Customer data

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Customer data or consumer data refers to all personal, behavioural, and demographic data that is collected by marketing companies and departments from their customer base. [1] To some extent, data collection from customers intrudes into customer privacy, the exact limits to the type and amount of data collected need to be regulated. [2] [3] The data collected is processed in customer analytics. The data collection is thus aimed at insights into customer behaviour (buying decisions, etc.) and, eventually, profit maximization by consolidation and expansion of the customer base. [4]

Contents

In the internet age, a prominent method for collecting customer data is through explicit online surveys, [5] but also through concealed methods like measurement of click-through and abandonment rates.[ citation needed ]

Customer data is gathered for customer research, especially customer satisfaction research and purportedly serves to increase overall customer satisfaction. [6]

Levels of information

A possible classification of business customer information was proposed by Minna J. Rollins, who distinguished the levels a) market b) organizational c) business unit, and d) individual. [7] For private consumers, different levels are a) personal identifying data b) psychographics data, c) transactional (buying) data, d) demographic, and e) financial data. [6] While the individual data level for business customers has some overlap with the data gathered from individual consumers, the other business-related levels roughly correspond to the demographic part of individual customers. [8]

See also

Related Research Articles

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information.

Consumer privacy is information privacy as it relates to the consumers of products and services.

Marketing research is the systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data about issues relating to marketing products and services. The goal is to identify and assess how changing elements of the marketing mix impacts customer behavior.

In marketing, market segmentation is the process of dividing a broad consumer or business market, normally consisting of existing and potential customers, into sub-groups of consumers based on shared characteristics.

Market research is an organized effort to gather information about target markets and customers: know about them, starting with who they are. It is an important component of business strategy and a major factor in maintaining competitiveness. Market research helps to identify and analyze the needs of the market, the market size and the competition. Its techniques encompass both qualitative techniques such as focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnography, as well as quantitative techniques such as customer surveys, and analysis of secondary data.

Personalized marketing, also known as one-to-one marketing or individual marketing, is a marketing strategy by which companies leverage data analysis and digital technology to deliver individualized messages and product offerings to current or prospective customers. Advancements in data collection methods, analytics, digital electronics, and digital economics, have enabled marketers to deploy more effective real-time and prolonged customer experience personalization tactics.

Qualitative marketing research involves a natural or observational examination of the philosophies that govern consumer behavior. The direction and framework of the research is often revised as new information is gained, allowing the researcher to evaluate issues and subjects in an in-depth manner. The quality of the research produced is heavily dependent on the skills of the researcher and is influenced by researcher bias.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Consumer behaviour</span> Study of individuals, groups, or organisations and all the activities associated with consuming

Consumer behaviour is the study of individuals, groups, or organisations and all the activities associated with the purchase, use and disposal of goods and services. Consumer behaviour consists of how the consumer's emotions, attitudes, and preferences affect buying behaviour. Consumer behaviour emerged in the 1940–1950s as a distinct sub-discipline of marketing, but has become an interdisciplinary social science that blends elements from psychology, sociology, social anthropology, anthropology, ethnography, ethnology, marketing, and economics.

Nielsen Holdings plc is an American information, data and market measurement firm. Nielsen operates in over 100 countries and employs approximately 44,000 people worldwide.

Audience measurement calculates how many people are in an audience, usually in relation to radio listenership and television viewership, but also in relation to newspaper and magazine readership and, increasingly, web traffic. The term is sometimes used with regard to practices that help broadcasters and advertisers determine who is listening, rather than how many people are listening. In some parts of the world, the resulting numbers are referred to as audience share; in other places, the broader term market share is used. This broader meaning is also known as audience research. Measurements are broken down by media market, which corresponds to large and small metropolitan areas.

Customer satisfaction is a term frequently used in marketing to evaluate customer experience. It is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. Customer satisfaction is defined as "the number of customers, or percentage of total customers, whose reported experience with a firm, its products, or its services (ratings) exceeds specified satisfaction goals." Enhancing customer satisfaction and fostering customer loyalty are pivotal for businesses, given the significant importance of improving the balance between customer attitudes before and after the consumption process.

