How To Leverage Data To Build a Better Customer Experience
The world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day.
About 90 percent of the world’s data has been created in just the past two years. The reason is the interactive nature of the internet and the growing use of connected devices. Every search your customer makes and the voice command they give contributes to the data recorded about their professional and private lives.
Imagine the impact when you start leveraging this data to understand your customers better. To list down a few benefits are – meaningful customer experience, customer retention, and loyalty, and ultimately better ROI. A data-driven culture is important to put your customer first and at the center of every business strategy. It helps you understand them better, predict their needs, and know their purchasing behavior.
Quick Case Study: Real-time Data Visualization Enables Better, Faster Decision Making
Down the line, you can identify the most valuable customers, prioritize them and improve on your existing customer experience. All you need is the right use of already collected data to propel your business in the right direction.
What is Customer-Centric Culture?
Customer-centric or client-centric culture is when your business considers your customer experience as the core of every business strategy, operation, and idea. It is the “make or break” component of every business initiative placing heavy emphasis on fulfilling and satisfying the clients’ needs.
Companies follow a customer-centric approach to create a superior-level experience for their customers around their products and services. As the old saying goes, great customer experience is directly related to increasing ROI. In order to create this mesmerizing experience for the customer, your business requires an in-depth knowledge of the customer.
Customer data reflects their likes, dislikes, interests, and behavior at all the stages of a customer lifecycle. Leveraging this data helps you to target the right audience, build marketing campaigns and provide a first-in-class customer experience for them. Following are the steps on leveraging data to build a customer-centric culture.
Related Reading: Why You Should Care About Improving Customer Experience
How to leverage Data to build Customer-Centric Culture?
- Adopt a Customer-Centric Data Model.
To be able to respond faster to your customer and make smarter decisions, your business needs to embrace a customer-centric data model. Most customers expect brands to anticipate what they need and why need it, even before realizing it. Moreover, they want their buying journey to be customized and personalized with communication channels of their preferences. A staggering 86% of customers admit that personalization affects their purchasing decisions.
Being customer-centric helps your business create a meaningful experience for your customers. It helps you understand them better and build lasting relationships with them. It’s more cost-effective to retain old customers than acquire a new one. But, that is easier said than done.
Before you personalize experiences for your customers, you must first have a holistic view of their persona. You can start by collecting data from the right sources and segregating them into four categories as below –
- Demographic Data – Information based on who your customers are, their age group, occupation, location, etc.
- Behavioral Data – Actions your customers take during online activities and their response to marketing advertisements.
- Transactional Data – Purchase history of a customer, how much they are ready to spend, and what influences their buying decision.
- Financial Data – The costs of investing and selling including the ROI and customer profitability.
- Data Quality over Quantity.
Simply collecting more data will not serve the purpose of your customer engagement strategy. Not all the data you collect will help you enrich your customer journey. Most companies collect an abundance of unstructured data but lack the technology, platform, and knowledge to use it effectively. The real challenges lie in Data Discovery i.e acquiring, aggregating, linking, and analyzing the data and then taking necessary actions using it.
Research from Monetate found that the top barriers to personalization include data quality (23%), building sustainable data architecture (17%), integrating third-party data (10%), and organizational constraints/silos (3%). The focus should be on the quality of the data rather than the quantity to drive better business decisions.
Thanks to organizational data silos that help you integrate your data from a growing number of sources, channels, and complex landscapes helping your company to concentrate only on the data that matters.
- Make Data Accessible.
Myriad examples prove that siloed data structures often hold organizations back from embracing a customer-centric approach and hinder their progress. On the other hand, implementing a centralized decision strategy reap benefits and demonstrates real business impact without fixing the data.
Making the data accessible across your entire enterprise allows every department to focus on a customer-centric strategy. It helps your departments to tap into more intelligent and precise customer insights enabling strategic decisions within minutes. Every department leader can access data lakes and streaming data sources irrespective of their locations. They can leverage it to operationalize data-driven actions and generate real outcomes.
After all, essential data can’t be siloed within a single department. The closer the analytics are to data sources, the more valuable customer insights can be extracted.
Related Reading: Agile Technologies for faster Business Insights.
- Identify your Most Valuable Customers (MVCs).
Customer centricity is not about treating all your customers equally. You have to identify your prime customers also known as Most Valuable Customers (MVCs) to target and generate revenue or profit. These customers may not be the most visible or the vocal customers. That is why you need to leverage customer data to identify them and make them the center of your marketing strategies.
Analyzing your customers’ data allows you to identify how profitable each customer is and how you can target them. You might even find the ones that are least expected to convert and you would be better off without them. Leveraging customer data helps you to look ahead in the future. It helps you identify the opportunities to expand and become more profitable.
- Calculate Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Lifetime Value is the total financial value that your business earns from each of your customers. This metric generally defines customer satisfaction, loyalty towards your business, the viability of the business, and financial return on your investments. It helps you find the right balance between long-term and short-term marketing goals and make better decisions.
Leveraging data such as customer recency, frequency, and monetization helps business leaders and marketers to calculate customer lifetime value. It helps them to focus more on customers that are of more value rather than of lower value. This way your business can grow more organically and sustainably, reaping a better lifetime of ROI from your loyal customers.
Benefits of leveraging Data for Customer-Centricity
Taking a data-driven approach empowers you with Data Visualization capability to see a complete view of your customer understanding. It increases visibility, provides deeper insights, and enhances your ability to deliver a greater customer experience. An increase in customer demands results in the need for shorter decision time. With a single view into customer data, teams right from customer engagements to marketing and sales will be able to pull data faster and make streamlined decisions.
Other benefits of leveraging data include:
- Seamless customer experience. Reduced employee friction.
- Easy customer data integration across channels and sources.
- Improved operational efficiency and cost-effective business processes.
- Better data segmentation and recommendation to understand preferences.
- Improvement in cross and up-sell. Upliftment in customer retention and loyalty.
- More profitable and long-term relationship with customers.
- Potential of increased revenue growth and profits.
Data and technology play a very crucial role in ensuring an organization’s customer-centric vision. It can drive massive business benefits as you can step into your user’s shoes and resolve real pain points.
How iLink can help your business?
If you are still on the fence, the above benefits are compelling enough to push you over the line. iLink’s extensive knowledge and expertise help your business define a dynamic data strategy to build customer-centricity. Get in touch with us to learn how we can help you leverage data analytics to improve customer experience and drive more revenue.
Endnotes
3. https://www.infosys.com/newsroom/press-releases/Documents/genome-research-report.pdf
4. https://www.marketingcharts.com/customer-centric/personalization-customer-centric-81555
