I have always found that when we talk of loyalty or CRM, immediately the discussion moves towards transactional and behavioural data of customers. It becomes a cold discussion of "variables" and " fields" that one has captured about the customer. Then, it moves into models, software and tools. For God's sake, we are talking about the human mind and there is more to it than just transactional data. I almost end-up feeling like this - implement the software application or models and customer relationships will happen automatically!
There's more to this than just a technology tool or transactional data.
For us to get a holistic picture and drive the customer experience, transactional data alone is not enough. One has to use a few other drivers (which has been brought out very well in the article by Byron McCann (Download experience.pdf .)
- Perceptual data is an important driver. For example, how satisifed is the customer with the product or service? What are the drivers of loyalty? What attrtibutes of a brand drive the perception, how do we fare against each of them? This information can also help us align the operations at the ground level. Most often this data lies in the market research dept of companies.
- Mystery Shopping data(across touchpoints) can give the current experience scores on the identified attributes . It can show a strong inter-relationship between future purchase and loyalty. Many a times this is more used as monitoring tool rather than a metric to benchmark customer experience.
- Then, use transactional data to define customer value and loyalty
If these 3 knowledge points are fused together, it will give us a holistic picture and can drive business decisions to align, differentiate and improve customer experience.