opinion
Malcolm Clifford responds to Mycustomer.com article 'Is it time for a volunteered personal information strategy' which can be viewed in full online at http://www.mycustomer.com/topic/customer-intelligence/it-time-volunteered-personal-information-strategy.
VPI has always been available via direct customer interactions but is not often gathered and maintained in a way which improves business performance. We have previously found, on the web or via telephone conversations that 75% of customers are happy to reveal details which are very strong indicators of interest in products and services; yet many organisations simply don't ask. In our experience the most useful information on any given customer is contingent upon certain key facts gathered or known about that individual, so the goal isn't complete sight of all data volunteered by a customer, but the ability to identify the key pieces of data which define the customer's demand for your products.
The best route to identifying and collecting these is by using intuition backed up by test-and-learn to target those pieces of information which are most directly relevant or predictive of demand for your products. It is certainly true that digital data expands the horizons of what information is available but as well as all the extra needles, the haystack has grown much larger too. This means data disciplines are more important than ever to understand which data make a difference, and how to interpret and use them to change the customer experience and improve sales performance. This is particularly pertinent since customers have more control over how they present VPI, so the data are often unstructured and in a much more difficult format to use than when an organisation designs the data processes for its own use.
Our approach, which has been built into our Digital Brain tool, is to support the use of VPI across media and channels via a series of components, so an organisation can introduce separate pieces of the puzzle as they become available. For example Digital Brain Search allows an organisation to understand and value all of the search engine interactions which are relevant in the context of the customer's journey to purchase. Similarly, other components of the Digital Brain are targeted at making much greater use of data captured from customers' website sessions in the context of overall customer behaviour, not just to supply basic web analytics. Taking this kind of piecemeal approach to VPI can help build the case to gather or source more data whilst delivering improvements in the short term.
A VPI strategy is a natural consequence of building success by scaling the gentler lower slopes first, rather than facing the sheer rock face of trying to implement a complete VPI policy from scratch.
Click here to view the full article and response as they appeared online
