Over the past month I've been reading a great book - The Numerati, by Stephen Baker. Baker is a Newsweek columnist who researched the world of mathematical and statistical practitioners who collect massive amounts of data about you and I in order to predict, among other things, our future behavior. He explores a multitude of uses of the data - security, workforce productivity and maximization, and of course, marketing and advertising.
Among marketers this customer data collection isn't anything new. It's actually hard to find a brand that doesn't have some type of loyalty or rewards program for their customers. I'm not averse to these programs - actually many of them sport rewards that are truly valuable for consumers. The best examples of these appreciate the value to their of recognizing and rewarding their consumers. The worst in the bunch merely use the data to subject consumers to relentless advertising. Thank heavens for the opt-out relief valve.
Imagine how valuable this data could be if deployed not only to support the marketing engine of a business but to also improve the consumer experience. The information is out there, it's just that many organizations have failed to perform the necessary integration to make it useful.
Mega Bookseller Example
I was recently doing some holiday shopping at one of the big box national booksellers. My daughter had a number of gift cards she wanted to redeem, and I had a number of books I was interested in reading over the cold winter break. Coincidentally, I had received a book as a gift from an out-of-town friend that was a duplicate of one I had already read. I thought it would be a simple process to exchange it - I had done this before, so I thought it would be easy.
It seems that "easy" isn't in the store operations manual for this company. At the check-out I was informed that without a paper receipt they wouldn't take the book back, even for exchange. It took three of their associates to tell me about their "policy". I asked if they could look up the purchase in their system (both my friend who purchased the book and I are members of the store's loyalty program), or of they could look up my account (I'm not one who normally does returns). Nope, sorry.
Imagine how this could have been a wholly different experience with
Comments