Marketing and Customer Services

The use of Customer information to inform marketing and customer service policy

Times have changed and the businesses have moved on to a more competitive platform where customer is the ultimate king and the organizations have to make every sincere effort to stay ahead of the competitors and live up to the expectations of the customers, since the market is now customer centric. Hence any information or lead related to customer is of utmost important for the marketing department of an organization.

Mc Donald’s makes the best use of this information to plan out service standards and service modes in order to provide best standards to the customers.

Targeting customer groups

Loyalty programs help in gathering of the data from a specified group of customers who gain some additional benefit as a result of promotional activity carried out by the company. This data is very crucial in determining the tastes and preferences of a particular segment of customers, this set of information could be analyzed and interpreted as needed by the marketing department to plan for future strategies.

At Mc Donald’s special loyalty benefits are given to the customers in the form of Discount cards which give them a straight 25% off on certain offerings of the company and in return the loyal customers need to fill a feedback or a marketing research form, which the customers tend to fill with honesty, giving an honest opinion regarding the quality of service which includes all the major aspects of service like customer care, waiting time etc.

Product development to meet customer needs

Companies are coming with new products and services in order to give more and better options to the customers. Product development is again done taking into consideration the demand of the customers, every product that is designed and developed is based on the findings of the research work that is done in the market to know the customer needs so that best products could be developed as per the demand of the market.

Adapting Marketing Mix

Product, price, place and promotion are the 4 P’s of the marketing mix for any organization. The effectiveness of the marketing of any organization depends upon these factors, Customer information helps the organizations to derive out the perfect mix of all these P’s in order to get the best offering for the clients.

For Example Mc Donald’s came up with a unique and a distinct feature which included the construction of the drive in formats nearby the highways so that it could be easily accessible to the people who visit the restaurant in their vehicles.

Choice of Media Carrier for promotion

Customer information also acts as a strong factor in determining the effectiveness of the promotional activities which the organization conducts in the market. The effectiveness of the various promotion activities could be analyzed as a part of the impact it has on the target audience. This impact further helps to decide which among the given set of promotional activities is best for the organization and which media carrier is the best as far as results are considered.

Example-Mc Donald’s had been following the traditional method of promoting, They have been advertising through the magazines and the major among it was reader digest, but as a part of the feedback which they got from the market, very few people are now accessing this form of communication, so now Mc Donald’s have started with some serious advertising campaign on internet and other social media platforms