Enhancing the understanding of Customer Base by using BSC

Owing to the prominent place that ‘customers’ hold for any organization, the process of ‘customer profiling’ often plays a crucial role in the success of an organization

The idea of profiling customers hovers around ‘developing’ and ‘enhancing’ the understanding of the components of a pool called ‘customer base’. Moving to the very details of ‘what drives customers to a particular brand’ or ‘why do some companies routinely collect the performance awards and others keep struggling in pulling their bottom lines’ can reveal the ‘very underlying’ secrets of ‘customer base dynamics’.

Mastering this domain will provide an exact and enough knowledge to the managerial staff for deciding the ‘place’ and ‘way’ for conducting business; thereby giving a tremendous push to the chances of ‘winning the competitive battlefield’.

Another fact that thrusts the profiling of customers is that several businesses are ‘going online’. This has caused the grip on customer-base to get loose because of an increase in the ‘scattering’ of the customers. This ‘spreading of the needy ones across various geographical locations’, ‘usage of more than one system to gather data’ and ‘difficulty experienced in integrating the different formats’ make maintaining the hold like that in previous times a tougher job. Well-thought and planned strategies need to be formulated and implemented via sophisticated tools.

Consequently, one gets to know the type of people, who are most likely to opt for the concerned company’s product or subscribe its service. Structuring of marketing plans and will depend on the findings revealed by this profiling exercise.

The devices that are chosen for customer profiling should be tested on various grounds like ‘response rate’, ‘appropriateness to the problem to be tackled’ and ‘stable offline operation’.

The actual task involves a lot of statistical and computational jobs. Compilations of demographic studies are done to figure out the answers to the pre-decided questions related to lifestyles, spending patterns of targeted customers. This in turn goes into efficient, relevant and focused communications to the ‘desired’ people leading not only to ‘retention’ of existing clients but also ‘addition’ to the customer base.

Deciding for the complete set of issues can be done by employing a ‘performance evaluation tool’ like BSC. One can frame the useful perspectives under this methodology with relevant indicators for each of these. To start with, the aspects that can be assessed are- Benefit sand Performance Perspective, Process Perspective, Integration and Best Practices perspective and Buying Behavior Perspective. The parameters which can be of use are- customer retention ratio, issues addressing index, customer base expansion and cost: revenue ratio. Process of customer profiling can be evaluated via indicators like ‘number of areas covered’, ‘number of techniques and technologies utilized in the process’ and ‘time taken in the whole exercise’. Further, Integration and Best Practices Perspective can be assessed by using indicators such as ‘staff fraction’, ‘database alignment index’ and ’best practices abiding ratio’. Buying Behavior Perspective can be calculated by depending on the metrics such as ‘proportion of customer bas

e that showed increase in the frequency and recency of purchase’, ‘increase in sales per customer basis’ and ‘level of customization climbing’.