Brandau: Can you really know me from my data?

Customer data and analytics likely are going to unlock a lot of smart marketing and development in franchising, but they aren’t going to empower brands to know everything. If you don’t believe me, just look at the top of my head right now. This past weekend, I walked in to a well-known franchise location to get a haircut. It was the first time I had been there in several years, despite living less than a quarter-mile from the store. Typically, every couple of months, I drive an hour away to catch up with my friend Mark, who has been a barber and hair stylist for more than 40 years and serves his customers in the makeshift barber shop he’s set up at his house. But he was out of town this past weekend, and I was desperate for a haircut, so I popped into the chain hair salon without an appointment. “Have you been here before?” my stylist asked. When I replied it had been maybe two years, she searched for me in the salon’s database by my phone number and found that it in fact had been just longer than that. I was a customer of this chain: It said so in the computer. But my stylist knowing a few superficial details about me — name, address, phone number — did not prevent my haircut from going slightly awry, and let me be clear, the mix-up was completely my fault. When she asked how I wanted my hair cut, I told her the wrong thing. I was clearly rusty in explaining how I usually wear my pin-straight, fine hair. Every time I sit down with Mark my barber, I don’t need to explain anything to him; he just goes to work, and probably wouldn’t take orders from me anyway. So I told my new stylist something about a No. 3 setting on the sides and in the back and a No. 4 setting on top, which sounded about right. And that’s exactly the cut I got, because she was trained well and gave me just what I asked for. It was a little jarring when she buzzed the top of my head way shorter than I meant to instruct, but it was obviously past the point of no return and I kept my mouth shut. Let me reiterate that my stylist did a great job and that I ended up with a super-short buzz cut because I told her the wrong thing. It’s fine — hair grows back. But it was an instructive lesson for me on just how many brands and businesses out there probably have just a few salient details of my digital life, and how little good that information does them if I only sporadically engage with them. The hair salon chain knows how to call me to follow up and where to send me a coupon, but they don’t know how to cut my hair the way my barber Mark has since I was 18. I have a loyalty card to Red Robin, which sends me an email every May to invite me in for a burger on my birthday, but the last time I used that card was my birthday four years ago, the last one before my wife and I had two kids and stopped having money for date night. By contrast, Mark has my number and is connected to me on all the social-media platforms, but he hardly uses them other than to text me back when I say I’m ready for a visit and a haircut. But he knows me better than most people and was the person who touched up and styled my hair and my groomsmen’s the day of my wedding. His business is so independent he runs it out of his basement barber shop. I’m not bad-mouthing my chain experience last weekend at all. But just bear in mind that, while this data and analytics revolution is great for customer relationship management and lead generation, it doesn’t very well serve the customer without taking the time to know customers personally — and put a face with the numbers.