Knowing the customer is key to winning in the
marketplace. Those companies who know
more, sell more, and can achieve long term loyalty and optimal lifetime
value.
Knowing citizen customers in the public government sphere
has been demonstrated to be important in winning elections and in preventing
terrorist attacks and finding the bad guys.
Knowing involves more information. The quest for knowing-it-all means that we
live in a surveillance society. There’s
not much that we do that is not digitized.
Data streams that feed surveillance are far flung and include mobile
communications, web interactions, biomedical devices, social media, video
surveillance, and much more. This
boundless personal data has become increasingly more manageable and valuable
due to significant strides in technology.
Knowing-it-all is all about creating…intimacy. The more intimate knowledge of one’s behavior
and habits leads to more success in selling products and services because the
selling can be (almost) customized to a market of one. But the intimacy is often strange. It’s not like we are having a conversation! Firms and government can know more and more
about you without you even knowing you have a suitor, or consenting to it for
that matter. The data that streams off
you is snatched. It is free “natural
resource” to those doing the snatching.
But it is yours. The relationship
has not been reciprocal. And who wants
that kind of a relationship?
Turns out that, so far, people don’t seem to mind. Polls show that people are not terribly concerned
about the government’s collection of “metadata” on everyone’s phone calls as
long as it put to good purposes like averting another terrorist attack and does
not result in an FBI agent lurking in the yard or taking out your daughter’s
hard drive. And people seem to yawn at
the notion that every keystroke is processed by cookie crawlers that make judgments
about one’s fitness for an receiving an advertisement, job or loan.
But there may be a looming possibility of a Data
Spring. Like the Arab Spring and
uprisings in other countries where citizens reach a tipping point and reject
authority that does not respect the will of the people, a Data Spring may erupt
if just a few examples of privacy abuse cause the big data spigot to be turned
off.
It is time to think of customer analytics as serving the
need to improve the lives of customers and the common good of citizens, first
and foremost. We have a saying in
healthcare, "nothing about me without me"--which means that patients
ought to be in control of decisions about their own lives, including their own
information, and the focus of all interactions should be to improve health outcomes. It's about engaging them in the co-production of something
that is worthwhile in their lives.
Clearly, the business will prosper by taking care of the needs of
customers first. Customers will get
something of value and may welcome the sharing of much more information to
achieve mutual goals. In fact, there is
much more valuable data in their heads than could ever be scraped from their
Big Data streams.
So, the old customer analytics were quite passive, covert,
and rather manipulative for customers.
It is the province of the marketing department. It is all about gathering information on
purchasing behavior and integrating it with models about habits and then
intervening with the right message at the right time, and probably with a
coupon offering, to sell them something.
The new customer analytics is
dedicated to customers, engages them, and is reciprocal in terms of sharing of
information and creating value. It is
about intimacy and a new relationship with customers. Mahatma Ghandi talked about customers in a
very respectful way, “He is not an outsider to our business; He is part of
it. We are not doing him a favor by
serving him; He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.” From this clear statement of values,
transformation can occur to improve the top line for business and the health of
populations.
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