Overview

In order to properly market, sell to, and offer support to customers, you need to understand them and get to know them. You can do that effectively by building a customer profile.

The UrbanBuz Customer Journey Platform enables you to easily and efficiently define what relevant data you need to collect about your customers and maintain that data over time.

Defining a customer profile means what “demographics” data that a business would like to collect about their customers to provide a more personalized experience. The system comes with a predefined set of common data fields that you can select from when defining the customer profile and you can also add your own custom fields.

Customer Unique Identifiers

A customer unique identifier is a piece of information that allows the business to identify a customer. No two customers would share the same unique identifier.

Typically the most common unique identifiers are a system generated number (or alphanumeric), phone number, or email since no two people would have the same phone number or the same email address.

The system requires the profile to include at least one customer unique identifier.  However, you can have more than one (phone and email for example). You cannot setup a customer profile without a unique identifier field, which will be used to search for customers and to link all relevant data to customers like transactions for example.

Dependent Fields

Sometimes businesses would like to collect additional data about their customers based on what they already collected. For example, if a customer has pets then maybe the business would like to know what kind of pets but if the customer doesn’t have pets then there is no need to ask that question at all.

This works well with the Customer Registration pages that come available with the UrbanBuz CDP. On the registration page, if the customer answers “Yes” to having pets, then the page will display the field about the type of pets the customer has so the customer can provide that information, otherwise, the field will not be displayed.

Using the Dependent field, makes the registration page more efficient in terms of collecting data where the customer sees only fields relevant to them.

Sub Profiles

A sub profile is an extension to the customer profile where a business can capture data that is not directly linked to the customer’s demographics but is relevant to the business.

For example, a sub profile can be used to store data about children, where the customer profile would hold the demographics data about the parent while the sub profile would hold the data about the children like name, birthday, gender.

Also sub profiles are used in vet clinics where the customer account would be of the pet’s owner and the sub profile would be of the pet.

Required Fields

Not all customer data is created equal. There are things that are essential for a business to capture in order to provide a personalized experience and there are things that are good to have to understand the customer more and improve the experience.

For example, a business might decide that Gender is an essential piece of data that would enable them to customize their communication and marketing. As a result, they set the Gender field as required.

Required fields are important when it comes to registration pages where a customer cannot submit the registration page unless all required fields have been filled.

Also, you can create customer segments that include only customers who filled out all their required fields and tailor your communication accordingly. The UrbanBuz system uses the notion of “Profile Set” to indicate that a customer’s profile has all the required fields filled.

The “Profile Set” concept enables the business to incentivize customers to provide information that the business deems as essential. Some businesses issue customers vouchers when they “Set” their profile, meaning when they complete all the required fields. Other businesses with loyalty programs, would allow customers to redeem only when they complete their profile.

Cloning Profiles

When you setup your business on the UrbanBuz Customer Journey Management platform, the system creates a Main Customer Profile by default that you can then edit to add all the data fields you want to capture about your customers.

However, you don’t have to capture all that data all at once. In fact most businesses capture the customer data in pieces in order not to overwhelm the customers and also to make it convenient for the customer to provide information within the context of the engagement.

For example, a business can setup a registration page at the store that would ask the customer to enter only their name and email while the business might do an online campaign to capture Birthday and Gender with special offers.

The system enables you to create different versions of the main profile and use those with different registration applications. So you can for example, clone the main profile and remove all the fields except name and email and use that profile copy for the in-store registration application. You can then clone the main profile again and remove all the fields except Birthday and Gender for the online registration campaign.