Customer data collection improves marketing intelligence that helps conceptualize robust marketing strategies, enhances customer service and paves a way for innovation. It therefore helps businesses to deliver better customer experience and enables them to remain ahead of competition by sustainably gaining competitive advantage.

What is customer data collection?

Technically, customer data collection is the process of gathering quantitative as well qualitative information about customers by leveraging various data collection methods.  From a strategic perspective, data collection helps companies to understand customer sentiments towards their products and services. Acquiring data from across disparate primary and secondary data sources drives better decision making.

Why customer data collection is important to frame effective marketing strategy?

Data dynamics do not remain the same and they play a decisive role in every move made by the marketing team. Data collection forms the foundation of all these activities. Here are some important reasons that prove why accurate data collection is important to develop killer marketing strategies.

1. It improves your customer database

Personal, behavioral, and demographic customer data collected from across disparate data sources at regular intervals helps to strengthen your database. The more data your organization has, the more it helps you gain deeper insight. As database continues to grow in size, you can analyze how, with time, customer dynamics are changing. Client data collection, therefore, improves your customer database not just quantity-wise but also quality-wise.

2. Helps you conceptualize better product and services

As one of the important aspects of collecting customer data is to understand the performance of your product and services. If they are not up to the mark, then it means there’s a scope for improvement. Customer data helps you in understanding where the gaps exist and how you can fill it.

Before starting its operations in India, BBC conducted a survey of people in major Indian cities. The survey helped the public broadcaster to understand television viewing preferences, surfing habits, and investing patterns of Indians. Backed by the data, BBC could come up with India-centric programs, witnessing an increase of around 30% in its viewership from 1998 to 2001.

Additionally, customer data allows marketers to identify products or services that are poor performers, and helps them create processes to reduce the unnecessary effort of building these products or services that have no demand. Equally, customer data streamlines your new product launch efforts by acting as a facilitating agent.

3. Assists you in framing right pricing strategy

Pricing tends to be a challenge as new products get added to the soaring the size of database. Marketers always look out for accurate answers to questions like:

• What should be the price of my product?
• How much should be the cost of services we deliver?
• How should we arrive at the appropriate product and service price?

Customer data at hand allows you to drive pricing analytics which is crucial to overcome the challenges of price optimization. Moreover, pricing analytics helps in identifying the channels that are most profitable, and conceptualize customized promotions.

4. Quality customer data strengthens your campaign strategies

Today, Data-drive marketing campaigns are an integral part of marketing strategies. Right data helps you test the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, and helps you strengthen and shift your campaign strategies to desired forms. This is achieved through predictive analytics based predictions.

World’s one of the largest chemical company from Saudi Arabia wanted to expand its market beyond local boundaries. To increase brand awareness and tap foreign markets, it collected data from target audience – mainly thought leaders from across the globe, so as to conceptualize new and optimize the existing B2B marketing campaigns. Insights from data helped it successfully devise effective ad campaigns for each target market, and enabled it to make informed decision making regarding existing campaigns.

Most importantly, data collection helps you streamline your lead scoring initiatives – allowing you to identify leads that are most likely to become your customers. This is important as it offers you a direction to optimize your marketing campaigns.

5. Accurately data collection to scale personalization

Today, businesses heavily depend on data and its analysis. Right from understanding market to basket combinations, product feature combinations that customers prefer, to understanding factors that affect their decisions; customer data gives scope to leverage any possible analytics.

63% of customers believe that personalization is a standard of service. Data collection allows you to understand what your customers are expecting in terms of personalization. When you have identified customers with similar interests, you can easily devise segmentation strategies, helping you to pitch them more effectively and shorten your sales cycle.

6. Improves communication with and enhances satisfaction of customers

Customer purchase history including buying behavior, reviews, and post-purchase feedback helps you create frameworks that can offer better experiences to customers. Using AI-based chatbots, you can empathize with them and personalize customer experiences; taking your customer service to the next level.

When you incorporate suggestions of your customers in your products and services, you experience higher customer satisfaction levels and a trust that automatically gets built in your brand. Customer data collection therefore allows you to constantly update your services.

Conclusion

Traditionally, questions such as why to collect customer data and how to collect customer data, bothered marketers and companies alike. However, now the focus is on how to leverage the power of automation and artificial intelligence to collect and exploit every single data source to glean actionable insights.

A good customer data collection practice helps you streamline customer journey to your offerings, enhances sales and improves ROI. Moreover, it is coupled with ethical policies that protect and secure data, and ensure that data is used only for legitimate purposes.  Given this, businesses need to take challenges involved in data gathering as opportunities, so as to come-up with better new-age customer data collection strategies.