Effective Client Management with your CRM/CDP: Are you doing it right?

If you’ve recently deployed a CRM or CDP in your retail business, it’s likely because you realized that working with unified customer data is crucial for effective client management across various channels and interaction points.

The enticing messages from most CDP or CRM platforms about building the “Golden Record,” the “Single Source of Truth,” a “360º Customer View,”… are very suggestive. At first glance, it seems like yes, uniting and cleansing the various silos present in the business: Ecommerce, CRM, Newsletter DB, etc., are key to achieving that desired unified customer data.

But let’s face reality. You’re probably finding that although the message of “uniting information silos” seemed to facilitate client management, in practice, in an omnichannel retail environment, it doesn’t solve it effectively, and you’re facing multiple adversities.

Client Management Complexities

Marketing managers in the retail sector face these barriers daily when creating their strategy to improve customer loyalty:

• Managing duplicate clients: their CDP tools collect data from various sources but do not automatically resolve the unique identity of clients, hence duplicate registration remains possible.
• Different online and offline identity for all clients due to registration with different credentials on different channels.
• Tedious processes of uniting and cleansing client accounts: even with tools in the system to help identify them, they require end-user validation, creating friction in the relationship with the client.

Seeking to overcome these obstacles, many companies have developed their CRM or CDP project for omnichannel retail to find an effective solution to client management, but the conclusions are:

• A really high expense that doesn’t guarantee a well-structured client base.
• Exclusive dedication of IT resources to design the various data sources and integrate them with the new tool.
• False expectations among different teams in your company: Marketing, Client Management, Loyalty… regarding the simplification of client management.

Eventually, they still can’t work with 100% reliable, unique clients. Therefore, all audience creation actions, campaign definitions… continue to rely on not entirely reliable data.

What happens if loyalty actions are designed without 100% reliable data?

Imagine building an audience with women of a certain age range who buy winter clothing from “x” brand, and at the same time, haven’t bought any outerwear in the last 12 months, all with the aim of directing them to a purchase recommendation or a promotion of a specific range of coats.

In this audience, there will surely be women who buy everything in-store, everything online, and many who buy on both channels simultaneously; for example, they prefer to buy online except for coats, which they want to try on in-store.

As client management platforms (that group customer data by uniting information silos) have an X% of clients who are one in the store and another online due to different registration credentials and are not grouped around an identity (this X% isn’t even easy to know, as to the system’s eyes, they are entirely valid clients). It’s clear that they will be poorly segmented in that percentage and therefore contacted with incorrect information or promotions, transmitting wrong messages and incentives either in excess or in deficit.

This creates great uncertainty in the departments handling this information about what data and actions they execute based on supposedly correct data. Unreliable information implies that everything built upon it is done with shaky foundations.

Consequences of Incorrect Client Communication

This way of managing client identities with existing CRM or CDP tools doesn’t offer an effective solution to the challenge of managing unique clients and causes non-personalized communication with each client, affecting the brand image:

• The user perceives that the brand doesn’t effectively know them, and can even create several registrations in the business, having various accounts and benefits on each.
• The client receives communications or benefits that don’t match their purchasing behavior, skewed by partial information.
• It allows certain users to take advantage of a “non-proper” use of services and benefits of the brand. For example: enjoying welcome or birthday promotions more than once.

Why don’t most solutions have a unified and reliable client management?

Because they are generic CRM/CDP solutions, not specifically designed for retail, but to cover generalist scenarios (B2B, healthcare, industry, etc.). It’s clear that this sector has unique characteristics requiring a different approach. What works in other types of businesses doesn’t work well in a retail scenario, much less in an omnichannel scenario with multiple sales channels.

As we mentioned in a previous article, in a retail business scenario, an effective client management solution should have, in this order, the following features:

• • Provide an automatic validation mechanism of client identity across various channels and interaction points: stores, Ecommerce, forms,… abstracting the different registration IDs users use on each platform.
  • Ingest client information from multiple channels, without uniting information silos, without the need for data cleansing, uniting, and cleansing processes.
  • Handle real-time information that allows agile operation and action automation.

Only then, with client information on a unique omnichannel ID, built automatically, 100% reliable data is guaranteed, no duplication of profiles of the same client, and the user is unique for the brand regardless of their different registration and interaction points.

Additionally, if on the same platform, you have the ability to convert this client data into much more direct and significant actions than sending an email, SMS, or a post on Social Media…, the ability to connect with clients and convert into sales skyrockets.

Conclusions

The most important thing about having these functionalities is that your client will start perceiving a brand that knows them and adds value in every interaction. A brand that treats them personally and offers exclusive proposals and benefits that match their tastes, preferences, and lifestyle.

If you are truly interested in knowing our tool in-depth and improving your client loyalty, contact us, we will be delighted to meet with you as soon as possible since there is no time to lose!