Making the most of your CRM tools is not easy when the information is dispersed across multiple in-house systems.  When your strategic direction changes and you have new business value propositions, using SaaS and Cloud technologies enables low-cost solutions and operational efficiencies that help turn data across your whole business into actionable knowledge.

So when does a business need to change?

To help explain why we keep talking about the importance of data-warehousing and data storage technologies, let’s go back to the fundamentals of business.  A business exists if it has customers, and products or services are provided that meet the needs of customers.

The success of a business relies on product excellence, operational efficiency and customer intimacy.  Focusing on the last one provides sustainable advantages over your competition and gives you competitiveness in the other two dimensions.

The principle driver here is markets.  Generally, a business changes because its customers do.  Venues will find that their loyalty, gaming and membership databases are key CRM tools that hold important information relating to how customers differ from each other and what value they ultimately bring to the business.

Two key groups in any segmentation strategy are ‘most valuable’ customers and ‘most growable’ customers.   With the most valuable group, you’ll want to do your utmost to look after them and keep them.  For growable customers, you will want to find ways to make them see more value in your business – by doing this, your business will grow.

In this blog, we'll skip the topic of 'how to calculate customer value', and jump ahead to answering a fundamental question “Who are these customers?” There are a number of ways to find this out and this is where it can get tricky, often raising the question, “Which method is suitable?”

Here are some basic principles that tell us where to start when creating customer profiles:

• who are they? (e.g. customer profiling with demographic information)
• what do they like? (e.g. purchasing behaviour; customer dialogue)
• what do they do? (e.g. purchasing behaviour; motivational;  visitational)

The extent to which you segment relies on the purpose.  For e.g., in strategic planning, segmentation is more a long-term differentiation of customers.  On the other hand, day-to-day activities, such as cross-selling, up-selling or churn prevention, rely on tactical and immediate targeting of customers.

How to get started

We've got some solutions to help you out, take a look now at how easy it is to know your customers and their attitudes and behaviours towards your venue's products and services.

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