Author: Miles Jones

Social Shopping and Social Commerce

Social shopping or S Commerce is a type of eCommerce that seeks to involve people with similar tastes in an online shopping experience. Sites like Pinterest claim to differentiate because on the one hand they offer the ability to pin items of interest but on the other hand they allow targeted marketing and click-through referral opportunities through image relationships. Arguably TikTok and Snapchat are also powerful channels for brands to launch their eCommerce campaigns. In fact, perhaps more than 50% of Snap’s business is in Direct Response advertising.

Many social shopping sites are similar in feel and design to social curation site Pinterest. E-commerce experts suggest this is not coincidental, that the approach is catering to a new generation of shoppers who enjoy and expect a “Facebook experience” where users like and share as part of their online life and are seen to do this.

Social shopping sites, like Kaboodle and ShopStyle, offer recommendations to members in the same way that you’ll see on Amazon Etsy and eBay.

The concept of Social Shopping makes presentations personal, by providing members with the ability to create personal boards, preferences and lists. For these sites, stickiness comes in the concept of community and the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with friends and peers. The goal is to build community by encouraging members to talk about products and preferences and make suggestions directly to their friends and social contacts as they might if they were shopping together in actual bricks and mortar stores.

Social commerce is that segment of eCommerce where sellers can actually sell and not just market their products directly through the social media platform, they can also browse goods catalogues and make those direct purchases.

Unlike the more limited, social media marketing, true social commerce gives the customer the option to perform a direct checkout and settlement.

Right now this is a $90Bn market, so what are the implications for customer data and your business?

Social commerce is a subset of eCommerce makes it easy to measure and evaluate the performance of your ad spend with the various platforms. The social media platforms have built-in eCommerce metrics for impressions, engagement and reach. you can see the number of clicks, the number of views and the level of engagement and perhaps even the response sentiment. All these capabilities come at a price which erodes your potential customer lifetime value. With the average consumer spending around $400 – $500 per annum on social commerce, there are the many costs that are loaded up by the platforms to consider, from the ad spend through the commerce fees and charge and pay commission.

In reality, social commerce is there for shoppers, not businesses. Since the entire process is focused on the particulars of the Social Media platform and if it includes checkout you lose website traffic and the opportunity to harvest some important customer characteristics.

Customer Service is driven by data

You might have heard or read about the concept of Net Promoter Scoring or NPS. At its heart, NPS, as a measure, is used to calculate the status of sentiment within a customer in relation to a product, service, brand, or experience. When looked at in aggregate it is the percentage of customers who are effectively pro or positively disposed toward that thing as opposed to against, or negatively disposed detractors of that good, service, brand, or experience.

If you recognize and acknowledge that surveys are a good way to get a sense of customer sentiment then it makes sense to go to the next step of attaching that sentiment to the customer master itself. This also can help guide service and support personnel in understanding that in some instances a particular customer has already indicated some sort of unhappiness and may need some specific special handling, Now that’s what we call customized or personalized customer interaction!

Using Pretectum APIs to manage and access the customer master, you can hook the survey results on a per-response basis right back into the customer master and surface elements like the date the last survey was undertaken the NPS, and any other data that you feel might be important. Ultimately the choice of what you store when you store it and the frequency with which you store it, is entirely up to you and the needs of your business.

How CMDM plays into “defensive” data management

Some of the more rigorous compliance expectations that your business should be adhering to, under the various regulations, include lawful possession of data, fairness in the use of that data, and transparency about the data that you have. Some other requirements are that you only use the data for its originally agreed purpose, that you only hold the absolute minimum of data that you need, that you retain it only for so long as you previously agreed or until the data no longer serves its original purpose, that the data be correct and proper and not exposed publicly and that if any of these facets are not adhered to, that the persons to whom that data relates, will be appropriately informed.

The fines and penalties associated with violations and failures can be extremely punitive and actually put organizations out of business.

The Pretectum Customer Master Data Management platform addresses aspects of this defensive strategy by offering five key characteristics to the customer master data management practice that support your CMDM function in being compliant.

Encryption – all data stored in the Pretectum CMDM platform and as such, data at rest, is encrypted by default in a secure database

Access Control – all access to objects within the Pretectum CMDM platform is granted through a “least permissions” model and is granted to users via an identifier with an accompanying password for UI access, and the same with a token via API. Users are then further restricted based on a hierarchy of permissions based on the organizational assignment and very fine-grained permissions within that organizational assignment.

Identifiable users – all users are identified by way of an email address that is part of the domain associated with the Pretectum platform subscription.

Data Quality built-in – depending on the way schemas are defined, all data either confirms or conflicts with self-defined business rules and configuration. The ability to observe the compliance of a given record with the specific rules defined, is observable at every stage in the platform.

Verbose Auditing and change logging – a verbose history of changes and events is tracked for all data and all objects in the platform including changes to user permissions and access.

Does Life Imitate Art or does Art Imitate Life?

Although the Pretectum platform is focused purely on Customer MDM, it affords your business the ability to define any number of critical key traits that your business might care to digitally imitate, about your customers. This means that if your model of engagement is highly personalized, with high touch and direct engagement by your associates, you need to empower those associates with as much suitable information as possible in order to service those customers optimally.