It seems rather obvious, but a new study confirms that tracking customer buying behavior across channels can have a tremendous impact on helping companies understand and market to consumers.  A new report by Deloitte Consulting “Look Closer, Look Further: How to Build a Better Business Case for Improving Information Capabilities” finds that the more information companies have about consumer buying patterns, the better companies can make special offers.

This means that companies should be looking at customer data across channels and integrating that data to get a true sense of customer buying patterns.  However, as the author of the report, Jane Griffin, a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP, points out, "Now if a customer goes into a store, the retailer doesn’t necessarily have information on orders the customer may have placed online and can’t make a personalized offer based on her online activity.”  

While the influence of online research on offline sales is certain, the consumers that begin research online still need to provide context when they walk into a store.  There are companies making inroads in driving traffic from the Web to stores, and while their offerings, along with technologies like Save & Send, make it easy to quantify leads, there's still much work that needs to be done to qualify them and leverage that data across channels. Right now, when a customer walks into a store, there's no way of knowing what they're looking for or if they're a loyal customer.

Unfortunately, the same is true in many cases when consumers transition from the Web to the contact center.  Loyal customers that have already invested time conducting research online must often start over again when they move across channels to place an order over the phone.  Not only is this frustrating for the consumer, but this lack of insight inhibits the ability of businesses to offer relevant cross-sells and up-sells.  Fortunately, solutions like Click to Call and Chat, are helping to bridge this gap. However, as powerful as these communication tools can be just by nature of delivering immediate human contact, they would be less effective without real-time access to the data they produce so that companies could determine (on the fly) what offers work best.