3 Steps to Building Solid Customer Relationships

Successful e-commerce companies have found ways to incorporate both automated systems and human processes to help run their organizations. Through their implementation, these systems and processes produce a significant amount of data that companies can tap into, helping to improve performance. In an effort to balance this overflow of data while not losing sight of the people on the other side of those numbers (i.e., your customers), I suggest building what my company calls an e-commerce customer lifecycle platform (ECLP).

At its core, an ECLP is about taking data and aggregating it into a central source — i.e., customer dashboard — built around individual customers, or customer stories. Building analytics around customer stories captures a bigger picture of your customers, their needs and how your brand can best serve them. Once you've established an ECLP, do the following:

• Determine which marketing channels are most profitable.
• Identify which customer groups purchase the most products.
• Analyze website content to determine what produces the highest customer engagement.

There are a number of ways to create an ECLP. Although results will differ for each company, three elements need to be identified before your ECLP will manifest: customer dashboard, data sources and means of integration.

1. Select a customer dashboard. The customer dashboard is a database of all customers, actual and potential. Many companies already have platforms in place to serve as a customer dashboard. For example, you might track customer profiles in a shopping cart, email marketing platform, etc. However, the goal is to consolidate all customer profiles into a single holistic source. First, choose where you want your consolidated customer dashboard to live. Although there are many options, consider one of the following:

• Excel: Excel is a robust data management platform and can easily serve as a customer dashboard. While Excel is worth considering given its flexibility and low cost, it's not for the faint of heart.
• Custom SQL database: For companies with developer/programmer resources, a custom SQL database is a fantastic option. A custom database provides flexibility plus advanced querying capabilities to build insights between data sources.
• Shopping cart platform: E-commerce companies have shopping carts that capture customer data. Many cart platforms allow the addition of custom fields. With the right integration, you can build a rich customer story where your customers are actually purchasing products.
• Marketing automation platform: Increasingly, e-commerce companies are expanding beyond email newsletters into the world of "marketing automation," which delivers tailored content. This ensures higher customer engagement and provides a rich source of information tied to customers’ email addresses.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) platform: Often pegged as a sales tool for service companies, CRMs provide customizable profiling capabilities. An integrated CRM will append additional information to customer profiles.

2. Identify your data sources. Once you've chosen a customer dashboard, you must identify where the data comes from. Consider the following:

• Acquisition (driving traffic to your website): This relates to online and offline marketing channels — e.g., search engine optimization, display, paid search, email, affiliates, social media, catalogs, public relations, etc.
• Conversion (turning visitors into customers): This includes website design and content, as well as outside sales channels. Measure conversion funnels for insight into where prospects drop out of the buying process.
• Fulfillment (delivering products): This data stems from shopping carts or e-commerce platforms. Pull in data on operational costs associated with fulfillment, such as shipping, packaging and warehousing.
• Retention (how you service customers and get them to return for additional purchases): Support systems and email marketing systems are primary data sources.
• Measurement (at each step in this framework): Measurement can provide data on top of data. Examples include conversion optimization, A/B testing platforms, and social graphing customer profiles using email addresses or social media.

3. Pull the data together. With data sources identified, aggregate the source platforms, then select the method for data extraction by your customer dashboard. Here are three methods for aggregating data:

• Manual export/import: Incredibly painstaking, one can aggregate data manually. Design a workflow process and schedule data exports. Consider this a first step in "prototyping" an ECLP; it helps determine what data is most important. Ruthlessly prioritize data to ensure the ECLP doesn't get bloated.
• API data syncing: There are various tools to sync data between platforms via API integrations. A syncing platform is the quickest way to build an ECLP. One drawback: you're limited by which APIs your platform supports.
• Custom API integration: The most robust method of building an ECLP is to work with a developer to create custom integrations between data sources and the customer dashboard. This captures exactly the data wanted, but will likely prove the most costly approach.

In the end, remember the goal of building an ECLP is to make sense of the available data and to create a customer-centric data profile. I believe that humanizing analytics by looking at various data sources as people rather than purchase orders will dramatically improve your customer relationships.

Ross Beyeler is the founder and managing partner of Growth Spark, a provider of strategy, design and technology services.