How well do you know your client?
Knowing your client is a vital element of any business strategy, no matter what your company may specialize in. Your customer is and always should be your main driving force. However, in a world where privacy is becoming more and more rare, certain businesses are taking advantage of what banks call KYC – ‘Know Your Client’. Unfortunately, this makes it harder for customers to trust the businesses they interact with. Let’s explore both the positives and the negatives of KYC and discuss whether it’s as important as it used to be or whether it’s become something more harmful.
The Positives
Audience Engagement
When it comes to making your business successful, you need to be able to engage your audience. ‘Know Your Client’ allows you to explore exactly who your target market is, what their interests are, and how you’re going to be able to capture their attention. Once you know what your audience likes, you can develop an effective marketing strategy that will allow you to target them directly. Not only is this going to make your business more appealing to your clients, but they’re going to feel more special too. KYC allows you to find and explore your audience demographic so you can really get to know them.
Competitor Analysis
Knowing your clients will let you collect further insight as to what competitor brands and businesses you’re up against lekarna-slovenija.com. Look into what businesses your clients frequent and do your research into their own marketing strategies so you can follow the same path towards success. You need to know your competition almost as well as you need to know your client. That way, you’re going to be able to see what your business is doing effectively and what you could improve on.
Customer Loyalty
You don’t just want to attract customers, you want to make them feel special and appreciate the attention that they’re receiving. Knowing your clients is going to let your business connect to them on a personal and emotional level, which is the largest factor of increasing customer loyalty. People don’t want to be treated like any other fish in the pond – they want to see why your company should have their interest and gratitude. Know your client in the most efficient way to find out what makes them tick.
The Negatives
Privacy Invasion
It’s becoming more apparent that banks are taking the concept of ‘Knowing Your Client’ to a whole other level. More often, banks are being seen to use the premise of KYC to invade the privacy of their consumers and analyze every aspect of their lives and activities. That’s especially true in the context of business customers. Instead of just getting to know their client, banks have been found to be collecting and storing information on everything their clients are doing, how they’re doing it, and why.
Audience Criminalization
Your audience should be your main focus, but this is occasionally taken too far by businesses like banks that abuse their power by using the excuse of KYC. Instead of being treated like customers, people are finding their information collected and analyzed as suspects of money laundering. In some cases, the guise of KYC is allowing banks to treat their clients as if they’re criminals rather than people. This maintains a harmful relationship between the business and their audience demographic, but it’s still becoming more commonplace throughout the business world today.
Lack Of Trust
So many banks and other corporate businesses have been exposed to be abusing the use of KYC that large amounts of clients are becoming more hesitant to share their personal information. Audiences no longer are sure of who they can trust and what information they can share, so they tend to take further precautions. In turn, this means that smaller businesses are going to find it harder to actually research and connect with their consumer bases as there will be less information to explore.
To be successful in the business world, you need to know your client, but it’s obvious that some corporations are taking it too far and ruining it for the rest of us. Is ‘Knowing Your Client’ as vital to industry success as it used to be, or has it become more of a ploy for businesses to stick their noses where they don’t belong?
Has the concept of ‘KYC’ been beneficial for your business, or do you believe the negatives outweigh the positives?
