This question was asked during our Office Hours - Session #3 where we covered the topic of Collecting Data About Your Customer Preferences Outside of The POS.

QUESTION
Any suggestions on ways to collect more data about our customer preferences outside of the POS data?

ANSWER

from Sasha Bartashnik, Director of Data Products, and Nick Lanoil, Sr. Business Development Manager.

There are a number of ways to collect data about your customer preferences, but one of the best sources to use is by using: 

Follow-up surveys on either preferences or customer's experiences.

When you’re using this method, it’s important that you’ve identified what information you need and the best questions to ask to get honest responses from your customers. Reaching out directly to consumers for their opinions makes them feel as though you care about them. This can improve customer engagement, brand awareness, and loyalty while also improving your data.

Speaking of “loyalty”, a more important source of collecting additional data outside of your POS is through: 

Loyalty Program

Loyalty programs are a great way to collect data because you gain the customer's contact information that you can use to engage with more directly, and then in return you can apply more meaningful tools to personalize the benefits and perks for your customer. 

The challenge, of course, is once you start collecting data from different sources, you start having to put more time and money into connecting the data together to get more meaningful insights about your customers. You have to start thinking about investing into a CDP or a team of data engineers who can help you house those datas.

Who was that customer who was in my loyalty program and responded positively to that follow-up survey? What are their purchase preferences? It sounds like really simple, but there are a lot of different data connections that need to be combined together to answer some of those questions.