Looking for ideas on how to show your gratitude for your customers? It’s the time of year when we gather around the kitchen island with family and friends, hold hands, and collectively take turns sharing what we’re thankful for. While you likely won’t be doing the same with your customers, the opportunity remains to share how much they mean to your organization. If you feel like holding someone’s hand while you do it, that’s certainly your prerogative!
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) provides a wide variety and depth of tools that enable the expression of gratitude for your customers – from better customer profiles, to richer analytics, to stellar activation of meaningful personalization. Customers live at the center of the CDP, and thus, for organizations that use a CDP, customers can live at the heart of the organization as a whole. Where they belong. Your customers are the lifeblood of your work and deserve proper thanks.
This holiday season, here are seven ways to use your CDP to show gratitude for your customers:
1. Start with getting better clarity on your customer relationships.
The use of a CDP to unify customer profiles is possibly one of its most well-known functions. But the gravy doesn’t stop pouring there. Unified customer profiles allow your organization to understand the true nature of your customer relationships. On a grand, mass scale, but also on a personal, one-to-one level, as well. Customer 360s help identify your top customers and how they’re specifically engaging with your products or services. The C360 also helps you pull out trends amongst top customers, as well as your bottom customers. No more guesswork on why people are engaging with your brand (we often don’t guess correctly, clouded by our own rose-colored glasses). Real clarity, based on data and truth, creates a real opportunity to deepen these customer relationships. It’s not an overt show of gratitude, but it’s the core of how you activate meaningful engagement and customer experiences.
2. Use your new clarity to show you care about your customers by mapping out improved customer journeys.
When you know what your top customers want and what your bottom customers don’t, you can build out more powerful and effective customer journeys. The benefits for your organization are evident – more engagement leads to more revenue and longer customer lifetime value. But these improved customer journeys are also good for your customers. Being served a relevant experience feels good, like being seen, heard, and understood. Your customers will appreciate the effort.
3. Make your top customers feel special through rewards and recognition.
Your CDP helps you uncover who your top customers are across all channels. Take this information and then use your CDP to express your thanks through personalized recognition and rewards. Send them a free gift card, write them a personal letter, unlock a special “elite customer” offer, or create a highly targeted gratitude campaign on their favorite platforms with exclusive products or services reserved for the best of the best.
4. Use the insights and analytics in your CDP to innovate new products or services.
This is certainly the gratitude long game, but your CDP will uncover how your customers are using (or not using) your products. Put this information into development for new products or advancements of your current products. Your customers will appreciate the evolution of your brand in the direction of their engagement and use. Bonus: your bottom line will appreciate it too!
5. Suppress customers from marketing they shouldn’t receive.
We all know the feeling of getting served an ad for a discount on something we just purchased at full price. Or being offered something we don’t want. Getting email campaigns that have no relation to our personal interests. Personalization is a two-way street. And your CDP fuels both directions. Your customers won’t know it, like the way your friends don’t know you’ve omitted onion powder from your favorite pie recipe, but you’ll have saved them from an unsavory experience being served.
6. Integrate your customer data with your customer service team to provide better support.
The holidays can be an especially stressful time, and your customers are more likely to need your support than any other time of the year. This is true not just for retail, but all sectors, including travel, health, finances, insurance, entertainment – you name it, it’s hitting max capacity this time of year. Use your CDP to break through interdepartmental silos and give your customer service department the full picture, the whole truth. Did someone just try to make a purchase online and experience disruption? Did someone find an unexpected balance in their bank account? Did your customer just have a challenging travel experience? Knowing the issue before the customer has to explain themselves will speed up the service experience and leave all parties happier. It’s in these challenging moments that your customers need to most feel seen, heard, and understood. Your support team will be better off, as well, and you want them at the top of their game during the busy holiday season.
7. Finally, just say thank you.
You don’t need a CDP for this. You simply need to say thank you, to all of your customers. Post on social media, send out a card, have your reps and account managers call their customers, and encourage kindness and thanks in all departments and across all channels. The world has enough trouble of its own. Let’s take some time to simply say thank you.
To our customers, thank you. To our non-customers, thank you, too. We firmly believe that customer data is how we collectively build more trust and better experiences across the board, in all industries, for all people everywhere. Customer data is not a thing, but who we are, the way we communicate in our new, advanced technological world. We are grateful to be here, to help connect your data so you can connect with your customers.
