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T R E N D S Mapping The Unknown Indian Someone could be watching your electronic footprints. Are you scared? You should be, says Ranju sarkar.
Whether it's physical (a phone call or a credit card) transaction or an online one (thanks to cookies, your PCS unique signature), consumers are increasingly leaving footprints all over the place. And you can bet that marketers will follow her on their closed-circuit television screens. Says Gaurang Shetty, General Manager (Marketing), Jet Airways: ''We would like to keep a tab at every point the customer touches the organisation.'' Jet's database on frequent fliers allows the airline to track the class travelled, the sectors flown, and the frequency of flights. Adds Santosh Desai, Senior Vice-President, McCann-Ericsson: ''The desire would be to map the customer a little better, and correlate behaviour.'' Mapping Route With increasing penetration of PCS, credit cards and mobile phones, marketers seem to have it easy. Actually they don't-and it isn't cheap. After mapping the company's business needs, the marketer needs to invest in technology and processes to capture such information live off the map, as it were. But more than that, he needs to have marketing personnel who will query the database, and take advantage of marketing opportunities. Needless to say, this means moving the ownership of the customer database from the techies to the marketing guys. The potential benefits: a powerful medium to inform consumers of new products and services, cross-selling, targeted offers based on affinity data (ergo, clustering), or even one-to-one offers based on personalised information. While the bulk of these offers can be made offline, the net really offers stunning potential for one-on-one marketing.
Mapping Tools Quite frankly, Indian marketers are using (or have just begun to use) pretty much all the tools to collect and exploit consumer footprints: relationship and loyalty marketing programmes; smart cards and readers (which can be integrated into a loyalty marketing programme); data capture and transaction-tracking technologies; personalisation technologies; and finally, telemarketing techniques. Of course, most Indian marketers are not even using cheap and common-sense techniques to recognise and interact with their customers. In fact, the tools available for data-mining are many, but it's more important to focus on what use can be made of the data. Says Rajat Sethi, President & coo, Result: McCann: ''Application of these tools is more important. We need to address the gaps in the entire CRM process.'' To start with, marketers need to emphasise the importance of customer focus within the organisation. For, the best diagnostic tool or software is of no use if employees and channel partners do not realise the importance of being customer-centric. Hence, internal training on CRM assumes significance. Then, if the company doesn't have a sound customer contact programme to address customer relationship issues, it is not closing the loop. Ergo, it is unable to monitor and assess whether its product or service is delivering on its promise or not. Adds Result: McCann's Sethi: ''Many companies view CRM from a technology angle, and not from a communication one. Technology is just an enabler.'' Remember, it's not easy. For instance, micro-mapping tracks brand experiences and customer touch-points across the time-of-day. This is extremely difficult, as different customer segments have differing lifestyles during a day. The marketer will need information on demographics, usage and habit patterns, attitudes, likes and dislikes... all of which evolve as the customer evolves. ''It is hugely expensive (even with the falling costs of data management) to do this,'' says Vivek Basrur, CEO, DIREM Marketing Services, which runs relationship marketing programmes for leading companies. So, for the moment at least, safely rule out the Orwellian nightmare of a complete mapping of an individual's life. Take my case: apart from Domino's, a couple of restaurants, and my credit card company, no one has really even begun mapping me. There's the government, of course, with its highly reliable database: the tax-payers list. If it makes you feel any better, only a very trusting marketer would agree to share such data with others. But as marketers track consumers more closely, attempting to offer personalised services-like, for instance, in the hospitality industry-there could be a backlash from consumers. In the West, for instance, invasion of privacy is a big issue. In the US, for instance, information about credit defaults quickly permeates through the system, from banking to mortgages, and so on. For the moment, there's no mechanism in India to share such data (though MasterCard has initiated such efforts). But one thing is for sure: as markets get more competitive and technologies evolve, marketers will increasingly track their customers more closely. And with dexterity. Those who capture data today, will effectively be the first off the block in reaching out to the customer of the morrow.
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Sometimes
all you have to do is hand over a business card to the hostess at your
favourite restaurant. In other cases, you don't have to do anything-just
call. Surprised that the store operator at Domino's Pizza anticipated your
choice? That's because the moment you identify yourself, your entire
profile flashes on a computer screen: the frequency of purchase (twice a
month), the average purchase (Rs 300), your preferred crust (thin) and
toppings (pepperoni), when you typically order (9 pm) and, of course, your
name, address, as well as your telephone number (sorry, see Privacy
Issues).