Multi-channel business enterprise and knowing customer behaviour

May 30, 2012 by MadesWehmann541

Over the last twenty years, the way in which consumers interact with brands has changed beyond recognition. It used to be that a customer would walk into a store, pick something off the shelf, pay for it and leave through the front door. Now, its a totally different story.
Todays customers make much of their big purchase decisions at home before they even enter a store, comparing reviews and finding the best deals on websites and social networks. The rise of the smartphone is making a significant impact, allowing consumers to make comparisons while on the shop floor, perhaps even purchasing a product from one retailer while in the store of another.
And this is just the start. Customers expect to mix and match these channels in a way that suits them – maybe buying an item online and returning in store, or ordering over the web, while using loyalty points that theyve earned through purchasing in a catalogue. Having the ability to transact with a customer in any channel is clearly becoming a critical capability.
The bigger picture is even more interesting. Now that customers are interacting with merchants using multiple channels, retailers and merchants are beginning to wonder what they can learn from this activity. Wouldnt it be a nice idea if we could tie everything we know about our customer behaviour, and then use this information to enhance these relationships, provide better customer service and ultimately increase sales conversion rates?
My personal background is building retail systems – an area where, in the past, such unification has proved extremely difficult to achieve across multiple channels. Today, advances in modern technology are helping to break down the siloes, but there is clearly a lot of work left to be done to provide a seamless and consistent customer experience.
For me, the merchants Holy Grail is to be found in combining detailed insight into individual customer behaviour with personalised offerings, across all channels of interaction.
Understanding customer behaviour across channels is not a trivial exercise. Contrary to what your market researcher may tell you, the best way of understanding a customers behaviour is by tracking what customers actually bought, not what they said they would buy.
One great example is what Tesco and Dunnhumby have done extremely successfully with the Clubcard scheme – which allows Tesco to gather meaningful customer behavioural information by identifying a Clubcard user through their unique number and tracking every transaction they make. This information is then used extremely effectively to shape merchandising and offers to individual customers. Loyalty schemes like this, however, can be extremely complex and costly to set up, which is why few other retailers have implemented comparably sophisticated schemes of their own.
There is another potentially much simpler way of tracking a customer and generating insight into their behaviour, and thats through their payment card number. Having a solution in place that can take card payments across all of the different channels already solves most of the problem. If that same solution provides a unified tokenisation strategy that allows the use of a customers details across channels in a PCI compliant way, then the picture becomes even more compelling.
I strongly believe in the future of multi-channel business, and at Servebase we will continue to invest heavily in developing our capabilities in this area. We can provide a tokenised solution that allows merchants to transact and track consumer spending across channels without compromising security. And with that you can begin to really understand behaviour and enhance the customer relationship. Perhaps the Holy Grail is not that far out of reach after all .

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