It's not news to say 'if you don't have a web site, you're missing out', but what if that conversation became 'if you don't know who is on your web site, you're missing out'?
Numbers these days mean great things when they're tangible. Take for example a bottom line sales number for an online travel agent - sales are down, 50% to this time last year (a worrying thought for those in the travel industry). But why was that? Who influenced that?
If you don't know who or why, how can your online business recover?
Take this scenario, which is typical of a customer insight platform - a visitor (known as ID 12345) arrives on the web site, looks around Summer holidays for 2012 and in particular, focuses on Caribbean cruises worth in excess of £3000. They go away and come back later that evening.
During the day, they phoned the call centre to ask about whether the travel insurance included covered over 65's with existing health complications - bad news, history of cancer rules them out. Deflated, the caller ends the call, but makes further enquiries with another insurance company who WILL cover them. A great result!
They go back on to the web site later that evening, and go to buy the holiday - they enter all their details for the cruise, name, age, address, phone number and more. It is during this process the platform discovers that the traveller is Mary Smith, a long time, loyal customer of the brand. However, the web site doesn't accept their booking due to availability no longer being available.
Consider this in a Customer Insight world - you have all their web browsing history (individual, not aggregated insight), you know they looked for Caribbean and Mediterranean cruises, you know they called in to the call centre and spoke to John Doe on x2233 and you know the message they got during their purchase was 'no availability', so what can your business do for this traveller?
You have a phone number, postal address, email address... Why not follow up via any of those marketing channels to re-engage Mary and show her you care about her business. Offer an alternative cruise and at a discounted price for the inconvenience caused (effectively saving Mary the cost of separate travel insurance).
As a result of this typical customer insight story, the travel company has reinstated it's brand with Mary as a company that cares, Mary still gets her holiday and the travel company still makes some money instead of losing money! All from some simple insight.
Tangible results mean everything. To say a bottom line is trending up, down, static or is +/-xx% doesn't mean much when you want to take action on the information you are presented with.
Use aggregated insight reports to tell you how well or how much you could improve your online business by, but don't try to bend it to do something it was never built to do - provide detailed individual insight. Leave that to a platform that has been doing it for years, has experience and is more cost effective than you might imagine.
If only all online businesses operated this way...
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