Bella loves sports and rarely watches movies. If she does catch a flick, it’s usually an action film. Rarely does Bella enjoy drama, romance, or science fiction. Yet her video streaming service constantly sends Bella recommendations and specials for movies, primarily dramas and romance, because their database indicates Bella is female and their statistics on demographic groups show that females in Bella’s age group typically enjoy drama and romance.
If the video streaming company bothered to gather and manage data on Bella’s viewing habits, they would quit sending her ads and special deals for 50 Shades of Gray and Real Housewives of Atlanta and start offering her discounts on NFL games and boxing matches. If they did, Bella would spend an average of $50 per month more on her video streaming services.
What is the service doing wrong? They are failing to store the right data and manage it properly in order to provide Bella with a customer experience she’s willing to pay for. Here’s how you and your app developers can learn from this company’s mistakes.
Storing and Managing Customer Data Across the Company
Demographic data can be sorely inaccurate. Not everyone fits into a stereotypical mold.
Every customer interaction with your company, no matter which department is involved, needs to be added to the database, analysed, and incorporated into future customer experiences. For example, Bella’s sales person should have noted the programming and features she asked for during her ordering process.
If marketing and customer service had access to this information, they could better tailor her experiences and generate more revenue from Bella, as well as all of their customers who fall outside the canned concept of market demographics. With data and data analysis, you don’t have to depend on inaccurate stereotyping. You can focus on your customers as individuals.
Creating an Accurate, Consistent Customer Experience
Additionally, all departments need access to the data collected by technical support, the billing department, and departments that deal specifically with particular products. How is this important? Say Bella lost her job, but was scheduled to start a new job in one month. She contacted billing to explain why her bill was going to be late this month, but explained her situation. With this information, the sales team could help work a deal out to save her money now, and perhaps contact her in a couple of months when things picked up and offer her more programming she could use, enjoy, and finally afford.
Delivering a Stellar Customer Experience
The data can be your navigational system to guide you into providing a stellar customer experience that will endear your customers to you.
When developing your apps, you need to empower those apps with data on your customers. The data should be made available across the organisation so that each and every time you have contact with a customer, their profile is honed and fine-tuned to assure that the next experience is even better.
Is your app collecting data on what your customers research, not just what they purchase? If they use the help feature, is this tracked so that you can determine the customer’s technical skills and how to make the interface and experience easier for them? Do they frequently filter results based on price, indicating that they are in the position to want or need to save money? Each of these data points can help you finely tune your customer profile, which helps you develop and deliver an app that is tailor made for your users.
The right storage and management of customer data will endear your brand and your app to your users, assuring that they will continue to trust you and spend their hard-earned money with you.
Are you ready to begin developing a rich, data-driven app today? Visit Glance to get started.
