Getting Customer Insights Into Your Company’s DNA
The why, how and what for…
Oh, the good ol’ days. Do you remember how easier it was to know your customers and what their buying behaviour and preferences were?
With a notepad and pen you could collect customers’ data like name, nickname and the days they would visit your shop. It was easy to remember that Burt “The Burtator” would come buy potatoes every Wednesday and coffee every Sunday.
Yeah, he also prefered to pay by check.
Well… now it’s a lot harder. These days you have so many customers coming to your shop that you can’t possibly remember everyone, even if you write their names on the coffee cup.
"What’s your name again? Sorry, what’s your preference, veggie burger or bacon cheeseburger? You want to pay by debit card, credit card, Apple Pay, Monzo, PayPal… coins?!"
What the heck?! You don’t even know where they found your business, because surely they don’t live in the area. It’s chaos sometimes, but thank Thor, I don’t need to know all these people’s details, right?!
The importance of capturing Data
Try again, cowboy. Yes, you do need to know all this information. With these, let’s use a buzzword here, “data points”, you are able to know and understand your customers. Just like in the ol’ days.
When you understand your customers, you can craft a unique local experience. Make it personal, create a connection. That’s just the romantic part, because you can also take advantage of the ‘boring’ but profitable stuff, such as offline analytics, customer trends analysis and effective marketing campaigns that boost your revenue.
What you can do with the information
Any little piece of information you capture can be used to improve your customers’ in-house experience and help you create better, more personalised and relevant marketing campaigns.
Let’s start with the simplest of examples. You capture customers names. Simple as that, just their name.
With that, you can greet your customers in a friendlier way. Which is nice, but you can also:
Now, let’s go a bit further… you know not only their name, but how many times the person has been in your venue this week. Time to increase customer loyalty by simply sending a SMS or email inviting them to come back.
For example:
“Hi Carolina, thank you for visiting us this week. How about you bring a friend tomorrow and get 5% off as a thank you?”
How about you run a campaign to increase the number of people that find you on a review site? Even easier! Send a message 10 minutes after they leave, with something along the lines of:
“Hola Maurice, thank you for you visit. We truly hope you enjoyed your stay, could you please spread the word and review us on TripAdvisor?”
Boom! I bet you a Canadian dollar that you will have the number of reviews increased.
The beauty of Guest WiFi for data capturing
Do you offer free Guest WiFi? Come on, it’s a rhetorical question, of course you do. Free and easy access to the Interwebs (Internet) is one of the three things all customers demand.
So, you ALREADY offer free Guest WiFi — then why not put it into use and make money with it? I’m not talking about charging for Internet access, as this could get your customers frustrated (I’ve seen some dramatic reactions for paid Internet access — punch someone in the face kind of stuff).
I’m talking about capturing data to better know your customers, leading to more efficient marketing, ending with more sales. I know you got it, but I’ll repeat for those people in the back row.
Better yet, I’ll show it to you with an illustration:
Why offer free WiFi if you’re not getting anything in return? With a Guest WiFi analytics and marketing automation tool, you are capturing data, improving your marketing AND generating revenue. I honestly can’t make this any simpler.
Get them logging in once but keep capturing their data
“Oh wait, but I don’t want my customers to sit and spend their time on the Internet instead of appreciating and savouring my beautiful dishes.”
No problemo, amigo. What you need to do is, get them to login ONCE. That’s all it takes. The reason is, they DO NOT have to use your Internet all the time (we also don’t want that, do we?). When they login for the first time, they won’t need to login ever again (unless you want them to), meaning… in their second, third, tenth, hundredth time they visit your venue, you will know they were there and they won’t even have to take their phones out of their pockets.
You’ll also know if they are new or returning visitors, how long they stayed at your venue and so on. If you’re a metrics and analytics fan, this is online analytics applied in real offline businesses. All the goodies of online marketing, easily and automatically applied to brick & mortar, to real life…
Ideas to get your customer connected for the first time
Right, so software can do the heavy lifting, running in the background quietly and constantly learning about your customers. That’s fantastic, but we at BLACKBX believe and recommend you should inject this concept, this need to learn everything about your customer to improve services, in your business’ DNA.
It’s just common sense. Knowing your customers means you can tweak your business to better service them. How great is when a waiter greets you by name? Or when a concierge in a hotel knows exactly the newspaper you love to read and leaves it in your room? (Yep, print. I’m old school.)
It’s all about knowing your customer. I’ve repeated this sentence so many times for a reason. Get it in your head.
Back to the topic, here are three ideas to get your customer connecting to your free WiFi so you can start capturing that sweet, sweet Data.
- Have visible stickers promoting your free Guest WiFi
- Get your staff to mention it at least once to the customer
- ‘Good morning Dorothy, here is your corn dog, please enjoy our complimentary free WiFi and have a great day. Go Pigeons!’
- ‘Hi Frederik, your order will be here in 5 minutes, please feel free to use our free Internet and leave us a review. We’d really appreciate it’
- ‘Howdy Ross, the doctor will call you soon, meanwhile please feel free to access our free WiFi and enjoy your wait’
3. Include an online menu, voucher or promotion on your website
Three basic and simple things, that will get you to capture data, know more about your customers, have offline analytics, improve and automate your marketing campaigns and of course… sell more!
Now what?
Easy… start your FREE trial here! If you want to know more, you can book a demo, download our eBook to learn about the WiFi mistakes you might be making or get in touch with us!
Originally published at www.blackbx.io.
