Whenever times of uncertainty arise, consumers and businesses alike hold onto pockets of cash. With that in mind, prioritizing your existing customers by nurturing and cross-selling to deepen your relationship and customer lifetime value is often a better investment than acquiring new logos. At BDO Digital, we call that Demand Expansion and it’s one of three pillars of our D3 Methodology. 

Understand the Power of Customer Experience (CX)

My colleague Randy Latimer recently published an article outlining three vital Demand Expansion strategies for developing customer loyalty. After all, when 86% of consumers consider leaving a brand after as few as two poor experiences, it’s generally a good idea to focus on keeping them happy and engaged. In addition to staying with you, they’re more likely to advocate for you to colleagues or friends, and it’s possible to avoid the bad PR of negative reviews. 

It’s not enough to know you need to deliver an exceptional experience. Demand Expansion involves aligning sales, marketing, and customer care so the entire team is in sync and positions your company to best serve your customers. Providing a consistent, cohesive, positive customer experience is fundamental to your ability to strengthen and expand demand for your product or service. 

It should come as no surprise that good data is one of the most important factors in a strong Demand Expansion strategy. In fact, Randy shared some words of caution about how bad, incomplete, and outdated data can negatively impact your customer experience. And in this article, I’m taking it a step further, illustrating real-world examples we’ve seen with our clients and highlighting some ideas to consider.  

What is “Bad Data?”

Before we can explore how different types of data issues impede good business decisions and high-caliber customer experience, let’s define a few types of “bad” data – siloed, incomplete, and dirty data. 

Siloed data refers to when one team doesn’t have access to the full range of customer or prospect data. An example of siloed data is when marketing or service teams don’t have access to purchase and product usage information, which means they don’t have the full picture they need to do their jobs well. Siloed data can also mean that data sources don’t “talk” to one another, which can necessitate manual workarounds and cause data inconsistencies or gaps. 

Incomplete data is self-explanatory and simply means you don’t have enough information to make good business decisions. 

Dirty data refers to data that is mismatched or invalid. An example might be when the wrong first name is associated with an email address, or when a person is attributed to the wrong company or buyer category. While this may be more forgivable for prospects or leads, when you’re working in a Demand Expansion capacity, existing customers typically have higher expectations that you know and care about who they are and communicate with them accordingly. 

The Danger Zone of Siloed Data  

One of the most significant problems of siloed data is that you may end up marketing products or services to clients who already own or use them. Clearly, that sends the wrong message to your audience and undermines their trust in you and your relationship with them. What’s more, if your support team doesn’t have access to accurate data, they look bad when they don’t know which products they’re expected to support or answer questions for the wrong products. 

This is something we see quite frequently with clients. In a perfect world, we eliminate data silos by integrating and modernizing the platforms. However, that can be a costly, time-consuming undertaking, and there are often stop-gap solutions we can put into place to drive results in the interim. 

A Community-Driven Siloed Data Solution 

An example I share frequently is a client whose marketing team didn’t have access to sales or product usage data. Out of fear of down-selling or overselling, they made few efforts to cross-sell or upsell to their existing clients. And realistically, there was no easy way to solve the data silo issue without system integration efforts. While doing so was a priority, it was further down in their roadmap. 

Instead, to foster more immediate Demand Expansion capabilities, we developed a strategy that focused on other aspects of customer engagement, like peer-to-peer sharing, online community building, and developing self-service educational tools. As we built out their customer community, we captured data on topic interest and common questions and began building look-alike models based on customer characteristics. We found opportunities to introduce new content designed to improve the experience for existing customers and targeted to different customer personas. As a bonus, those new use cases, case studies, and best practices FAQs could be repurposed for later-stage prospects to help move them through the demand funnel.  

We were able to help customers improve and expand use of our client’s products and services, while also highlighting additional products and services they might find beneficial. Expansion is not just about cross-selling. It’s also about deepening and reinforcing the trust customers place with your company. 

Enriching Incomplete Data to Help Reduce Missed Opportunities  

It’s easy to end up with incomplete data. The more questions you ask on lead gen forms, the fewer people are likely to fill in the information, so many businesses ask as few questions as possible to capture more contacts into their database. While incomplete data may be accurate, it’s not usually sufficient to make good decisions, market effectively, or clearly communicate in a way that resonates with your audience. 

So, what’s the solution? It generally lies in learning how to ask the right questions at the right time to enrich or confirm the information you already have. The good news is that it’s usually easier to solve the challenge of incomplete data compared with siloed data, as long as you collect it in a way that customers perceive a reasonable “value exchange” – they share information with you when they feel they get something of similar value back from you. By using progressive profiling on forms, it’s possible to continue building the relationship and completing their data profile. Trusted third-party sources also can be a great way to extend the data you capture directly from customers. 

Great data-gathering processes that allow you to better serve your customers make it easier for you to stand out from the competition. All too often companies don’t take the time to continue learning about their customers after the initial purchase, diving deeper to learn about decision factors in their purchase decision, or checking in on service and support to make the experience even stronger. Rich, reliable, integrated customer data lets you see patterns in customer behavior and identify opportunities to delight, retain, and expand the relationship you build with your customers.  

Implementing Solid Data Management Practices to Overcome Dirty Data Problems

Data governance and data quality often feel like eye-glazing topics. However, failing to manage your data frequently leads to bad decisions and poor outcomes for you and your clients. And as you gain more data, if you don’t take steps to keep it clean and trustworthy, that can lead to communication practices that snowball into monsters.  

Making decisions or taking actions based on dirty data is worse than using incomplete data, particularly because it’s one of the fastest ways to erode customer trust. Maintaining clean customer data is arguably even more important than clean prospect data: in fact, it’s a must when it comes to building and reinforcing trust and loyalty. Customers expect you to know them and need to feel that you value your relationship with them. And while personalization helps build trust, it’s far better to send an email that says “Hi!” than “Hi Jack” when their name is Mary or Malcolm. 

Identifying dirty data issues—and quickly resolving them—is fundamental to keeping that trust and positive experience for your customers, and to your ability to make strategic business decisions. Whether managed in-house or via a strategic relationship with consultants like those at BDO Digital, data management is vital to ensuring your customer data is clean, high-quality, accurate, and compliant—a foundation that you, and your customers, can rely on.

Demand Expansion Relies on Clean, Well-Managed Customer Data  

By taking the time to develop effective data management practices you can delight existing customers and expand your relationships with them. Moreover, you can reduce churn by identifying early signs of attrition and working to prevent it—an important strategy, since increasing customer retention by just 5% can yield as much as 25% profit growth. Well-managed data is key to building experience and relationships that turn loyal customers into advocates. What’s more, when you have accurate and comprehensive data, you can develop more effective customer profiles and improve targeting for expansion opportunities as well as new lead generation based on look-alike audiences. 

Ultimately, Demand Expansion is a valuable marketing strategy in any season, and particularly so in times of uncertainty. To find out more about BDO Digital’s Demand Expansion services, contact us today.