Unlocking Value from Customer Avatars

Unlocking Value from Customer Avatars

Meet Ryan. Ryan is a 32-year-old businessman that visits a local pizza restaurant up to six times per month to entertain clients. He'll normally bring a group of three or four diners, and he'll order wine, dessert and coffee. His average spend on these visits is £40 per head, and he never uses discounts; he values the presentation of the restaurant as well as its quality food and service, as they make a consistently good impression on his clients.

So when Ryan receives a voucher for 20 per cent off home delivery on kids' meals with the restaurant, it goes straight in the bin -- it's irrelevant to him.

Like many chains, the restaurant doesn't have a detailed understanding of its customers.

It's a serious issue. Imagine that there are 10,000 other customers with similar buying habits to Ryan. If you could get each of these to spend £5 extra then that's an additional £200,000 in revenue per month -- so not only has the marketing team wasted its time, it's missed a significant opportunity.

Now imagine that a new restaurant opens up down the road. Ryan receives a promotion telling him about their new executive service: for only £5 extra his party get a dedicated waiter and seating on the upper balcony. It's just what he needs to impress his clients, and he takes up the offer.

The new restaurant has won his custom -- possibly for life -- because they have sent him an offer that precisely meets his needs.

The Tech Challenge

As you may have guessed, Ryan isn't real. He's a customer avatar -- a hypothetical personality that represents a collection of common customer characteristics and buying habits. In this case, Ryan embodies the 'business boozer'.

In today's digital world, restaurants have a mass of customer information available to them, which in theory should enable them to create in-depth customer avatars.

However, this vast, interconnected digital world is exactly what makes building a detailed picture of customer buying habits so difficult.

A single customer might interact with the business across the website, through an app, at the till, on Wi-Fi and through social media. These systems aren't generally designed to connect, and so collating data from all of them is complicated and time-consuming.

Furthermore, these systems usually store data in different ways, meaning that it's almost impossible to draw accurate conclusions from across your channels.

So when it comes to launching campaigns, most catering businesses are just guessing -- they push out marketing emails or advertise and hope people turn up. If the restaurant is empty (or full), they don't necessarily know why. The customer avatars that they do have are either overly simplified or based on inaccurate or incomplete data. In Ryan's case, for example, the restaurant may have sent the offer to all people who dined as a group, assuming that they would be families.

For marketing teams, it's unrewarding, frustrating, and a waste of effort. They know that the data is there, but technology and time pressures create a seemingly impossible challenge.

There is a Way Forward

We know that you want to provide the targeted and personalised service which your customers demand -- that's why we created Event-Stream.

Event-Stream connects all of your disparate digital channels and captures all customer engagements in one place, ready to be analysed and deployed in campaigns.

It helps you work out key data, like when every customer prefers eating, what their average spend is or what menu items are their favourites.

Understanding your customers on such a deep level provides the opportunity to build out more detailed customer avatars. These more granular avatars allow your marketing to be laser-focused to address key customer needs.

Event-Stream achieves this using a concept called the single customer view.

The Single Customer View

The single customer view is at the heart of Event-Stream's ability to build a detailed picture of each customer's behaviour.

Every time someone engages with your business, it is captured in one record. This is then assigned to a touchpoint that is unique to that customer -- usually an email address.

By capturing three pieces of data for every touchpoint (what happened, when it happened and who instigated the touchpoint), Event-Stream can create rules that develop the single customer view.

Some modelling and data architecture can be used to make sure that every channel has a key that identifies the user -- once this infrastructure is set up, you can link the actions of one customer across all channels.

Once you're able to assign all the rich data, you collect to specific customers all of sudden - it becomes easier to understand customer behaviour and create those avatars.

So stop guessing -- contact us today to find out how Event-Stream can give you a detailed understanding of your customers and leave you confident in your campaigns.

In Good Company

Event-Stream is used by brands like Pizza Express and Carluccio's to capture thousands of interactions with millions of customers every hour, providing the business with the intelligence to drive strategic marketing decisions.

Every month Pizza Express uses Event-Stream to deliver 20+ complex and highly targeted campaigns across 470 restaurants and over multiple digital channels.

The results:

• 50x increase in the number of marketing campaigns can be deployed in any given period.

• 100s of development team hours saved every month because there is no need to spend time setting up laborious manual campaigns.

• 1000s of brand new customer segments can now be developed using the Event-Stream datasets.