Analytics should do more than gather data, it should ACT on it….….

Jason Martin, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Tahola

The process of gathering and analysing information about customers has become a fundamental requirement for companies seeking to compete in the digital era. As the consumer’s data footprint expands, so does the opportunity for businesses to understand their requirements in more detail.

Single Customer View or SCV has been around for several years and means different things to different people. As customers interact with an organisation they leave behind many data points, in multiple software systems that reside within the business.

The main objective of the SCV is to consolidate and aggregate data to give a holistic view of a specific customer or customer profile type, that can then maximise on past activity to predict future behaviour.

This can then be further exploited by targeted marketing to elicit a planned response, the ultimate aim being to generate additional revenue through obtaining detailed customer insight.

Within the hospitality industry the adoption of an SCV is usually to assist the marketing function to drive sales by stimulating more visits, encouraging the customer to spend more or trigger lapsed customers to re-engage.

To do this we can use the many digital touch points a customer has with a hospitality business. A few of the more common data sources include:

EPOS- to identify the customer, one of the following systems can be integrated into the EPOS to “tag” the transaction with the customer:

◦A Loyalty Card system

◦Table booked system

◦Payment App

By tagging the transaction with the customer, we can analyse detailedpurchasing

behaviour, such as what was purchased and with what otherproducts (basket analysis),

when they were purchased (day part, day ofweek, etc), where were they purchased (till,

site, area, etc).

WIFI - to use the WIFI in a specific venue, the customer will log in and identify themselves.

Social Media- Follows, likes, retweets etc. If privacy setting allow we can also extract many

useful attributes of the customer to populate our SCV. This is especially useful if the

customer uses social media to log into other systems, such as the WIFI.

Direct marketing- via email or social media.

CRM - This is not essential but very useful as a home for Customer dimensional data, i.e.

Full Name, Address, telephone, email address, etc.

I was recently involved on an SCV project for a UK based hospitality operator, they had a number of data feeds into their SCV, some were linked to EPOS (loyalty card) and some weren’t (WIFI login). The first campaign that was driven by the SCV was focused on Father’s Day. Using the SCV and the connected data, we were able to segment their customers to specifically identify lapsed customers that fitted a particular profile, in this instance it was men who had children. An email campaign was created and distributed to the targets identified. The day after Father’s Day we were able to quantify the effectiveness of the campaign by looking at the activity of the selected recipients. The re-engagement of those lapsed customers was particularly compelling and the money that was spent as a result of the campaign contributed to the overall ROI of the project.

The SCV is therefore, not only a source for direct marketing, but direct marketing should also be a source for the SCV. If a feed from the direct marketing platform(s) is used to update the SCV with the marketing activity a customer has received, then the effectiveness of that marketing can be effectively calculated.

This can be quantified not only in terms of what the customer has spent because of the marketing campaign, but also how receptive the customer is to that specific marketing message or approach. Thus providing the marketeer with the insight to tailor more effective and targeted campaigns by utilising the insight that has been gained from the SCV.

Consequently the SCV becomes the master data for the customer. It uses the dimensional data from the CRM and calculates the attributes and measures that are necessary to provide insight and segmentation for the marketing activities, this therefore means that the return on investment for the implementation and adoption of the SCV can easily be calculated.

The challenge as always though is in the detail. The multiple software systems previously mentioned, identify the customer and measure them in many different ways. These must all be conformed, to enable us to join the activities to the unique customer.

Organisations that harness the power of customer analytics can provide better customer experiences and reap the benefits of increased customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. However, businesses that neglect their customer analytics technology will lag behind, struggling to create the personalised customer experiences that guarantee success.