Using Context to Avoid Creepy

With great power comes great responsibility. The more information you know about a customer's profile, behavior, and habits, the greater the chance to create intimacy and deliver relevant, timely, and value-add messages and offers. And the greater the chance to totally creep out a customer who realizes you know where they slept last night. With the proliferation of Groupon-style deals and merchant funded offers, overcoming this creep-factor is critical to unlocking the value of those programs.

A lot of people think of context in the single dimension of the current request – who are you and what do you want. This is a limiting view, however, and one that increases the risk of an irrelevant, insensitive, or insulting communication. It is more effective to consider context in 3 dimensions: past, present, and predictive. To optimize your communications strategy, it is essential to understand and manage the three dimensions of context to engage not enrage your customers. Lets see how this plays out:

Context: The 3 dimensional chess game

We start with however much is known about the customer. This includes basic account and demographic information, profitability and any transactions that might be relevant.   Next we try to figure out the customer intent and how and where are they interacting with us. There are a lot of rich new temporal details available to marketers that build an opt-in relationship with their customers.  Finally you take what you know of the customers profile and their current intent and logistics and suggest optimal experiences, offers and treatments.

Lets take an example.  Our Profile knows a customer named Jenny who has recently consolidated her accounts and points onto one card and she also just redeemed 50k of 52k total points.  Her annual renewal fee is coming up at the end of the month.  She is opted into email and SMS account alerts and has not accepted an offer in over 1 year.


Its 9:10 am and Jenny just logged on to her account to check the balance and find a local bank branch.  Given her profile and the recent interaction, there are a number of options to engage Jenny.  While there is an opportunity to offer a new card, given her recent consolidation and points redemption, its likely Jenny is an attrition risk.

So, given the attrition risk, the time of day, and the general location information, we decide the best option is to make a good faith offer for a free coffee at her favorite coffee chain store 3 blocks away.  We send an email message with this offer and note that it was redeemed 20 minutes later.


Sounds easy? It isn't. Each of the three stages has its own complexities and data challenges. That said, “Big Data” is accelerating with incredibly powerful analytic tools and an explosion of available customer data. All of this advancements means that businesses are getting sophisticated with their knowledge of whats relevant to the Customer. The question is: can our moral compass and sense of good taste keep up with the capability advances to present relevant treatments in manner that is effective and appreciated?

Ask Target, who got a lot of press about its ability to identify customers who are pregnant and offer them discounts on baby items. Luring in mothers-to-be is lucrative business, but tell that to the father of a teenager who learns about his daughter's condition from a Target coupon mailer.  

Creepy = Relevance without Trust and/or Perceived Value

How Mature is Your Relationship?

When in doubt, go back to the basics - the customer Profile. But look beyond the simple data points to create a picture of the relationship with this specific customer. What is their involvement from a tenure and activity perspective. How do they communicate and what channels are opted -in/out? What offers were accepted in the past? Have they ever had account or service problems and were they resolved? In other words, gauge the maturity of the relationship from a trust and activity perspective.

How Extreme is the Message?

Now take the relationship maturity and compare it with the message. On the low end of the spectrum are the more mundane elements of basic account servicing. On the extreme end of the sensitivity spectrum are things like health and credit status. Some people are more willing to share their location and basic account details.

Account details Category Spend Credit Status Health and Personal Details

How Valuable is the Offer?

Finally, its important to gauge whether the offer is valuable enough to justify using a customer's data and communicating an offer. Since perceived value is in the eye of the beholder, its important to spend enough time an focus to introduce new mechanisms like deals and discounts to ensure the customer gets comfortable with the value they get.

A good example of this is BofA's launch of spend based discounts during last June. While many are familiar with Groupon-like deals, BofA knew that the concept of a bank combing through personal spend data to find trends and patterns could seem like big brother. So they took several months to roll out the concept, with enough above and below the line advertising to ensure a smooth transition. In addition, they provided a lot of extra information and FAQ's to address concerns, and built the entire program as an opt-in to ensure permission based enrollment.

The proliferation of data and customer engagement channels is a huge opportunity for the Retail and Banking industries. As you can expect, businesses are racing to implement tools and strategies to harness and exploit this data to increase customer profitability. Gone awry, however, leveraging personal info can destroy the intimacy that is the objective. To avoid the creepy factor, it is essential to understand and manage the three dimensional context an effective customer contact strategy and establish a relationship of understanding, trust and perceived value.