How to Leverage Customer Data for Better Results

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Every business wants to improve customer acquisition and retention in order to facilitate growth and boost ROI. But in order to achieve these results, you need a way to understand your customers, and that means you need access to comprehensive customer data. Comprehensive customer data doesn’t just allow you to understand who your customers are, it also helps you mitigate risk and create a strategy to target new customers who will bring value to your business. A strong customer data management system means implementing Know Your Customer (KYC) policies at every stage of the customer lifecycle, and here are three key ways you can leverage customer data in your business to achieve better results. 

Mitigate risk and speed up onboarding with a customer data platform

In order to mitigate risk and ensure compliance in your business, particularly in financial services, you need a way to vet your customers to ensure you’re not onboarding anyone that could pose a threat to your business by committing fraud or another financial crime. This requires implementing a Customer Identification Program with identity verification so that you can verify that your customers are who they say they are and identify any potential sources of risk. However, you also want your Customer Identification Program to be quick so that you can move more customers through the onboarding process and in turn improve overall customer acquisition. 

With a customer data platform, you can quickly access large amounts information about your customers pulled from a variety of sources – such as utility listings data and credit headers – in order to cross-check the information they provide to you and verify their identities. You can also perform a background investigation of your customers for better customer due diligence, access criminal records, bankruptcy records, and screen watchlists – allowing you to identify customers who could pose a risk to your company and make more informed decisions at the get-go. When you have access to expansive customer data, you can speed up the onboarding process and turn away risky customers before they negatively impact your business – improving overall customer acquisition and boosting revenue.

Use customer data for ongoing monitoring and better customer retention

For optimal customer acquisition and retention, you need strong KYC tools at every step of the customer lifecycle. A Customer Identification Program is the first step, but what happens if something in a customer’s life changes after the onboarding process that could negatively impact your revenue or compliance? To maintain a view of your customers throughout all of their interactions with your company, you need to perform ongoing monitoring of your customers. This includes monitoring changes in customer relationships, assets, bankruptcies, locations, and more. With a customer data platform, you can maintain a comprehensive view of your customers and automate notifications for when something of concern arises. 

When you automate the process of ongoing monitoring, you spend less time manually checking customer profiles to ensure nothing has changed and can better prioritize situations that require further investigation or due diligence. This not only helps you maintain ongoing compliance with regulations without the extra work of continuously searching for risks on your own, but it also allows you to gain insight into the value your customers are adding to your business throughout their lifecycle. When you use a customer data platform for ongoing monitoring, you’ll not only minimize costs of risk assessment, but you’ll also help your customers feel safe, protected, and certain that your company is only working with other high-quality customers – improving your customer retention. 

Perform customer data collection for more effective marketing campaigns

Gaining insight into who your customers are helps you protect your business from risk and ensure the customer lifecycle is smooth – leading to better overall results – but it also goes one step further to show you who your valued customer could be. With customer data enrichment, you’re able to enhance the data you already have about your customers to gain an even deeper understanding of them. For example, you may use a customer data enrichment to gain a deeper understanding of the demographics of your customers and their history, which could then help you segment your marketing outreach based on those demographics. 

With list generation and data augmentation, your marketing campaigns will be more effective because you’ll be able to reach out to other people who are similar to your current customers and will likely find your services more relevant than people you market to at random. Using customer data to segment lists also helps you prioritize prospects who are less risky and may bring more value to your business. Gaining a better insight into who you want to market to will make your marketing campaigns more effective, leading to better customer acquisition, as well as minimize the possibility of bringing in leads who are high-risk or will negatively impact your revenue, further boosting your ROI.

Leveraging your customer data opens up many opportunities for growth in your business – from protecting your company from risk to improved customer acquisition and retention overall. And with the right customer data tools with Tracers, using customer data to achieve better results is easy. Get started today