Customer profiling
Customer profiling is gathering information about customer related to their behavior vis-a-vis a product of a particular brand or it may be a general behavioral pattern towards spending habit and characterizing them. Customer profiling help a business know their customers, find their valuable customers. Customer profiling is also a great way of targeted advertisements.
Customer characterizing parameters may vary from one industry to another. But all industries need customer profiling in order to increase their marketing success.

It can be said that, customer profiling is a proven technique for success in marketing and sales.

How to do customer profiling is the question now! Interactive Voice Response System can be used for customer profiling easy way and IVR system can be easily modified for profiling customers of various industries.

Using IVR systems for customer profiling
Interactive Voice Response System is an intelligent equipment which can be used to profile customer without much effort! In fact, many of IVR users must be doing it, without themselves realizing it!
All IVR systems use “menus” which people choose to get information, submit information. There are also customers who always want to talk to a human agent! And that is also one kind of profiling. Those callers, who normally do not want to use menu options, well, do not bother them presenting any IVR menus, just try to connect her to a available human agent or inform that human agent would call her back or she may choose to wait for human agent to become free! It will save more frustration to the caller and save time for the IVR system.

Basically, the “menus” could be organised as per characters, traits needed for profiling and store which callers chooses what menu! This may not be a fool proof profiling, but it can surely tell certain behaviour patterns of the callers.

Another method of using IVR for customer profiling is outbound IVR surveys! This will simply dial out existing customers and ask simple questions and record their replies. This exercise can be completely automated, one excel sheet reporting at the end of the day in email inbox for that day’s customer profiles! One should simply parametrize the profiling category.

In an inbound IVR system, caller may be asked to take part in some simple surveys with customer profiling related questions and stored their preferences. In fact, asking a caller to store her language of communication in customer care IVR, itself is one kind of customer profiling! One could tell, how popular Hindi is by checking out Airtel 121 callers, how many have chosen Hindi as their preferred language!

Voice portals are at very advantageous position as they generate huge database where they record every activity performed by the caller. For example, in NTS Voice Portal application, every key pressed by caller, the last action are stored with time and date stamp along with the caller id. Also it stores what services are used by the caller and for how long! These records could be analyzed to infer certain traits of callers, and they can be profiled accordingly.

Finally, IVR ( Interactive Voice System) is wonderful tool for customer profiling and for targeted advertising for increasing sales!