Study: Big Brands Still Don’t Understand Their Customers

Amido, a vendor-agnostic technical consulting agency, believes that the majority of big brands are still failing to understand their customers, despite a number of technological solutions designed to help them do so.

In a new report, Amido states that six key verticals are currently struggling to create individualized customer identity profiles due to the rapidly paced, increasingly digital nature of retail.

“CIOs and CMOs interviewed across Retail, Financial Services, Media, Automotive and Industry, Logistics and Utilities all admit that creating the holy grail of a single customer view is of the single, most strategic importance to business development and customer retention but aren’t realizing the potential that already exists in their infrastructure and the complementary technologies they need to deploy to achieve this,” according to Amido.

Amido’s report found that businesses in all the industries studied struggled to create personalized services for customers, despite collecting their data and that “pools” of data were merely being siloed and not utilized.

“Our report clearly reveals that all organizations see customer identity and creating a single customer view as a rich resource but seem unsure about how to achieve this — even though they know that the lines between marketing and IT have blurred,” according to Alan Walsh, CEO of Amido. “Both the CIOs and CMOs need to realize that the solution is rarely a single product to answer to a complex enterprise-wide problem, meaning integration of technologies is inevitable. In most cases, the answer is a hybrid-IT approach to multiple products and some custom build. By using cloud-based solutions, verticals are able to affordably collaborate their software to ‘talk to’ each other, which will enable data-pooling across disparate parts of the organization.”

Even vaunted eCommerce giant Amazon has some work to do on its customer personalization solutions, according to Walsh.

“Amazon’s customer identity solution is not where they excel — its purchase recommendation is basic as information on the customers is based on what they previously bought and does not take into account anything else about that individual,” according to Walsh. “A joined-up identity strategy reduces spam, and personalization excellence comes when you use insight gained from multiple data sources (social profiles, email marketing, order or browsing history, customer services, transactional history, cookies, online journey, etc.) to offer up products and services that customers want, when they want them and in the right channel.”