How to Leverage Consumer Data to Improve the Customer Experience

For performance marketers, the devil is always in the details. It is not enough to know your ideal customer profile and drive the right leads. Once you have a lead or inquiry, you need to be able to leverage the data you have to provide the best customer experience. That means engaging at the right time, via the right medium, with the right message and offer.

So, how do you take all of the data from the various internal and external sources that you have access to and leverage that to manage your treatment of inbound inquiries? This was the focus of a great discussion and session between Joey Liner, Co-Founder and President of DoublePositive, Dave Haggert Sr. VP of Marketing at Freedom Mortgage, and Jason Wehner, Director of Enrollment Ops & Contact Center Management at Northcentral University, at Journey Summit titled Translating to Treatment: What to do With What You Know.

For most organizations, engaging with consumers who have raised their hand and shown interest and intent involves a mix of telemarketing, email, text and possibly direct mail. But very often it starts with an inbound or outbound phone call. So, lead and call routing is very important.

As Jason Wehner from Northcentral University shared, “Being in the education space, we do things a little bit different than some of the insurance or mortgage companies. Our focus is really on a qualifying transfer process outside of our first party sites that we’re driving inbound volume from. We do a lot of routing logic as it relates to degree level. So, we’re really focused on getting the right type of program or degree level to the right group of advisors.”

Freedom Mortgage uses a similar approach to lead routing and segmentation. “We have a very highly segmented sales floor. We actually spent a lot of time making sure that the calls and the leads go to the right groups,” offered Dave Haggert. “So, we have over a dozen different, loans advisor teams that really focus typically on one product and typically one offer.“

But before a call, email or text comes in or goes out, there is a lot of work to ensure that the best leads are being acquired. As mentioned in previous blogs, this begins with having the right data to develop an ideal customer profile. Then constantly evolving and testing that profile using additional data, and using consumer behavior and intent data to identify in-market consumers who resemble that profile.

Once a lead is acquired, it is then a matter of matching each lead with the right offer, via the right channel and/or agent. As Jason Wehner shared, “So we have predict scores on our inquiries when we purchase them, and it gives us the ability to match the higher quality converting inquiries or transfers to those higher-tiered advisors. Our score is very much modeled in a way to revenue generation, so that’s, it’s really critical for us to maintain those conversion levels.”

But even when everything is routed correctly, organizations and consumers aren’t able to engage during that initial outreach. That is when nurture and re-marketing are critical to ensure that a lead and opportunity is not lost or wasted.

“We’ve really expanded our re-marketing efforts. Some of the things that we’re doing is really scoring the leads from a re-marketing standpoint,” shared Dave Haggert. “What leads do we think have the most viability from a remarketing perspective?”

This enables organizations to maximize ROI from their lead acquisition programs, but also helps to improve the consumer experience. As Jason Wehner offered, ‘I’m a firm believer of doing the right thing, all the time for our customers because you just don’t ever know who’s going to be on that line. I believe that the experience starts when you try to engage with that person. Even if their intent is really low, there’s a potential referral there.”

In the end, the panelists agreed. Marketing organizations who have the right data, can better identify in-market consumers with high intent. Using this data, organizations can more effectively engage them via the right channel, at the right time and with the right offer. This provides the consumer with a better experience, reduces customer acquisition costs and ultimately leads to higher conversion rates.