CRM activities can vary from one organization to a different one, especially as activities related to the customer life cycle. Our checklist starts with the essential activities that ought to form the CRM foundation for each retailer. Then we’ll advance to intermediate and more advanced activities in CRM. Here’s a fast overview of the areas we’ll cover:

• Perform a knowledge audit
• Perform a policy audit
• Update your customer segments
• Augment your data
• Combine segmentation with primary research
• Recognize best customers
• Review and update your customer journeys
• Optimize your loyalty program
• Engage your customers with content
• Investigate CRM re-targeting
• Move geo-location/beaconing into action
• Leverage AI 
• Consider clienteling
• Do a deeper dive on your unstructured data text analytics

Examples of Basic CRM Activities

Since retailers differ on where they’re on their CRM journey, we’ll start with the fundamentals before moving on to more advanced activities in CRM.

Stay proactive about data integrity and accessibility.

When it involves data, retailers are struggling to not only collect it but to also use it effectively. That said, the simplest CRM strategy within the world can’t structure for poor data practices. And, during this area, the devil is actually within the details. Consider your collection of customer data a business asset that needs constant upkeep.

On the analytics side, at about two-thirds of organizations, analysts spend most of their time on data-related tasks versus analytic ones. This often means your analysts spend endless hours cleaning and preparing data so that it can provide a usable dataset for analysis. Bad or incomplete records are a frequent culprit.

On the strategic side, a Forbes Insights Brief provides a detailed analysis of the advantages of effectively extracting value from your customer data. The report shares how data are often wont to guide customer marketing initiatives to raised reach customers, compete more effectively across channels, and drive additional revenue.

Perform a knowledge audit to make sure that you’re capturing the cleanest customer data possible, consider performing a knowledge audit, mapping out all of the entry points for data about your customer: POS, mobile app, e-commerce, customer service, etc. for instance, confirm there are systems in situ that verify email addresses in real-time, as they’re initially entered, providing error messages when the @ is missing or a standard name appears to be misspelled.

Perform a knowledge penetration study as a part of your data audit. This looks at each field in your master customer record layout and provides a percentage value of what percentage records therein field are populated with data. consistent with a study by Experian, 91 percent of companies complain of common data errors: incomplete or missing data, outdated information, and inaccurate data. Most believe this wastes a mean of 12 percent of revenue.

Perform a policy audit. As a part of this effort, review and make sure that the right opt-ins are in situ for all email and SMS data intake. The Marketing Association’s Permissions Guidance may be a great resource for the newest guidelines. It’s worthwhile to review them periodically to make sure you comply as state and federal laws do change.

Take understanding your customers to a subsequent level.

Most retailers understand the worth of using customer data insights to drive strategy throughout the enterprise. Following are suggestions to assist you’re taking your understanding of your customers to a subsequent level to spice up customer engagement and long-term loyalty.

Update your customer segments. If you haven’t updated your customer segment clusters in four years or more, it’s time. After all, you employ clustering algorithms to segment your customers into groups where they’re almost like each other (and dissimilar to other clusters). the purpose of this activity is to essentially let the “data speak.” If you’ve got newly collected data, it could impact the resulting clusters. 

Augment your data. Similarly, if you haven’t augmented your data with third-party data during a while, it’s probably time to think about updating that, as well. Demographics change and evolve, and if they’re not regularly updated, they subsided usefully. additionally, the breadth of third-party data available can provide insights into customer behavior and intent. Third-party data can augment and fill gaps around what you recognize about your customers.

Order the combo. Combine segmentation with primary research. A valuable approach to raised understand customer needs and motivations is to conduct research and consider the results by customer segment. this is often easy to try to do on the back-end with customer survey response data.

On the front, consider organizing segment-homogeneous focus groups. Since social psychology can make or break an honest focus group session, having customers who are members of an equivalent segment within the same room can make an enormous difference in getting everyone to open up and permit you to drill down on understanding their needs and motivations.