To enhance the customer experience (CX), organisations need to consider the entire customer journey – including each interaction and touchpoint that a customer has with your business.
By Gary Allemann, MD of Master Data Management
The amount of data that organisations need to collect to do this is only possible with data analytics tools. When organisations effectively use data to their advantage, they can make intelligent business decisions that generate ideal results faster for both them and their customers.
Learn About Customers to Understand Their Journey
Data is vital for learning as many details about customers as possible. The more organisations know about their customers, the more they can personalise their marketing, sales, and customer service strategies. When customers feel like a brand truly understands them, they’re more likely to do business with them long-term.
Thus, understanding who a business’s customers truly are means knowing the “why” behind their journey with a brand.
Customer analytics tools can help collect insights into their behaviour throughout the customer journey. By using this tool, organisations can effectively learn:
- Demographic information
- What the most popular products are
- How to best reach customers
- How customers make purchases
- Commonalities between customers
- How customers interact with a business’s digital platforms
- Whether customers prefer online or offline marketing tactics
Knowing the customers’ journey inside and out allows a business to improve its marketing strategy.
Improve Your Marketing Strategy
Not only is data critical to improving the CX, it is also critical to the success to your marketing strategy, as each marketing campaign and channel can be tracked.
Through data, businesses can establish which messages resonate the best with their customers, which marketing channels they’re most engaged with, and which techniques lead to a conversion.
More importantly, by gathering this information, organisations can allocate resources to the marketing strategies and channels that garner the most engagement and result in the highest conversions.
Optimise Your Sales Process
When a customer is ready to make a purchase, organisations need to ensure the sales process is as smooth as possible. Collecting data can provide insights into where your customers are leaving the process and why.
This provides the knowledge a business needs to add features, if need be, that meet their customers’ expectations. Businesses can also eliminate anything that’s hindering sales, like unnecessary fees, the extra page in the sales funnel for an upsell, and so forth.
Make Customer Service More of a Priority
Data has the potential to improve customer service, if used effectively, enabling businesses to find out what kind of service their customers want and what they can do to fill those needs as fast as possible.
For instance, studies suggest that “companies, on average, receive roughly 7% of all inbound customer support conversations during off-hours.” Organisations should explore this statistic as it relates to their business and customers. If a brand is aware that it is receiving a significant number of inbound customer support inquiries outside of its business hours, they can implement live chat support to give customers the support they need 24/7.
Make a Plan
To harness the benefits of analysing data, organisations need to outline a strategy for their data analytics tools. They should ask the following questions: What exactly is it that I am trying to figure out with my data? What do I want to accomplish? What are my expectations? What answers do I need to achieve said goals?
Collecting vast sets of data can be overwhelming. It can also be difficult to ensure that a quality standard is maintained, and that everyone uses data productively across departments.
Organisations ought to develop a plan for adequately storing and managing the data that they collect and consider creating a company guide that details how to use analytics tools and govern this data appropriately.
Tools
Not all data analytics tools are created equal, and Google Analytics is a great place for an organisation to start its data analytics journey – although, there are a host of data analytics tools to choose from.
Organisations can start with an internet search for data analytics tools, research these tools and map out how they match up with their data analytics strategy goals.
Then, narrow the choices down to the top three and dig into these platforms to choose the one that best suits the company’s needs.
Short and long-term strategies
An organisations’ business and customers will naturally change over time. For instance, customers might start shopping more online than in person, or a company may add a line of products that meet a new customer’s pain point.
Organisations need to continuously adjust and update its data strategies if they want to get the most out of them.
Businesses should check metrics and performance on a short and long-term basis so that they can keep up with the ever-changing needs of their customers and implement improvements quickly.
In summary, utilising data to improve the customer journey is a wise business decision, however, data analytics tools are only as effective as the people and businesses behind them.
Organisations therefore need to outline a solid data analytics strategy, and then choose the right tools for their data analytics goals.
Finally, it’s important to ensure that the business is looking at its data analytics strategy from a short-term and long-term perspective.