Harnessing Customer Data to Unlock the Luxury Market
Earn the Privilege to Communicate With Each Customer
Many luxury businesses squander opportunities to retain these costly-to-acquire customers, or worse, inadvertently drive them away. Part of the problem is that they continue to apply conventional approaches and technology to capture, analyze and use (or misuse) customer information.
Typically, customer contact information is collected after each in-store, online or phone transaction and stored in an organization’s customer relationship management (CRM) system. While this gives the organization a way to connect with customers, what’s typically missing is useful insight on these customers. For example, these organizations typically push products on their customers based on criteria such as their assumptions of the customer’s wants/likes and their predictions of the customer’s propensity to buy using a back-office algorithm. Yet having already been exhausted by traditional marketing efforts, such customers are unlikely to feel positive vibes about another organization wasting their time.
Marketing efforts are more potent when guided by customer insight. Such insights are discovered as a result of employees engaging more deeply with customers’ minds and hearts, at all points of interaction. There are always opportunities for engagement because customers tend to have a story to tell when they pay a premium for luxury. Each story is unique, interesting and uncovers insights on how best to service the individual customer and create value for them as well as the business.
The wealth of actionable insights and information will enlighten the company on how its luxury customers feel about its products, services, experiences, interactions, information, brand and organization. The company will also learn about its customers’ communication preferences, favorite channels, attitudes, current needs, future needs and purchased products, including why the customer purchased the product. When these actionable insights are captured and used appropriately, retailers can transform their ability to succeed in a luxury market. It will help retailers to better engage customers, improve and expand offerings, maximize sales, and, more importantly, retain these high net worth customers. For example, these insights can guide a company on how to earn the customer’s permission to provide ongoing communications on the topics, products and services that are relevant and useful to them. In turn, this helps to strengthen the customer’s relationship and loyalty.
