In the first article of this series called ‘The Seven Deadly Sins of Customer Motivation’ I review several major pitfalls that often plague companies with their data management capabilities. This typically results in hindering the ability to understand and ultimately motivate their customers, which can deteriorate loyalty and hurt the bottom line. This piece looks in-depth at the sin of fragmentation.
Perhaps the ‘holy grail’ for most brands is achieving the marketing buzzword ‘evangelism.’ Evangelism, in the business sense, is evolving the casual customer into a loyal fanatic of a product or brand so they preach its benefits and entice others to try it. The conversion of an evangelist is largely accomplished by delivering exceptional experiences and fantastic engagements which increasingly elevates customer loyalty. However, very few brands achieve this level of customer motivation consistently. This is largely because many brands commit some level of one of the following Seven Deadly Sins of Customer Motivation.
1. Intimidation – Allowing the sheer complexity of data to hinder the organization
2. Ignorance – The lack of visibility of all the internal and external datasets
3. Fragmentation – A failure to bring these dispersed datasets together
4. Assumption – Ignoring the precise insight of the data in lieu of assumptions
5. Improvisation – Developing ‘wing it’ strategies that boil down to ‘one-size-fits-all’
6. Impersonalisation – The failure to deliver tailored experiences and engagements
7. Procrastination – Delaying these steps to fully understand and motivate the customer
These ‘sins’ are further exacerbated by the ‘Age of COVID.’ This has increased the complexity of customer decisions, behaviours, engagements and preferences. Therefore, avoiding these ‘sins’ is more critical to gaining holistic customer understanding to engage and motivate them, while focusing on evolving their loyalty into evangelism. With a sound plan, strong partner and proven platform, businesses can incorporate intelligence solutions that help them connect with customers and increase revenue.
Let’s take a closer look at the sin of fragmentation and how it hinders championing customers.
The sin of fragmentation
Fragmentation is a splintering of intelligence across a business which can potentially cripple a brand. With the Market Pulse survey revealing that the average business has 400+ different data sources within its technical infrastructure, not bringing these dispersed datasets together, even if the business has fully inventoried them, can result in a brand flying blind. Not integrating these datasets into a single-source view of products, markets, customers and even competitors is a major sin for many businesses. It isn’t enough to just identify these sources. Rather, pulling them together with advanced intelligence technology, is critical to gaining insight that’ll guide decisions, drive strategy, deliver experiences and direct innovation.
The need to ultimately synthesize these systems is essential to avoiding the fragmentation sin. It also facilitates overlaying various datasets to gain unique and powerful views of the customer and market. These dimensions are increasingly valuable towards understanding the ongoing shifts in the market resulting from COVID-19.
Such is the case for brands that are trying to figure out how to reign in their disparate data and transform it into a competitive advantage. Many brands simply allow the volume of dispersed data sources to freeze their ability to reign in the data to extract valuable intelligence. It’s understandable this is often seen as a Herculean undertaking.
Liz Lamb, Senior Director, Data & Insight for Asda adds:
“There are so many data sources that exist across different teams spanning a company that harnessing them all and trying to eliminate the fragmentation is essential. This intelligence capital approach of collecting and circulating the insight across the company helps to guide Asda’s decisions and formulate our strategies to ensure that they are congruent with our customers.”
This sort of holistic approach to unifying a brand’s data capital is becoming an increasingly essential step towards evolving into a customer-centric company. Unfortunately, getting the widespread commitment across multiple teams necessary can prevent businesses from doing so.
“Fragmentation isn’t just an issue when it comes to disparate data sources, it’s also something that plagues the strategic mindset of an operation,” explained Mark Harrington, Strategic Marketing Advisor for mTab. “This is often where departments are not just misaligned in their strategic view, customer understanding or experience execution, but they are fundamentally partitioned off from each other which creates engagement silos resulting in incongruent, broken experiences for the customer which can be both confusing and clumsy.”
Absolving the sin of fragmentation
The key to absolving the sin of fragmentation is first, taking a comprehensive inventory of the disparate data sources across a company’s technical infrastructure. This can range from point-of-sale systems and social channels to online platforms and customer surveys, and more. It’s s also important to take note of the department ownership of each dataset.
Beyond this, integrating these data sources into a single advanced intelligence platform becomes essential to begin overlaying information sets to extract various intelligence perspectives across markets and competitors, but particularly the behaviours, attitudes, experiences and preferences of customers.
As Harrington went on to say, “Eliminating the fragmentation of data facilitates a more holistic, multidimensional view of the customer. This allows for tailored engagements that align with how and when they interact with the brand. It also facilitates personalization in these experiences which is essential in effectively motivating customers. This serves as the backbone to building time-tested loyalty, which can then evolve into evangelism.”
A business that’s failing to reign in their fragmented data sources is doing itself a disservice. It’s akin to having a vein of gold that goes unmined. Therefore, the sooner a brand inventories, organizes and synthesizes these datasets, the sooner it can empower teams and employees in their decision making, strategies and innovation. Beyond all of this, it’ll serve as a catapult in making your entire organisation more customer-centric.
