To Track OR Not To Track !

In the absence of physical connect with the end consumer, the only way to understand your customer behavior is to analyse the way customers react to you solutions, their appreciation of your products and services and their affinity to your brand; all based on data from digital interactions. While most of this feedback is postmortem and /or near real time, almost all remedial actions are after a postmortem analysis. With systems getting integrated for meaningful service delivery, the IT infrastructure is more or less in a position to deliver real time analytics results that could be acted upon. We see this behavior in a lot of web properties. 

Many organizations are gearing up to structure their digital assets to be need-aware and sense customer requirements. This happens thru having business tie-ups with digital properties with high footprint and then gauge customer's content consumption and subsequently drawing conclusions from the same. This way when a customer comes onto your portal, you are aware of the customer's browsing pattern and are in a position to personalize the portal experience. Selling becomes easy if you put your customer through a collage of content and track their behavior and the time spent with the content; before you prepare your selling pitch through personalization.

Most of the digital advertising world banks on customer's click stream information as the core constituent of their pricing model. Some models are based on clicks and some on views depending on where you are advertising. Many portals subscribe with third party digital advertisers rather than run their own setup, with customer click stream data being the basis of the billing models. With Microsoft pioneering the Do Not Click feature in IE10, the enterprises, specially the marketing guys, will have to really work hard to make the digital advertising world and the CRM strategies effective. While I am not touching upon the ethics part of tracking a customers behavior online in this blog, I am merely analyzing the challenges this will pose to the enterprise and the effect on technology strategies related to CRM. 

Most organizations would love to anticipate customer needs without having physical contact with their customers, and most of this exercise on the ground today is all about what the organization thinks the customer needs rather than what the organization knows whats going on in the customer's mind. Most of the need anticipation data is an out come of analytics results based on the data an enterprise has on their customers wallet, life stage information and life style information. What's going on in the customer's mind is a result of what the customer is seeing and reading in the virtual world on the sites with whom the enterprise might have no business relationship. The only way to read the customers mind is to track customer browsing pattern and time the attention span given by customers to the content that is served up. I land on  XYZbank.com after having ogled at the three new SUV models launched, the bank better know that and serve up interesting car loan offers on  SUV. I land on XYZbank.com after having browsed thru news portals where the highlight of the day/week is the terrorist strikes and accidents that have taken place; the bank better know that and serve up insurance protection plans. I browse thru some interesting pictures on scuba diving, mountaineering and land on XYZbank.com; the bank better know that and serve me up some content that offers personal loands for holidays. To strike the iron when its really hot, information on my digital consumption is so very essential. 

With Do Not Track, these challenges get a little more complex. While my view is that DNT is a flag that you can ignore if you choose to, but that mounts to getting pesky calls and SMSs on your cell phone after having registered for DND. If enterprises start asking customers permissions for tracking their behavior in order to serve them effectively, I am not sure how many customers will consent. Time will tell. For most advertisers life has become now more interesting and they will need to re-look at their basic business models to protect revenue. A consumer today cannot exercise similar choices on billboard ads, print, television and radio ads. They just ignore them or devote time based on their mood and need of the hour. Maybe the same makes sense in the portal world too. DND is essential on telecom side as SMSs and calls are an invasion of privacy on personal devices, where your phone buzzes insensitive to what you be engaged in at that time. Email spam is an invasion of privacy and the you could painfully unsubscribe to each unsolicited content that turns up in your inbox or clean SPAM folders from time to time. But, I guess digital advertising on portals could be treated the same way as billboard, TV and print ads, where consumers will ignore or pay attention based on their interest levels.