Maintaining professional customer relationships in a highly competitive business environment is critical to improving guest satisfaction and retaining a loyal consumer database.
In other words, customer relationship management is essential for building and sustaining a successful business. But, at the same time, companies that invest in tools and software to collect and analyse consumer data get more than professional customer relationships: they get returning clients (loyalty) and referrals (new clients). These outcomes lead to increase sales and ROI, among other positive results.
Before we dig deeper, let's note that customer service and customer relations are different. For example, while improving your services secures client retention, customer relations deals with customer experience, feedback, sentiment towards your brand, satisfaction, expectations, and how you respond to these issues.
Do collecting and analysing consumer data play a role in maintaining a trustworthy customer relationship? The short answer is yes. Today's advanced AI technologies will help you understand how customers feel about your business and their expectations before entering your doors. Then, once you have the data, you can fine-tune and improve your services to maintain a positive relationship with your current and future clients.
Customer data management (CDM) defines the mechanism that collects customer information from various sources. It then manages and analyses the data to give managers an overview of how a person may interact with a business across the entire customer journey.
Businesses typically need a CDM cloud solution or software to collect, manage, and analyse consumer data. An example of such a solution would be Google Analytics 4, which gives you a complete understanding of the customer journey across multiple devices and where they come from (as in all traffic sources, paid, organic, social, email, and others).
But GA4 is not a CDM solution. It has CDM features, but for more actionable insights with a depth of detail, you will need CDM software, sometimes referred to as CDP (Customer Data Platform). And bear in mind that collecting customer data may raise privacy concerns that can land you in hot water if your methodology is not CCPA or GDPR-compliant.
Companies that don't have compliant CDM or CDP solutions may face high costs over time. For example, organizations must promptly handle subject rights requests (SRRs) - which empower individuals to make requests regarding their private data - to avoid non-compliance fines.
When done manually, SRRs may cost roughly $1,400 USD per workflow, according to Gartner. To put things in perspective, a company would have to invest 140K for 100 requests. So, saving costs is one of CDP's main benefits.
"The speed and consistency by which AI-powered tools can help address large volumes of SRRs not only saves an organization excessive spend, but also repairs customer trust," said Bart Willemsen, research vice president at Gartner.
Besides saving costs, CDPs have other advantages:
- Automation: AI-powered CDPs eliminate manual data entry, unburdening staff by saving hours of integration work.
- Single Customer Insights: CDPs unify all data sources (devices, websites, and apps), offering a centralized, comprehensive view of the customer data and journey.
- Data Silos: CDPs eliminate disjointed customer data, making data silos accessible to all departments.
- Marketing Impact: CDPs provide reliable data to help marketers with cross-channel marketing strategies.
- Customer Relationships: By providing a better understanding of the customers, CDPs empower marketers to build customer-centric marketing strategies that lead to better customer satisfaction and maintain professional customer relationships.
An example of an AI-powered CDP solution that checks all the boxes is Verity Guest, which collects consumer data from Verity signals, hotel property management systems, point of sales (POS), surveys, social networks, emails, concierge, and more. For example, Verity Guest supports technologies like WebHotelier, RateParity, GA4, MailChimp, moosend, Triparound, etc.
In addition, Verity Guest has pre-built integrations that consolidate siloed customer and prospect customer data in one place, making it accessible to other software hoteliers use to improve the guest experience.
The Single Customer View feature in Verity Guest gives hoteliers access to details about every customer individually. It is a comprehensive view that will show extensive data:
- Events: check-in and check-out, new booking, user log in and log out, email opened;
- Profile: all the essential details, including contact information like email and phone number;
- Loyalty: frequent travellers who book often and earn special privileges and discounts;
- Identities: customer's public profiles across social media channels and review sites;
- Privacy: customer's privacy preferences.
Verity Guest has a Data Clean-up and Standardization feature that ensures the quality of the data for consistency in recognizing a customer based on algorithms for standardization, normalization, matching, and deduplication. This will ensure that the marketing, IT, and analytics teams are on the same page.
Verity Guest is GDPR, CCPA, and ISO compliant, enabling self-service data access and integration across marketing and operational applications. This will ensure that the customer will receive no unwanted communication since the system synchronizes individual data usage and data consent preferences.
To summarize, by gathering data across the consumer journey, CDPs enable marketers to create a more customer-centric experience by delivering privacy-compliant marketing messages that impact customer relationships and overall customer satisfaction.