Every time a customer engages with us, they speak volumes about what works and what doesn’t. They tell us how to better reach and serve them. They give us a wealth of information, often without saying a word. Now and certainly in the future, leading businesses are defined by how well they can hear this unspoken feedback. Whether the customer speaks, sips, or swipes, winning teams know how to listen and respond.
Customer data is the kingmaker of the next ten years. How well you measure and respond to passive and active customer feedback will determine your success in virtually any industry. For merchants, it should be a top priority to learn and improve on collecting, analyzing, and adjusting to customer data. For COCARD and our members, the top priority is to empower our merchants with cutting edge features and the education to use them.
How to Listen
Across industries, success in sales hinges on your ability to hear the client. While the art of sales has changed quickly, particularly in a post-pandemic world, this fact remains true. Of course, face-to-face interactions are a treasure trove of information. However, ask anyone with a virtual storefront, high traffic volume, or multiple locations; we don’t always have the ability to hear directly from our customers in the moment they visit.
Luckily, there are more ways than ever in 2022 to listen to your customers, and act accordingly. Whether they clicked or strolled over, visitors leave a trail of clues regarding their experience, from frequency of return business to direct feedback in the form of surveys and ratings, to metadata generated by their visits. We cannot overstate how valuable this data is!
Metrics Make the Difference
If you’re a merchant, you almost certainly have an idea of your core customer base. You know the demographics that most engage with you, and you’ve ideally built your business around better serving and reaching those groups. However, you can always get a richer picture of who your customers are and what they want. Customers provide this data to us when they transact.
Better conversion is consistently cited as the most powerful impact of analyzing customer data. Naturally, there are times of the week and the day when your physical and virtual storefronts receive more visits, and slower periods as well. There are people who tend to buy and people who tend to browse and bail. Volume is important, but conversion can supercharge your performance.
How much revenue per visit is generated and different times, and why? Is there a specific clientele, such as families or elderly visitors, that spends more than others? How can you better reach that group?
Surveys are a more direct way to get the information we seek from customers. A simple after-transaction survey, such as rating the overall experience or product purchased, quickly shows us where we’re doing great and where improvement is needed. Perhaps ratings suffer during a certain time of day or with a certain team on the floor. Surveys and ratings, especially when correlated with other data, are an excellent way to see where to shore up service.
Each data point is valuable, but customer data truly tells a story when we can combine and correlate all the information. If average ratings fall when volume is up, for example, it may be time to increase staffing.
Why is conversion suffering and ratings falling on a certain day, or for a certain product, or for a certain clientele? The first step to answering those questions is to know which questions to ask. Are you ready to take your business to the next level with intentional analytics?
How COCARD SuperCharges Feedback
Over the past twenty years, we’ve seen the industry continue to evolve in terms of the importance, collection, and analysis of data. We identified leadership in these changes as one of the most important things we can do to keep adding more value in the industry. Our Revonu product line of software and hardware POS solutions is the culmination of these efforts, and we dedicate 50% of our staff to continuously improving our offering.
Next-Generation Reporting and Analytics
Our Revonu line doesn’t just offer a seamless POS experience, either through software or hardware solutions, complete with menu navigation and a customizable interface. We collect crucial information on every transaction, and compile this information into personalized reports for you to reference. Our reporting is so powerful, many of our merchants find that they find they no longer need their CRM software!
Online and Physical Storefront Integration
We understand that most businesses today exist in two worlds: the physical and the virtual. We offer a seamless combination of both worlds’ data, allowing you to separate or combine reporting based on location, medium (online or in-store), product, or whatever else you want to focus on.
Store, access, and analyze all your customer transaction data in one place.
Respecting Customer Privacy
In better catering to your clients through data-driven solutions, there is a delicate balance that you’re expected to maintain. Customers expect personalization, but they also expect you to respect their privacy. While a lot of data is valuable and ethical to collect, keeping sensitive information or storing data beyond its useful life is not legally or morally up to snuff. This balance is essential for avoiding liability and earning your customers’ trust.
This is where a software provider like COCARD also makes merchants’ lives easier. Our job is to both present actionable reports and follow the legal and ethical norms of data protection. We are constantly improving our reporting and data collection practices to deliver merchants a richer understanding of their consumers while respecting their privacy and ensuring their security. We are and always will exceed the legal requirements for treatment of customer data, and share our merchants’ intention to only store and utilize the data that truly helps us better serve clients.
COCARD: Helping You Listen in a Quieter Time
Better understanding your customers has never been more important, and in a post-pandemic world, it can be difficult to get feedback by traditional means. Customer data is a crucial part of a successful, responsive business.
COCARD entered the POS and payments processing space at the start of the digital era, and we’ve seen tremendous changes in the way people transact, as well as in how businesses understand their customers. We’ve stayed on the cutting edge of that change. Our Revonu product line offers a POS service suite, both online and in-store, which captures and presents customer data in a way that empowers our merchants to act on it.
As always, our fundamental mission is to create more value for our members and our merchants. To learn more about unlocking the power of customer data, and how COCARD can help you achieve it, contact us today!