Customer engagement is an interaction between an external consumer/customer and an organization through various online or offline channels. According to Hollebeek, Srivastava and Chen S-D logic-Definition of customer engagement is "a customer’s motivationally driven, volitional investment of operant resources, and operand resources into brand interactions," which applies to online and offline engagement.

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A target market, also known as serviceable obtainable market (SOM), is a group of customers within a business's serviceable available market at which a business aims its marketing efforts and resources. A target market is a subset of the total market for a product or service.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Targeted advertising</span> Form of advertising

Targeted advertising is a form of advertising, including online advertising, that is directed towards an audience with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting.

Social network advertising, also known as social media targeting, is a group of terms used to describe forms of online advertising and digital marketing focusing on social networking services. A significant aspect of this type of advertising is that advertisers can take advantage of users' demographic information, psychographics, and other data points to target their ads.

The social data revolution is the shift in human communication patterns towards increased personal information sharing and its related implications, made possible by the rise of social networks in the early 2000s. This phenomenon has resulted in the accumulation of unprecedented amounts of public data.

Carrier IQ was a privately owned mobile software company founded in 2005 in Sunnyvale, California. It provided diagnostic analysis of smartphones to the wireless industry via the installation of software on the user's phone, typically in a manner that cannot be removed without rooting the phone. The company says that its software is deployed in over 150 million devices worldwide.

Oracle Advertising, formerly Datalogix, is a cloud-based consumer data collection, activation, and measurement platform for use by digital advertisers. Datalogix was a consumer data collection company based in Westminster, Colorado that provided offline consumer spending data to marketers. In December 2014, Oracle signed an agreement to acquire Datalogix. After the acquisition, Datalogix's name changed to Oracle Data Cloud, which later became Oracle Advertising. Oracle Advertising is part of the Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (CX) application suite.

Data-driven marketing is a process used by marketers to gain insights and identify trends about consumers and how they behave — what they buy, the effectiveness of ads, and how they browse. Modern solutions rely on big data strategies and collect information about consumer interactions and engagements to generate predictions about future behaviors. This kind of analysis involves understanding the data that is already present, the data that can be acquired, and how to organize, analyze, and apply that data to better marketing efforts. The intended goal is generally to enhance and personalize the customer experience. The market research allows for a comprehensive study of preferences.

References

  1. Kroll, Lee; Feldman, H. Leigh; Schienberg, Alan (May 23, 2019). "It's time to embrace customer data privacy and security". IBM RegTech Innovations Blog. Archived from the original on Jul 8, 2019. Retrieved January 24, 2020.
  2. Gupta, Sachin; Schneider, Matthew (June 1, 2018). "Protecting Customers' Privacy Requires More than Anonymizing Their Data". Harvard Business Review. Retrieved January 24, 2020.
  3. Brown, Brad; Kanagasabai, Kumar; Pant, Prashant; Pinto, Gonçalo Serpa (2017-03-15). "Capturing value from your customer data". McKinsey & Company. Retrieved 2018-08-15. In an increasingly customer-centric world, the ability to capture and use customer insights to shape products, solutions, and the buying experience as a whole is critically important. Research tells us that organizations that leverage customer behavioral insights outperform peers by 85 percent in sales growth and more than 25 percent in gross margin.1 Customer data must be seen as strategic. ... Information on what customers purchase, how many times they contact customer service, and how long they linger on a given website can create an insightful narrative about buying habits and preferences.
  4. Dean, Kevin (2022-09-28). "An Open Letter to Marketers and Data Scientists". AnalyticsIQ. Retrieved 2023-10-02.
  5. 1 2 Shandrow, Kim Lachance (February 8, 2015). "10 Questions to Ask When Collecting Customer Data". Entrepreneur. Retrieved January 24, 2020.
  6. Rollins, Minna J. (Oct 2014). "Types of customer information collected about business customers". Customer information usage and its effect on seller company's customer performance in business-to-business markets – an empirical study (Report). Archived from the original on 12 Mar 2024 via ResearchGate.
  7. Chui, Michael; Hazan, Eric; Roberts, Roger; Singla, Alex; Smaje, Kate; Sukharevsky, Alex; Yee, Lareina; Zemmel, Rodney (June 14, 2023). "Economic potential of generative AI". McKinsey. Retrieved 2023-10-02.