In today’s world, customer’s data is getting generated from multiple sources. Companies are looking for making sense of this data for micro-marketing (for a target group), enhancing seamless customer experience, and reducing attrition of customers or increasing customer retention.
With this current explosion of data, it becomes important to understand what can be achieved by using this data to gain insights & how to dig deeper to provide a personalized experience. Data mining can help you achieve all this.
In simpler terms, data mining is an analytical process used to extract important knowledge from a large mass of data. Some ways via which data mining can help in this field is:
1.Generating a 360 degree profile of customers:
Customer data is generated from multiple sources. Enterprises are unclear as to how to integrate & synthesize data from social networks, mobile applications, in-store POS etc. Understanding this data & integrating it with a Customer Management Platform is the key to generate a 360 degree profile of the customers. Mapping these profiles & behaviors (for e.g. a vegetarian) to specific product recommendations (e.g. food ordering app only shows vegetarian restaurants in recommended places) will eventually lead to stronger brand building and high loyalty amongst customers.
2.Understanding the Sales Life-cycle of customer
The buying patterns & behaviors of different customers are different and hence when you have created a 360 degree profile of customers, it becomes important that you map them to where they fall in the sales life-cycle. For e.g. if you are an IT service provider and you have got a lead on a customer. Now, if the customer is looking for a solution next year, then your approach towards him will be different from a customer who is looking to buy your services in the next few months. Hence, knowing the current position of your customers in the sales life-cycle becomes important.
3.Decoding the path of Least Resistance
Many a times you get a new visitor to your store (whether in brick & mortar or online) & many a times a customer does not know what she is looking for. Data mining can help us understand that. So, if we can deliver it to her with minimum clicks (efforts), then we have won that customer. Hence, Data mining can help us to determine that optimum & convenient position (whether in brick & mortar or online) to place a product which increases the probability of making a sale
4.Determining cross-selling opportunities
This is the classic case of what we call association in data mining. To understand this in a real scenario, let me give an example. Father’s Day 2017 in India shall be celebrated on June 18; to gift my dad, I go to Amazon.in, and there I find that though I am looking for Aviator sunglasses, it tells me under “Frequently bought together”, that a medium case cover pouch is also available. There is a complete TechTarget article on association, you can read it here
The opportunities provided by data mining is immense. From figuring out new opportunities & new markets (remember Ansoff matrix), to increasing customer retention, building genuine loyalty and enhancing the overall customer experience, data mining can help businesses drive growth in innovative & myriad ways.
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