Boosting Customer Experience with Customer Data
Collecting and analyzing Customer Data is an essential element of Customer Experience. However, using Customer Data to tailor and improve a Customer’s experience is a tricky scenario to get just right. Using too much data, or too personal of data, can make a customer uncomfortable and turned off. Suggesting a related product or service or offering help, in an authentic way, can make for a delighted customer.
Two positive examples are when an eCommerce site suggests comparable or related products, or when an organization simplifies a complex online process with a “wizard” or set of simple steps. Both are powered and improved by Customer Data.
Customer Experience Analytics provides the foundation for an organization to improve its customer service operations and customer experience. The concept is simple, but designing the data and processes is a complex undertaking. Identifying the right data to collect, being respectful of customer privacy, and meeting all regulatory requirements are three key elements. Organizations must set themselves up for success by designing systems that capture the necessary data points and analytic systems that provide insights to improve customer experience.
Customer Experience Analytics is the discovery, collection, and analysis of customer data that provides insights for leaders to make data-driven decisions about their customer service processes. Data helps organizations discover obstacles and bottlenecks in processes, and analytics shows the customer satisfaction in each step of a process. Understanding the data is important to developing, improving, and transforming customer journeys. In a continuous process, data informs the journey, and in return the journey provides new data to tune and improve the experience.
Leading organizations use a Design Thinking mindset to incorporate organizational strategy, goals, and initiatives into their approach when planning and building their Customer Experience Analytics capabilities. They tailor the analytical infrastructure to best support the organization’s customer service capability growth. To accomplish this growth, organizations should define their key metrics to observe patterns of customer interactions, perceptions, and pain points. Journey Maps can also help organizations better understand their customer’s perspectives and identify these key metrics.
These metrics should then serve as the basis to tell the story of the customer’s journey:
What part of the process do our customer like least?
What part of the process takes our customers the most time?
What type of customers have the highest satisfaction? Why?
How can metrics be combined to create an overall customer satisfaction or engagement index that we can measure and improve over time?
When we design systems to collect the data that answer these questions, we have a better picture of our customer’s journey and how exactly we can make it better to improve the experience for them.
