How to Survive in the Digital Age: Know Your Customers

With Digital Transformation, we are living in a direct-to-customer world. Consumers don’t want to talk to middlemen or brokers when they need something. They also don’t want to be bombarded with irrelevant ads, nor do they want to be on the receiving end of a blanket, irrelevant marketing campaign.

Customer expectations are high, and growing!  To provide a differentiating customer experience, you must exceed, or at the very least meet their expectations. Almost everything you read today talks about customer engagement and customer experience. It’s not because those are the latest buzzwords, it’s because they really affect your top line. It is also a compliance matter nowadays to know your customers well.

Customer expectations are defined as:
Know Me
Understand me
Respect me
Listen to me
and Respond to me anytime, anyplace.

Modern customers demand intelligence from the organizations they engage with. They demand knowledge, care, and personally tailored content and campaigns.

Digital technology has turned customers into moving targets. Customers are hopping channels all day – starting with their smartphone or tablet at breakfast, continuing on mobile while commuting to work, then hoping to laptop/pc once in the office, and again moving to other devices when out of the office and then TV, tablet, mobile at home before finishing the day. This leaves a huge digital footprint for businesses to further analyze.

Today, customer data, knowledge, and insights are more valuable and of more strategic importance than ever before.  Businesses have to adopt various key elements to engage customers:

• Involve customers: Allow customers to engage and be involved in your business goals
• Anywhere, Anytime Access: give them flexibility to connect to your business from anywhere, on any device, anytime
• Relevant content to Engage: provide the content which makes sense to customers
• Hyper personalize: customize the content to the very personal level meeting specific needs
• Responsiveness: quick and effective response on customer interaction

Businesses can deploy big data analytics to bring in all the advanced customer intelligence while interacting with customers:

• Customer journey data: Collecting all the customer data across all touch points of your business
• Behavior data: How customers have behaved while interacting with your business
• Sentiments data: What customers are saying about your products and services – good or bad!

This helps in knowing the customers better than the competition does, not only knowing who they are and what they have purchased, but also understanding what they want at a particular moment in time.

Amazon, Disney, Apple, Starbucks go to great lengths to exceed customer expectations by leveraging customer information and insights.

Finally, knowing the customer helps you in marketing, advertising, customer service, customer retention and loyalty and above all helps improve the customer experience.

Knowing your customer is key to survival. Find out who they are and how you can create products that truly solve their needs.
How is your organization putting efforts to know your customers in digital age?

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