Identifying More Customers Without Getting in Their Way
part 4 of 6
In the previous part of this series, we looked at the difference between a booking database and a genuine customer database. One person may make the reservation, buy the tickets or book the tee time, while several other customers experience the business without ever being identified. The obvious response might be to start asking more of those people for their details, but done badly, that can simply create another problem.
Customer data capture can very quickly become an interruption. Forms appear when somebody is trying to do something else, staff are expected to ask awkward questions, and QR codes lead to pages asking for far more information than seems necessary. Customers are invited to “join our mailing list” without being given much reason why they should.
The objective shouldn’t simply be to collect more data. It should be to make it easy and worthwhile for more customers to identify themselves.
Customers Need a Reason
There is a simple question sitting behind almost every successful customer sign-up: what’s in it for me?
Businesses understandably approach data capture from their own perspective. They want a larger database, more mobile numbers, more email addresses and a bigger audience for future marketing, but none of those things are particularly compelling reasons for a customer to participate. “Join our database” describes the benefit to the business; “be the first to hear when we release weekend tee times” describes a potential benefit to the customer.
A restaurant might invite customers to hear about special events or last-minute availability, while a golf club could offer notifications about available tee times. An attraction might provide advance information about forthcoming events, and a salon could offer cancellation alerts or priority notice of appointments. The reason doesn’t need to be complicated, but it does need to make sense in the context of the customer’s relationship with the business.
Nor does it always need to involve giving something away.
Incentive Doesn’t Have to Mean Discount
Discounting is often the first idea businesses reach for when they want customers to sign up. “Give us your details and receive 10% off” can work, but if every new customer relationship begins with a financial incentive, businesses can quickly find themselves paying people to join a database when they have already paid to attract them through the door.
There is another way to think about value. Customers may want early notice of an event, a cancelled appointment, a special menu or an available table or tee time. They may simply like the business and want an easy way to hear from it again.
The incentive can simply be relevance. These aren’t strangers being persuaded to show an interest; they have chosen the restaurant, played the course, visited the attraction or sat in the salon. The business doesn’t need to manufacture a relationship from nothing. It needs to make the existing relationship easier to continue.
The incentive, in other words, can simply be relevance. That is particularly powerful because these aren’t strangers being persuaded to show an interest; they are people who are already there. They have chosen the restaurant, they are playing the course, they have bought admission to the attraction or they are sitting in the salon.
The business doesn’t need to manufacture a relationship from nothing. It needs to make the existing relationship easier to continue.
Every Extra Step Matters
Once a customer has a reason to identify themselves, the next challenge is making the process easy.
Imagine scanning a QR code and landing on a form asking for your first name, surname, email address, mobile number, date of birth, postcode and marketing preferences. Every additional field asks for another little piece of effort and another little piece of trust. Add account creation, passwords, verification processes and complicated consent screens, and a simple interaction can quickly become a task.
And customers already have a task: they are trying to enjoy themselves.
If those answers aren’t obvious, unnecessary friction has already been introduced.
The Right Moment Is as Important as the Right Message
Where and when customers are invited to identify themselves matters just as much as what they are offered. A QR code buried at the bottom of a receipt may technically provide an opportunity to sign up, but very few customers are likely to notice it. An invitation presented before somebody has experienced the business may equally be asking for a relationship that hasn’t yet been earned.
Consider instead a restaurant customer who has just enjoyed an excellent meal, a golfer finishing a particularly good round or a family whose children have spent the afternoon enjoying an attraction. At that moment, the business isn’t an advert appearing in their social media feed; it is an experience they have just had.
Don’t Make Customer Identification Entirely Dependent on Staff
There is another practical challenge that is easily underestimated: people. A business can design the perfect customer sign-up process, print attractive QR codes and brief every member of staff on why capturing more customers matters. Then Saturday night arrives.
The restaurant is full, the reception desk has a queue, somebody has called in sick, a new member of staff is learning the job and everyone is concentrating on serving the customers standing in front of them. Nobody mentions the QR code. This isn’t necessarily a training failure; it is simply what happens in busy businesses.
Staff will always play an important role in encouraging participation, but a customer identification strategy that works only when somebody remembers to explain it is inherently fragile. The invitation needs to become part of the environment rather than something that exists only when a member of staff remembers to introduce it.
That might mean placing it on menus, table cards, booking confirmations, signage, receipts, displays or other natural customer touchpoints. The precise method matters less than the principle: customers should have opportunities to identify themselves even when staff are busy doing the job they were employed to do. A simple staff prompt can then reinforce something the customer can already see rather than introducing the whole idea from scratch.
Small Improvements Become Large Audiences
This is where the economics become interesting. Imagine a restaurant serving 1,000 customers each week but identifying only the people responsible for 350 bookings. The objective doesn’t need to be identifying all 1,000 customers; that is probably unrealistic and, more importantly, unnecessary.
Suppose instead that a simple, well-positioned invitation encouraged another 100 customers each week to identify themselves. After one week that might not appear transformational, but after a year it represents more than 5,000 additional customer relationships. For a golf club, attraction, salon or entertainment venue, the numbers will be different, but the principle is identical.
Customer data capture doesn’t need to be perfect to become commercially significant.
Small improvements, repeated every day the business is open, accumulate. Unlike an audience rented through advertising, these are relationships created with people who have actually experienced the business.
The Aim Isn’t to Capture Everyone
There is a danger in turning customer identification into a numbers game. If the only objective becomes collecting as many names and mobile numbers as possible, businesses risk recreating the same problem in a different form: a large database whose size looks impressive but whose commercial value is questionable.
The objective is not to capture everyone. It is to identify more of the customers who genuinely want an ongoing relationship with the business.
Give people a relevant reason, make participation simple, be clear about what they are agreeing to and put the opportunity somewhere they will actually notice it. Don’t allow the entire process to depend on a busy member of staff remembering to ask. Do those things consistently and the gap between the customers a business serves and the customers it can recognise begins to narrow.
But identifying somebody is only the beginning. Once a customer has chosen to stay connected, the business has another decision to make: what is that relationship actually worth, and how do you use it without becoming another source of unwanted marketing?
The Hidden Cost of Anonymous Customers – Part 5 of 6
Turning Customer Data Into Customer Relationships
The next part of this series looks at what happens after a customer identifies themselves: how businesses can use that connection intelligently, communicate when there is a genuine reason to do so and turn a growing customer database into something commercially valuable.