Customer data or consumer data refers to all personal,
behavioural
Behavior (American English) or behaviour (British English) is the range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems or artificial entities in some environment. These systems can include other systems or organisms as wel ...
, and
demographic data that is collected by marketing companies and departments from their customer base.
To some extent,
data collection from customers intrudes into
customer privacy
Consumer privacy is information privacy as it relates to the consumers of products and services.
A variety of social, legal and political issues arise from the interaction of the public's potential expectation of privacy and the collection and di ...
, the exact limits to the type and amount of data collected need to be regulated.
The data collected is processed in
customer analytics
In sales, commerce, and economics, a customer (sometimes known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a good, service, product or an idea - obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchange for ...
. The data collection is thus aimed at insights into
customer behaviour (
buying decision
The buying decision process is the decision-making process used by consumers regarding the market transactions before, during, and after the purchase of a good or service. It can be seen as a particular form of a cost–benefit analysis in the ...
s, etc.) and, eventually,
profit maximization by consolidation and expansion of the customer base.
In the internet age, a prominent method for collecting customer data is through explicit
online surveys, but also through concealed methods like measurement of
click-through and
abandonment rate In marketing, abandonment rate is a term associated with the use of virtual shopping carts. Also known as "shopping cart abandonment". Although shoppers in brick and mortar stores rarely abandon their carts, abandonment of virtual shopping carts is ...
s.
Customer data is gathered for
customer research, especially
customer satisfaction research
Customer satisfaction research is that area of marketing research, customer intelligence, and customer analytics which focuses on customers' perceptions with their shopping or purchase experience.
Companies are interested in understanding what th ...
and purportedly serves to increase overall
customer satisfaction.
Levels of information
A possible classification of business customer information was proposed by Minna J. Rollins who distinguished the levels a) market b) organizational c) business unit, and d) individual.
For private consumers, different levels are a) personal
identifying data b)
psychographics data, c) transactional (buying) data, d) demographic, and e) financial data.
While the individual data level for business customers has some overlap with the data gathered from individual consumers, the other business-related levels roughly correspond to the demographic part of individual customers.
See also
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Audience measurement
Audience measurement measures how many people are in an audience, usually in relation to radio listenership and television viewership, but also in relation to newspaper and magazine readership and, increasingly, web traffic on websites. Someti ...
*
Customer data management Customer data management (CDM) is the ways in which businesses keep track of their customer information and survey their customer base in order to obtain feedback. CDM embraces a range of software or cloud computing applications designed to give l ...
*
Customer data integration
Data integration involves combining data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of them.
This process becomes significant in a variety of situations, which include both commercial (such as when two similar companies ...
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Customer data platform
A customer data platform (CDP) is a collection of software which creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. Data is pulled from multiple sources, cleaned and combined to create a single customer profile. ...
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Customer intelligence
Customer intelligence (CI) as part of business intelligence is the process of gathering and analyzing information regarding customers, and their details and activities, to build deeper and more effective customer relationships and improve decisi ...
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Market research
References
Customer relationship management
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