Know who your customers are – part 1
August 31st, 2005 by Peter Scott
Consider a supermarket data warehouse – you know what was sold, where it was sold and when it was sold, we can even identify what else the customer bought in the same basket. But do we really know who the customer was?
Identifying retail customers at point of sale has always been problematic, other business sectors have less difficulty identifying customers; banks have account numbers, Telcos have telephone numbers; both effectively use an unique reference code to tie transactions to individual customers. Being able to link multiple shopping baskets to an individual or being able to characterise a set of customers by some demographic grouping is gold dust to retailers and their suppliers. Short of asking customers for their names at the sales terminal retailers have devised many techniques to tie customers to their baskets – these include loyalty cards (some even target promotions to the customer based on their buying patterns), credit accounts, delivery services and of course internet shopping.
September 1st, 2005 at 5:20 am
and now try to do the same with customers clicking on search engine results and ads: welcome to my daily hell…
September 1st, 2005 at 11:00 am
That’s the problem with dealing with ‘old’ business all of the time - you forget the e-commerce stuff. Thanks for reminding me of your hell, Nuno
September 1st, 2005 at 1:45 pm
OK. You’ve hooked me. Where is this going? When is part 2 coming?
Cheers
Tim…
September 1st, 2005 at 2:13 pm
Tim - oh the joys of marketing!
Soon - got to do my day job first -
September 1st, 2005 at 4:25 pm
You know, I wonder whether anyone has done any data mining studies of identifying individual customers through their shopping product mix/shopping time/payment method etc?
That would be an interesting study.
September 1st, 2005 at 4:26 pm
What’s up with your RSS feed?
Why am I keep getting the same content over and over again?
September 1st, 2005 at 5:34 pm
Anon - I think Feedburner had a few problems today - a few other Blogs I read report similar things.
Dave
Do you mean ID the customer based on the shopping basket? Could be done - - but not by me
September 1st, 2005 at 5:45 pm
Some stores ask you for the zip code so they can at least identify what area you live in.
September 5th, 2005 at 4:22 am
It’s a common practice now in Australia. Everywhere I get asked my postcode (local zipcode).
Don’t mind doing it: I’m one of the few people out there that believe this sort of information may indeed be used by a local retailer to make sure I get batteries of the type I need when I pop in to the local Tandy shop.
But when someone at the bowser asks me for the postcode, they get the wrong one: what the heck are they trying to do with it?