You've probably heard many times about the fantastic untapped potential of combining online and offline customer data. But relax, I’m going to cut out the fluff and address this matter in a way that makes the idea plausible and its objectives achievable. The reality is that while much has been written about the benefits of online customer intelligence, it far outweighs what’s happening in most organisations today. In fact, considering how beneficial tapping the data can be, I don’t think enough has been written about what types of online customer behaviours should be tracked and how they could be used to create a better customer experience across all touch points.

So where do you begin? 

It all starts with what you have decided are the objectives for your digital presence – are they to register, to make a transaction, sign up for a newsletter, interact with a certain content object such as internal or third party? Those are generally the key objectives I see organisations having in order to understand the customer journey leading up to these events, as well as tracking and ‘remembering’ when the customer interacts with all the organisation’s available channels to the market. A key aspect is to monitor and understand how external campaigns, in-site promotions and search contribute towards those goals and how this breaks down into behavioural segments/profiles.

Recognising a customer

The next important consideration is – how do we recognise visitors/customers we should know from previous interactions even if they haven’t identified themselves on this occasion? Identification doesn’t have to be dependent on a log-in. It could be through an email address we can match with a satisfactory level of confidence, or it could be a tracking code coming from another digital channel where customers had earlier identified themselves. It’s of much greater value if we can match their behaviour as unknown visitors when the identify themselves and not have to start building our knowledge from scratch at the time of identification.

This leads to the point where we need to explore our options for weaving a visitors’ online behaviours into our offline knowledge about them and how – at the enterprise level – we can best exploit the capabilities of our broader data-driven marketing eco-system. We should ask ourselves, is it valuable to us to be able to send a follow up email to the ones that abandoned a specific form? Can our call centre colleagues enrich their conversations by knowing which customers downloaded particular content? How important is it to us as an organisation to be able to analyse text from in-site searches and combine it with insights driven of complaint data from our CRM system? What are the attributes of the various parts of the journey leading up to completing an objective?

Perhaps you wonder what I mean by the capabilities of the ‘broader data-driven marketing eco-system’. Well, my point is that it that it puzzles me that most organisations today can’t integrate/report/visualise online customer intelligence in the systems that already comprise the backbone of their information infrastructure. They don’t utilise their existing campaign management systems to make decisions on what’s relevant for the individual and drive online personalisation which increase the online conversion rates, but at the same time can be used across channels. Organisations rarely take ownership of online customer data or use their advanced analytical engines and existing analytical skills to drive next level insights.

Not taking full advantage of campaign management systems already in place is opportunity missed because the deliverables of integrated online and offline customer intelligence are very real. We should be looking for them every day.

This post first appeared on marketingmag.com.au.