Page 204 - DMGT308_CUSTOMER_RELATIONSHIP_MANAGEMENT

Unit 8: Managing Customer Relations

So establish collaborative working relationships with IT to pull together your requirements Notes
and build a business case for projects to acquire key data and cleanse existing data where
required.
Finally, most of the data that you will be focussed upon relates to the customer’s relationship
with you. This can be usefully summarised to understand how engaged the customer is at any
point in time by establishing how often they visit your website, when they last bought from
you, how frequently they buy, and what their average purchase value is.

Remember though that overlaying existing data with external market data can also help you to
understand more about how well you are leveraging a customer relationship based upon a
customer’s circumstance (e.g. their income, age, geodemographic segment, etc). This is a key
component of understanding the potential future value of a relationship and the headroom you
have to improve the current position.
Email Marketing Data

Email metrics are often held within email service provider databases or in-house operational
databases focused on delivering and managing email campaigns. Is that sufficient for your
business or do you need to integrate that data back in with more traditional transactional data?
Is it important for you to know who opened, clicked as well as bought to show different levels
of engagement – or indeed what they do and don’t engage with? If so, set out your data
requirements and frequency of refreshes.

Web Behavioural Data

How critical is web behavioural data to your business and how do you need to manage this in
the context of relationship management, as opposed to behavioural and content management
on a website? If it is important, how will you match this data back to other customer data? How
do you wish to aggregate the masses of web data into key metrics and variables that would
drive a differentiated customer relationship strategy? Define these needs against defined customer
contact plans; if you can’t then leave this with the web analytics team for now but ensure that if
future business needs change that this can still be accommodated.

Social Media

The majority of businesses today are using some form of social media (blogs, forums, Twitter
and Facebook) although most are only dipping their toes in. How important is this media to
your brand? How advanced are you today and where do you realistically see yourselves in the
next 3-5 years?
Most developments are likely to be in listening and tracking. The challenge for a business is
being able to understand the mindset of the consumer that is expressing opinions and making
purchasing decisions on products. So what listening and data capture do you need and how, if at
all, do you need to try and tie this back to your other customer data records (when often you
won’t know who is talking about your brand)? If the intelligence that this more unstructured
data provides is critical to success it will require a new approach to data gathering and
management.
Structured data originating from within the business, lends itself to being consolidated within
a single customer view as much of this data is likely to have contact details such as name and
address and telephone number. The challenge is how to combine this with unstructured data
which cannot be keyed using conventional name and address processing. Do you have keys or
data fields that could form links to your structured data; if so how will you define and create

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