How to Identify Customers using IDIC Model

How to Identify Customers using IDIC Model

Introduction

Any business or company cannot flourish unless and until it has very clear, explicit and sufficient information about their customers, their changing needs and preferences and their behavior towards the business. This is simply because this data helps a company to identify the target audience they need to focus, the new products they must launch to meet the customers' needs and adapt the necessary strategies in order to not just retain, however expand their customer base. Therefore, business and firms all over the world take the necessary steps and adapt the technologies in order to utilize the customer information to alter their business needs accordingly. However, one of such technology-oriented plan that has now been used very often by companies is known as IDIC Model.

Discussion

The IDIC model is divided into four elements that include Identify, Differentiate, Integrate and Customize. However, the ten steps proposed by Peppers and Rogers are basically the categorization of the four elements into more explicit tasks that are to be performed by the computers and software technology. This approach has actually played a more important part in simplifying the fundamental stages of customer identification in to smaller tasks (Zahay & Handfield, 2003). Therefore, the aim of this paper is to discuss the different tasks in managing the information about the customers with the help of technology and technical procedures and explore how this data can help a business. For example, the below mentioned steps will discuss the implication of this model for an electronic company selling a wide range of products.

Define

This step involves defining the customer range of a firm or the product it offers. For an electronic company, the target audience will vary based on the nature of the product. For instance, products like I pods which are usually bought by the consumers belonging to the age group of 15-30 years. Therefore, at this stage, the company identifies its customer range and this data will further be used in decision-making about other important business operations. However, this technology has a role to facilitate the company in this task. It is important to note that before further procedures are carried out, the information and data can be saved thereby using effective technology devices.

Moreover, the company can also make an estimate plan about what strategy can affect the overall target audience. A range of software can be used to reflect and project different predictions and estimations about the consumers in graphical form, pictures and images and numeric figures (Xu et al, 2002). In addition, it is essential that this basic information is saved and protected through different technologies and techniques by the electronic company. It will be fair to say that there is not a lot that can be done in this task with regard to the utilization of technology.

Collect

Once the company has identified its customer range, the next important step is to identify the needs, requirements and preferences of the customers ...