Dean Dacko on fostering a personalised customer relationship
First published on 7th March, 2017
What are the major obstacles to fostering a personalised customer relationship?
Experienced airline executive Dean Dacko asserts the challenge is three-fold: the lack of a full 360 view of the customer behaviour including customer touch points outside of marketing + competitive search and transaction activity; the inability to convert customer data into actionable customer insights to deliver relevant customer value in real-time; the fear of making the major investments required (technology, systems, processes, talent) without a guarantee of return on investment success.
Current challenge
Data is housed in specific silos across the organization. It doesn’t allow for a single view of the customer. So how to interact with customer, how to communicate with them across various points of their journey? Customers are ahead, and airlines aren’t able to deliver personalised relationships that entities in a lot of other customer verticals are already delivering. It needs to be noted that there could be brands that belong to organizations that aren’t more than 15 years old. They probably started with a platform and business proposition that doesn’t entail involvement of a legacy system. But recognize that their whole ability to succeed and grow lies in personal relationships. So the customer is expecting that the brands they appreciate the ones they want to build a relationship with and the ones they want to transact with are the ones that truly understand them and deliver a value proposition that’s unique to them. In the context of understanding what a personalised relationship looks like - it is about delivering personalised customer value proposition unique to customers. This makes customers feel “You get, you understand me, you anticipate my question before I pose it and you answer/ present me with a relevant offering”. So when talk of that moment of truth, customers always find that brand to be in the scheme of things as per their booking funnel. “Understanding is important rather than offering free stuff,” said Dacko. “So it’s the notion of using personalisation in growing that capability to create a personalised relationship that makes them believe that you are truly investing in them. This reflects in the trust that is developed. So the notion of where the future is going in terms of understanding the importance of personalisation is really something that is understood how the customer is evolving not just in the airline space, but almost every other vertical worldwide.
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