![\"Ammonite_lamp_post_at_dusk,_Lyme_Regis\"](\"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Ammonite_lamp_post_at_dusk_Lyme_Regis-300x214.jpg\")
Not many years ago, a British utility launched a December promotion designed to recognize its very best customers by mailing each of them a holiday greeting card.<\/p>\nNot many years ago, a British utility launched a December promotion designed to recognize its very best customers by mailing each of them a holiday greeting card.<\/p>\n
To the amazement of the company\u2019s marketing managers, however, in January nearly a quarter of the cards were returned to the company unopened. The reason? Many of the \u201cmost valuable customers\u201d on this utility company\u2019s holiday list were actually lamp posts. And lamp posts, of course, don\u2019t read holiday cards.<\/p>\n
The utility company made a classic mistake by equating electric meters with customers, a mistake many\u00a0other companies are still making,\u00a0even today. My wife and I bought two different cars at different times from a local car dealer, for instance, but despite the fact that\u00a0each of us\u00a0dealt with the same\u00a0salesperson,\u00a0the company’s CRM system still sends us\u00a0entirely separate mailings \u2013 complete with overlapping offers and repetitive messaging.<\/p>\n
Identifying customers is the critical\u00a0very first step<\/a>\u00a0in setting up and managing a customer relationship, and it is absolutely essential if you plan to make any progress in improving your overall customer experience. But if you manage your business solely in terms of your own outputs, as\u00a0this\u00a0utility and car dealer did, you\u2019re likely going to miss that step.<\/p>\n For some businesses, of course, identifying customers is more difficult than for others. But\u00a0all<\/em>\u00a0businesses need to undertake some basic activities in\u00a0order to \u201cknow\u201d each\u00a0of their customers individually.<\/p>\n Specifically,\u00a0six\u00a0different activities are required, with respect to\u00a0individual customer identities, if you want\u00a0to implement any type of robust customer experience initiative:<\/p>\n Not many years ago, a British utility launched a December promotion designed to recognize its very best customers by mailing each of them a holiday greeting card. To the amazement of the company\u2019s marketing managers, however, in January nearly a quarter of the cards were returned to the company unopened. The reason? Many of the… It’s 2016. Do You Know Who Your Customers Are?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":2235,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[840,1033],"class_list":["post-2234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-strategy","tag-customer-experience","tag-integrated-marketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2234"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2236,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2234\/revisions\/2236"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n<\/strong>Decide what information will comprise a customer\u2019s actual identity: Is it name and address? Home phone number? Account number? Will you include householding information? In B2B, will customer identities be defined in terms of\u00a0users, specifiers, approvers, influencers, or all of the above? At its heart this is an intellectual exercise. You can’t embark on any kind of customer experience initiative if you don’t have a solid agreement on how you’re going to define what a\u00a0“customer” is.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n
\n<\/strong>If you don\u2019t naturally come into possession of individual customer identities, then you could collect them by using frequent buyer programs, credit card data, online interactions, or other, more exotic things such as radio frequency identification (RFID) microchips (like ExxonMobil\u2019s Speedpass). In B2B, LinkedIn itself is an especially powerful tool for aiding your effort to\u00a0identify\u00a0your “customers within the customer.”<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n
\n<\/strong>Once a customer\u2019s identity is defined and collected, it must be linked to all transactions and interactions with that customer, at all points of contact, and within all your different operating units and divisions. Think \u201comnichannel.\u201d If a customer shops online but then calls your contact center to order, you need to be able to link the customer\u2019s phone call directly to her online interactions, and there are\u00a0several ways to do that<\/a>. Linking up the transactions and interactions of an individual customer\u00a0implies that you are\u00a0integrating\u00a0each customer\u2019s identity into the information systems running\u00a0your business, as well. Frequent-flier identities must\u00a0be integrated into the flight reservations data system, for instance, and household banking identities need to be integrated into the small business records maintained by the bank.\u00a0Customer<\/em>\u00a0integration\u00a0is at the heart of\u00a0the true definition of “integrated marketing communications.”<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n
\n<\/strong>Customer identities need to be stored and continuously updated, improved, revised, and verified. And the identities\u00a0themselves are\u00a0key inputs when it comes to analyzing individual customer differences, including\u00a0the value each customer represents to your business<\/a>, as well as\u00a0each customer\u2019s individual needs or preferences<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n
\n<\/strong>A wide variety of people and functions within your firm need access to customer identifying data, especially in a service organization, or a company that delivers service as a part of its overall customer offering. Front-line access to customer identities and the information linked to each identity is vital.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n
\nIndividual customer identities are both competitively sensitive and potentially ruinous to individual customer privacy, so it\u2019s absolutely critical to secure this information. So take all appropriate steps to ensure that your customer identities are protected from unauthorized use (internal threat) and from hacking attacks (external threat).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"