Discovering Data Nuances, Part 5: The Customer Experience Team
There’s not a single team leader, CEO or even seasonal intern within an online retail organization that won’t be improved by better data. But data can be overwhelming (hello, omnichannel, location-based, social with no persistent identifiers!), and getting a handle on it tends to be deprioritized when things look “good enough” or if the charts are going up and to the right. In this blog series, guest author Adam Paulisick will explore how clean and unified data can benefit different functional teams and roles, leading to more effective decision making that results in growth today. As more articles are added to the series, they will be linked here:
Discovering Data Nuances, Part 1: The CEO or Founder
Discovering Data Nuances, Part 2: The Marketing Team
Discovering Data Nuances, Part 3: The Data Team
Discovering Data Nuances, Part 4: The Finance Team
With clean data, finally create the flawless customer experience your customers demand
“I want an Oompa-Loompa, nooow!”
While Veruca Salt is a character we all love to hate, her famous line in Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory is actually pretty…relatable. As consumers, we know what we want and we wanted it yesterday. Taking it a step further, we expect brands’ to anticipate our wants and needs, and to fulfill them before we ask. Creating a customer experience that meets these demands is more work than being Veruca Salt’s dad.
But ownership of creating this experience doesn’t come down to one team leader or department. It belongs to customer service, marketing, advertising, merchandising, product design, hiring decisions, logistics, in-store aesthetics, and just about every part of your business operation. It also extends to third-party reviews and opinions, press and media coverage and even pop culture. Pretty much, there are a lot of places it can go wrong. Especially if different teams are not on the same page.
While Veruca Salt is eventually labeled a “Bad” egg when she demands “the whole world,” that’s not a luxury DTC brands have. All fun aside…meeting customer demands and provoking the right emotions to drive a sale, create a customer and earn loyalty is a herculean task.
An accurate customer journey is a necessity, not a luxury, when it comes to personalization
Undoubtedly, the first step to being able to create any sort of personalized experience is knowing whether a shopper has purchased your brand before (or not). Taking it further, knowing whether it’s their first purchase or their fifth purchase is important. Knowing what products they buy, at what cadence, from what channel add more pieces to the puzzle.
Altogether, this information makes up a Customer History. And while you may be thinking “yes, everyone knows this, get on with it,” this basic step is where things often go wrong. As it turns out, creating an accurate customer history is not basic at all.
Take the example of a real Amour Vert customer, who we’ll call Jessica. Jessica made a $200 online purchase from the brands’ e-commerce site. She then decided to return all of the items to the store, but while she was there she made a separate purchase for $50. The marketing platform only saw the online purchase, valuing her at $200. The e-commerce platform saw the in-store return, but not the in-store purchase, valuing her at $0. The retail platform saw the return and the in-store purchase, but not the original e-commerce purchase, valuing her at -$150.
In truth, Jessica’s actual net value was $50. The only way to see her actual customer history was by combining all of her transactions and accounts into an ORITA IRL ID. Apply this to 500,000 customers, and you can start to see the scale of the problem.
In a recent report, Klaviyo wrote “Even when marketing teams have enough data in terms of quantity, it often fails to prove actionable because of its quality: it isn’t clean.” In fact, 71% of the executives surveyed said their data wasn’t usable for this reason.
The issues that arise from this situation cannot be overstated. It’s impossible to create loyalty cohorts, or even to understand the actual steps customers go through before making a purchase. This leads to ineffective or overspending on marketing, missed loyalty opportunities and poor product merchandising. It also leads to strategy shifts in the wrong direction and lost growth opportunities.
As customer experience capabilities move from art to science, a basic customer purchase history is critical to gaining a deeper understanding of habits and purchase triggers. Analysis of a full and accurate customer history can show which products are most attractive to first time buyers, how long it takes a customer to get from $100-$200 and many of the other insights that are essential for creating a customer journey map. This important tool is not a luxury when it comes to creating a winning customer experience.
A beautiful website is not enough
We’ve no doubt you have a fantastic product and a website that showcases it beautifully. You’ve created something that consumers want right now. You rely on high quality photos and messaging that evokes emotions. Now you just need to update it with new products, occasionally change the featured products and keep things fresh. Right? Not quite.
In mere seconds, your website visitors have already decided they know everything they need to know about your brand and they’re either a) moving forward toward a purchase or b) moving on. It’s a high stakes game, with no room for guesswork.
Simple Sugars creates all-natural skincare products, made famous on Shark Tank. They grew into a high volume brand overnight, and wanted to understand if their buyers were simply Mark Cuban fans there for the novelty or if they had the chance to become brand loyalists. The thing was, without clean and accurate data, they couldn’t answer any of the following questions with confidence: How is retention changing? Were customers getting to spending milestones faster or slower? Were they unlocking that champion level loyalty segment at a national scale?
All of these questions were critical to understanding growth potential, and to creating a website that would engage high-value customers. See, they needed to find product leaders that would appeal to potential repeat customers and not just one-time buyers. They needed to know what path to take customers down after their first purchase, so they had to understand who was actually a first-time buyer and who was a repeat buyer. Once their data had been cleaned, they learned that almost 60% of sales were coming from first-time buyers. They were doing a great job winning conversions and now they needed to work on creating champions.
When it comes to first-impressions, it’s imperative to communicate a message that will immediately win the attention of high value customers. Clean and unified customer data can tell you what that message is so you don’t have to roll the dice or rely on a hunch.
Customer service can make it or break it
Sixty-one percent of customers will defect to a competitor after one bad customer service experience, according to a recent survey of more than 3,500 consumers by Zendesk. That’s a 22% jump from the same survey in 2020. After a second bad customer service experience, 76% of customers are out the door.
At the same time, 60% of revenue for DTC brands comes from repeat purchases by just 26% of customers. So losing a customer due to bad service is a really big deal. But it’s not inevitable. Since this application of clean data is in its early stages, we don’t have a case study to share. But we have spoken to DTC brands who are arming their customer service team with easy access to the full and accurate customer history mentioned earlier in the article. With this information, it’s possible to: prioritize high value customers in chat or phone queues, approach every customer service interaction with full knowledge of customer history (removing the annoyance factor of having to repeat oneself), and treat shoppers as if they are valuable because they are known. To help get the rest of your team on board, we’ve created this handy cheat sheet here.
Giving every department across the DTC organization a single source of truth on which to base decisions will propel the customer experience (and business performance) beyond the competition. With this competitive advantage, your brand can deliver a stand-out experience, win higher value customers and keep them around. Even when they demand the whole world.
Adam Paulisick is an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University and an Advisor to Orita. Adam was previously the Chief Product Officer at the Boston Consulting Group and a Senior Vice President at The Nielsen Company specializing in advertising attribution, identity resolution, and clean room data matching.
