions. But, if you stick with it, you and your partners will figure out what works for your audience, and then you’ll be off to the races, the races being where you can tie a sale to every marketing initiative instead of telling the story in terms of click-through rates.

These aren’t hard and fast rules you have to follow. These are just some of the learnings I’ve had through my career. Frankly, many are concepts anyone should consider before any project.

And for those crunched for time, here's the TL;DR version: Get a solid understanding of what kind of data you have and how you want to use it before you jump into customer-facing activation. Once you get that sorted, start small and move quickly to eliminate what doesn’t drive results so you can invest more into what does work.

Take a Deep Dive Into Strategic Segmentation

Listen to our three-part podcast series where ITA Group customer experience expert, Max Kenkel, interviews CMB CEO, Jim Garrity, on the value of strategic segmentation, best practices and how to apply it to your business.

PART 1

The Value of Strategic Segmentation During Disruption

info.itagroup.com/podcast-part-1

PART 2

5 Strategic Segmentation Best Practices

info.itagroup.com/podcast-part-2

PART 3

Applying Strategic Segmentation to Your Business info.itagroup.com/podcast-part-3