How Data and Analytics Can Enhance Customer Experience

Successful differentiation in today’s market relies on delivering exceptional customer experiences, which in turn rely on strong data practices. When your employees and technology systems know everything about your customers, they’re equipped to provide better service, better support, and more personalized experiences.

Ongoing data capture is the first step. Most modern organizations are already gathering, processing, and tracking countless data points every day, through every single interaction with their customers. But all that data is of little use unless you have a process for harnessing the insights it can produce. You need a strategy.

Data and analytics strategy drives your business forward, helping you understand your customers’ emotional and relational needs and wants. Companies that capture and leverage customer experience KPIs are better positioned to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, which translates to higher earnings overall.

Which Customer Experience KPIs Should Organizations Leverage?

There are three main types of KPIs to focus on, in order to get the most out of your customer data: operational, sentiment, and loyalty.

Operational Data

This data represents the logistical end of your customer experience, benchmarking the strengths and weaknesses of your efforts to attract and retain customers. Where are your customers experiencing friction or dropping out of the sales funnel due to technological frustrations?

Some elements to investigate:

• Website efficacy
• Checkout and shopping cart abandonment rates
• Issue resolution efficiency
• Multichannel touchpoint usage

Sentiment Data

These data points are focused on a customer’s emotional connection to your brand. How do they feel when they engage with your organization? Is their experience with your brand leaving a lasting positive impression, maybe even replacing their last best experience?

Sentiment data points may include:

• Customer Satisfaction Index
• Net Promoter Score
• Customer Effort Score

Loyalty Data

Loyalty data points provide: a measure of how long your customers stick around, whether they come back to your brand again and again, and how likely they are to recommend your organization to their friends and families. Loyalty data goes beyond the one-time experience to assess your long-term relationships with your customers.

Key loyalty data points are:

• Customer Acquisition Rates
• Customer Retention Rates

Specific Ways Data and Analytics Can Enhance Your Customer Experience

So now that you know to continuously collect customer data and understand which data points are likely to be the most useful in improving your CX, here are five specific ways you can leverage the KPIs you’re gathering:

1. Journey mapping. Customer journey mapping offers an in-depth view of what your customers are doing and where they’re going, which helps you build an understanding of their patterns and any issues that might arise across various channels and touchpoints. Using data to improve your journey mapping can help make your customer understanding more robust and accurate, enabling you to make meaningful improvements where necessary.
   
2. Data unification. Adopting a customer data platform that unifies all your customer data into a single location enables you to churn out a singular record for each customer, which in turn allows all of your employees to view each customer holistically. This means that, even when a customer engages with two different agents about the same issue, there’s no gap in understanding – they’re able to pick up where they left off.
   
3. Informed technology investments. By leveraging data, you can easily identify what improvements could be made to your data collection and analysis process and your overall customer experience, which leads to a better sense of where to invest your resources.
   
4. Personalization. With better data and analytics, you’ll be able to establish a more well-rounded picture of customers’ wants and needs, which will enable you to deliver hyper-targeted messages and offers that take personalization far beyond addressing your customer by name.
   
5. Data reporting. Great data reporting makes data clear, accessible, understandable, and shareable to every member of your business. And the easier the data is to review, the more actionable insights can be gleaned from it.

The ability to make informed, data-driven decisions is an essential part of business success, and customer experience is no exception. The better your data and analytics, the deeper your understanding of your customers, and therefore the higher the quality of the experiences you’re able to deliver.

A strong customer experience rests on a strong data/analytics foundation – you can’t have one without the other. At Avtex, we use our decades of collective experience in CX to help organizations just like yours use data and analytics to improve their customer experience. If you’re looking for a strategic advisor, get in touch today.