Profiling That Elusive Customer

Customer profiling is one of the main driving actions that help in obtaining benefit from CRM. Simply put, this activity tells you who your customer is so that you can market and sell your services to him. Of course, getting the customer to your shop is only half the job done. You need to be in a position to offer him the right goods at the right time at the right price and in an assortment of his choice.

It would be a major CRM triumph if companies were able to access a common view of the customer based on past history that would enable them to sell, market, cross-sell, up-sell, and provide service. The key impediment in achieving a single truth about your customer is integration. Businesses find it very difficult to cull information from all the various data sources that exist within the company. This is what leads to incomplete information and the single truth remains elusive. At any point in time, different departments are viewing diverse data on the customer that exists in different formats and reacting accordingly.

Customer profiling takes on increased significance for e-businesses where the crucial human interaction is missing. This makes it all the more difficult to get information on customer characteristics and behavior. Without accurate information, you cannot really focus your products or streamline and target your marketing efforts to a narrowed down audience.

Customer profiling considers important geo-demographic factors such as age, sex, social status, house type, income etc. Obtaining such information can be time consuming not to mention intrusive as well. But the significance of such information is underlined by the fact that it when it is used in a communication to a prospect or a customer, it increases the chances of them responding to the communication. You need to decide on what bases do you wish to understand your customer – in terms of demographics or behavior. You can also opt for a balance of the two.

The concept and objective of customer profiling are easy to grasp. The trick is to develop an implementable strategy and have a detailed action plan. There are many reasons why accurate customer profiling is not easily achieved. Difficulties in execution and problems on the ground level include getting the customer to participate, designing questions that do not come across as intrusive, getting enough data to have a sample space big enough for an accurate picture, storing data, and then making it available when required.

One of the key holdups in The complexities of customer profiling increase with the scale of the operation and also when companies adopt an ad hoc approach. Consider your objectives, assess your present data, and chart an action plan to unravel what makes your customers buy. obtaining uniform customer information is integration. Businesses are rendered helpless by the amount of customer information that lies distributed across databases in different forms. There is a need for consistent, quantifiable, and current data that is actionable.

The complexities of customer profiling increase with the scale of the operation and also when companies adopt an ad hoc approach. Consider your objectives, assess your present data, and chart an action plan to unravel what makes your customers buy.