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Key Ingredients for Collecting Customer Data: Value, Trust, Care

By Jose Mauricio Valdez Mendia - Microsoft for Walmart LATAM
Chief Transformation and Digital officer

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By Mauricio Valdez Mendia | Chief Transformation and Digital Officer - Thu, 12/01/2022 - 15:00

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Omnichannel interactions between customers and organizations have led to an exponential increase in data generation. Customer data has been among  the use cases that have really put big data to the test. If we think about  it, organizations have always had to keep their transactional data in check so that, at the end of the day, their operations and accounting could take place. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, which have been available for the past couple of decades, are based on delivering well structured and efficient transactional data that enable key aspects of a company: sales, finance, sourcing, asset management, supply chain, manufacturing, etc. For many years, their focus was product- and company-centric, which distance them from today’s intensive customer-centric approach.

Customer data protection and privacy laws and policies have been around for some decades as well but have never been as relevant. In 2016, the European Union released the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a set of rules on data protection and privacy whose primary aim is to enhance individuals' control and rights over their personal data. It contains best in-class rules that we can expect to become worldwide practices when we talk about customer data protection and privacy.

The framework for data protection and privacy is a must that every organization must put in place and treat seriously. It is in their business strategy that a value proposition must be presented whenever data is being collected. Customers must understand there is a gain or a pain reliever at every interaction where their data is going to be collected.

Let’s  examine each of the three elements that are key for collecting data: value, trust and care:

  1. Value: Every touchpoint in the customer’s journey must expose the organization’s strategy to deliver frictionless experiences to its customers, while simultaneously creating opportunities for data gathering. 

Data gathering for the purpose of data gathering will not go well with the majority of your customer base; they expect interactions to serve the purpose that helps achieve their intentions.

Understanding the core value of your services and what attributes are most important for your customers helps in creating seamless experiences that enable data gathering. For example, customer’s want to have full control and visibility of their assets when it comes to banking. Delivering an app that enables 24/7 real-time account balance visibility has driven many customers to download and use mobile apps that require a customer ID, from biometrics to email, mobile number, and localization services. Some customers have abandoned call-center services to receive personalized in-app services that require providing personal, identifiable data. The same occurs for delivery status and visibility in retail, room selection and early check-in in hospitality, etc. 

  1. Trust: A study by Atomic Research showed that participants between 16  and 35 years old (millennials) indicated  that it was “Vital” and “Very Important” that personal identifiable information (PII) is stored correctly and only shared with authorized parties. While there is a perception that millennials upload a massive amount of personal information to social media, when it comes to PII, they want it treated with the utmost privacy and security.

The implicit statement is that customers trust the organizations with whom they share their data and PII. Cybersecurity roles have never been in such high demand and organizations rank security and data protection among  their most important strategies. One minor breach is all that needs to happen for an organization to drastically erode the brand equity that it has built over the decades.  

Protecting information is just one part of the equation; the other is enabling customer control over the collected data. While organizations store PII data, customers must be free to request its complete or partial deletions and do so whenever they want. 

  1. Care: This is  the manner in which an organization creates procedures to ensure that their communications are not creating friction with their customers. While understanding that hyper-personalized communications deliver the best ROI regarding marketing strategies, they must respect and care for their customers and the number of interactions they establish within a specific time frame.

When an organization has reached a maturity stage to run hyper-personalized communications, it is normal for all the different areas of the organization to want to connect with their customers. Someone has to mediate between the internal demand to contact the customer and the actual communications that are established. Policies should be created regarding  how many communications per week and months, what is the authorized schedule, what is the channel strategy, etc.

Organizations must put in place active strategies to identify unsubscribing, app deletion and blocking among their customers. Every single communication must be observed to guarantee that it does not generate customer abandonment. Customer experience and customer relationship management areas within the organization must align with marketing to guarantee that communications are relevant and add value to their customers.  

Collecting, protecting and activating customer data must be on every CEO’s mind, for it is a path to boosting loyalty and delivering great experiences that can significantly improve and enhance an organization’s brand equity. It is not a simple task and requires an organization to work in unison. When done correctly, it can deliver incredible results that can be measured in loyalty.

Photo by:   Mauricio Valdez

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