Companies today have been leveraging an array of analytics tools, statistical algorithms, and machine learning techniques to predict future outcomes based on historical data. Analytics is helping such companies unearth insights from data to forecast demand, improve business processes, and drive predictive maintenance. But the promise it offers in enhancing the customer experience may be most significant.
Leveraging deep data and analytics expertise, companies can develop and implement a customer experience strategy that prioritizes high-impact initiatives while driving overall revenue performance gains for the business. Reports suggest that companies that earn $1 billion annually can expect to earn, on average, an additional $700 million within 3 years of investing in initiatives to improve customer experience.
The importance of customer intelligence
Until recently, B2B brands found it easy to differentiate themselves and stand out based on price or the quality of products. But in a customer-driven digital era, this is no longer possible. Today’s customers demand a digital experience that is attractive, smooth, and gratifying. This has brought customer intelligence into the spotlight, compelling businesses to define customer experience strategies that incorporate the voice of the customer, their individual personas, and journey maps and incorporate them into the business strategy.
In today’s digital world, an analytics-driven digital experience that aligns customer needs to products and product content across the entire journey has become key to loyalty and advocacy. It is reported that companies that prioritized and effectively managed customer experience were three times more likely than their peers to have significantly exceeded their top business goals in 2019. A robust customer experience strategy that is built and executed with precision is critical to:
- Determine what drives the customer experience and what actions need to be taken to sustain that.
- Understand the customer base, individual customer profiles, and the reasons for customer loyalty and churn.
- Identify and analyze different customer segments, maximize cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and enhance Customer Lifetime Value.
- Design rich product content tailored for every audience while incorporating best practices and tools.
- Curate an efficient and trustworthy digital experience that translates into revenue by driving the buyer journey forward.
- Leverage data and insights to set up an effective digital merchandising practice and enhance customer engagement.
Using analytics to offer an unmatched digital experience
Given the profound impact great customer experiences have on customer loyalty and retention, and ultimately business profitability, using analytics is now key. Analytics provides the power to understand and improve customer experience, enabling businesses to create optimized customer journeys – that are both gratifying to the customer and valuable to the organization. Here are some tips to design unmatched analytics-driven customer experiences:
1. Understand your needs: The first step in designing a successful analytics-driven digital experience is understanding your business needs. Work with the key stakeholders to identify a comprehensive list of digital experience-related issues you are looking to solve. This will allow you to get started with your analytics initiative on the right foot as you design processes that can deliver maximum impact.
2. Identify and capture the right data sets: Once you identify (and prioritize) problems that can be solved through analytics, you need to capture the right data sets about your customers. Since every customer touchpoint can yield innumerable insights into their behavior, collect data from every device and every channel they use, and utilize them as focal points for your analytics efforts.
3. Use the right tools and infrastructure: When you know what data sets to capture, you then have to lay the roadmap for the tools and infrastructure you need for building your digital experience strategy. The choice of tools will depend largely on the capabilities you need: visualization graphs, reports and dashboards, real-time alerts, and more. Take time to decide where you want to store all the data you capture and analyze – in a physical data center or in the cloud.
4. Enable self-service: Since enhancements to digital experiences have to be made continuously, make sure the tools you select are easy to use for the business user – without having to rely on a technical team of data scientists. Make sure to enable self-service options, so anyone and everyone contributing to creating the digital experience can make the most of the tool’s capabilities.
5. Constantly refine your strategy: Modern customers provide a treasure trove of constantly changing data for analysis. To stay relevant, you need to continually evaluate and refine your analytics strategy based on the new data you gather about customers. Such refining can help you adapt to new trends and to the changing tastes and behaviors of your customer segments.
Technology has changed forever the way customers and businesses interact with each other. To keep track of these changes and always stay a step ahead of customer needs, businesses have little choice but to turn to analytics-driven digital experiences. 86% of customers are willing to pay more for great customer experience. Analytics can enable organizations to better understand customer needs and provide them with product content that is relevant, useful, and personalized. That may also be the way to drive enhanced revenues and better business outcomes.