Customer Mindsets: Predicting Behavior with Data-Driven Intelligence
By leveraging the data from our digital products, our Decision Science team is able to provide Compass operators with insights into the customer mindset—what drives their decision-making and behavior—for a strong business impact.
To create the best-in-class customer experience in the hospitality world, it is important to understand what drives them to our dining spaces, what they would like to purchase, and what kind of experience they expect. Gaining these insights can enable Compass operators to make informed and strategic decisions that are tailored to their specific customer base.
The Search for Useful Behavioral Patterns
Enter the Experience Analytics project and its goal of assisting operators in identifying, understanding, and better accommodating their various customer groups.
Point-of-sale (POS) and mobile transactional data provide a detailed view into customer preferences, behavior, and purchasing patterns. These patterns can be used to segment customers based on their mindset using a machine learning model, BeCA (Behavioral Customer Analytics).
BeCA is informed by internal research results from the UX Research team, and is powered by transactional data—including what was purchased and when—to allow for behavior-based segmentation. In order to ensure accuracy of this model, the Decision Science team needed to develop metrics to examine the quality of their results.
Other challenges included:
- Scalability of the algorithm to various levels of business, i.e., unit-level, region-level, and sector-level
- Flexibility in reporting trends over time
- Automation to ensure efficient performance and allocation of efforts
What’s Next
As more opportunities to collaborate with Compass operators continue to emerge, there will be several key objectives based on the project’s applications:
- Driving strategic decision-making within cafés
- Improving customer experience (through both digital and traditional POS) by using the data-driven approach
- Learning about and optimizing our food services by understanding customer mindset and preferences
Lots of excitement is building throughout Compass as discoveries continue; the teams are energized to begin preparations for their next steps, which includes implementing better protocols to ensure clean data.
Ultimately, as more actionable insights appear, so will more satisfied customers, more opportunities for innovation—perhaps even, a competitive advantage in driving the digital future through empowered decision-making.
