Customer profiling can be a foundational way to improve many aspects of a title agency’s business, from fine-tuning your marketing language to recalibrating your customer communications.
What is customer profiling?
Customer profiling is the process of gathering all data on a customer into one location that can then be mined to inform business decisions, refocus marketing efforts, or personalize the customer experience.
The core purpose of a CRM system is to create customer profiles that can be leveraged to strengthen customer relationships for long term retention, analyze and enhance the customer experience, and boost sales.
But you don’t need an expensive system to create your own customer profile database. Customer profile templates are an inexpensive method for small companies to construct their own database from which to draw information for business planning purposes.
What to include in the profile
Before you select a customer profile template, it’s helpful to know what your goals are and how detailed you need the profile to be. Here are a few things to consider.
B2B vs. B2C Profiling
If you are profiling your B2B customers, you will be including different data then if you are profiling your B2C customers. As a title agent, you may want to profile both, but create different profiles for your real estate agents and loan officers than you do for your homebuyers, refinance customers and sellers.
Types of data to include
There are several classic types of customer profiling strategies, and you will need to decide ahead of time how you want to use the data to ensure you are gathering the correct information.
Demographic profiling might include the customer’s age, gender, marital status, ethnicity, and job title.
Geographic profiling targets the customer’s address, place of business, and community they serve. This is especially significant where real estate agents are concerned since they usually cover a particular geographic area or specialize in a specific price range of housing.
Psychographic profiling is often used to understand the customer’s values, lifestyle, attitudes or personality traits. This helps you discern your customers’ motivation and perception of your agency. This data may include customer reviews, communications captured during the transaction, or information gathered through focus groups.
Typology profiling looks at why the customer came to you specifically. Was it because you were fast? Convenient? Perhaps your agency specializes in condominiums or small commercial properties or has expertise in transferring properties containing mobile or manufactured homes. You may have a multilingual staff or a great legal team that helps your customers navigate foreign-owned property sales or short sales.
However you decide to focus your customer profiling, Alanna is here to help you take the valuable data you collect and turn it into more effective communications with your real estate agents, buyers and sellers, improving response time and freeing staff for more complex production or client service tasks. Call us today to learn more!
Stay tuned for part 2 of our customer profiling series, where we explore the benefits and uses of customer profiling.