How Companies Can Best Leverage Customer Data

In today’s fast-paced, consumer-driven marketplace, customer communications channels abound.  Gone are the days of simply picking up the phone and contacting customer service.  Instead, customers communicate with companies through numerous channels, including social media, email, live chat, and more.

So what does this mean for companies looking to provide optimal customer experiences?

In order to develop a full and complete picture of the customer journey, as well as truly understand their customers, companies must find ways to leverage the wealth of customer data at their disposal.

Aberdeen research reveals that 58% of businesses today use at least eight channels to capture customer data.  This means that companies have considerable structured and unstructured data regarding customer behavior and sentiment to work with.

However, data alone is not enough to succeed in meeting and exceeding the demands of the empowered customer.

Companies actually have to use the data to provide their customers with the types of experiences they’re looking to have.

Let’s take a look at how to best leverage data:

Unified View of the Customer Journey

Delivering exceptional customer experiences means that all employees must have developed a unified view of the customer journey.  In other words, agents need to capture customer conversations across channels, gathering data not only from various points of contact but across all customer-facing departments (marketing, customer service, sales, etc.) in the organization.

According to Aberdeen research, only 15% of organizations are fully satisfied with their ability to use data to make informed decisions when managing customer conversations.  Eighty-five percent, however, struggle in this area, because their data is captured and stored in disparate, disconnected systems.

Using master data management (MDM), organizations can eliminate data silos and deliver consistent, omni-channel interactions with customers as a result.

Analytical Tools

The lack of a unified customer journey is detrimental to any business looking to provide positive customer experiences.  To this end, Aberdeen data shows top-performing companies combine MDM with analytical tools (i.e., business intelligence and predictive analytics) to develop a full and complete picture of the customer journey.

Empowered with analytics, employees can analyze historical and real-time data captured across all channels to uncover hidden trends and correlations. For example, using business intelligence, a financial services firm could determine how factors such as interest rate, account balance, age, or location might indicate the likelihood of a client applying for a mortgage.  The findings from this analysis would help the firm tailor marketing campaigns to accounts that are most likely to buy.

While its uses vary from business to business (and even department to department), the benefits of speech analytics extend across all businesses.

Final Thoughts

With today’s customers using more and more channels to communicate with companies, organizations must make effective use of this data in order to provide customers with exceptional experiences.

Using master data management and analytics tools, companies can unify customer interactions and develop a broad understanding of the customer journey, resulting in improved customer service overall.