Today’s consumers are empowered, engaged, and mobile thanks to the plethora of digital devices at their disposal. Customers and clients are interacting with companies through various channels, on multiple devices, and over the course of multiple visits, so it is critical to understand how their experience shapes their relationship and journey with the company’s brand.
Most companies can collect data from their customer’s interactions and feedback but to remain relevant and connected with their customers; companies must successfully analyze all the aggregated data. The following are some of the best practices a company can adopt to use data to improve customer engagement.
Enable Access to Insights
All customers who initially engage with the company will follow a path. Sometimes, that path leads to sales but results in churn. Sometimes, a customer’s path leads to repeat sales and retention. Other customers are dissatisfied or are not engaged enough to make the first purchase. By quantifying your customers’ journeys and reviewing their feedback, both given as well as implied, you can unlock insights that might drive loyalty, increase sales, and retain customers.
Follow Your Customers’ Journey
Understanding that people have access to a number of channels for interacting with a company is important, but it is critical to analyzing your customers’ journey over time. This involves looking at the data lineage of customer experience in both successful and failed events. This processing is creative and logical as it asks important questions about customer decisions while in the various channels. Ultimately, companies need to understand how customer experience drives business results, such as purchases, registrations, subscriptions, churn, and abandonment.
Encourage Collaboration
A company’s customers interact with several people at the organization who may work in different departments. Additionally, some people may not directly work with customers but their roles in the day to day at the company affects the customer experience and journey. It is crucial for companies to encourage and improve collaborative efforts through cross-functional communications as well as training. This way, managers and decision-makers can find weakness and obstacles holding back positive business results.
Find the Right Time and Offer
Data, especially in real-time, can be used to craft the perfect offers through insightful analysis of data that results in highly engaged customers. The insights for what incentives to offer and at what time are gained through analyzing the most successful aspects of the customer experience through all the channels and discovering what key influences are at work that leads to positive business results.
Data can be used in the following ways to craft special offers:
• Analyzing buying patterns
• Analyzing customer lifecycles over multiple channels
• Reviewing cross-channel experiences
• Mining and analyzing the social history of your customers
• Using predictive models
• Using a contextual and aggregated view of all channels
• Targeting location-based awareness and engagement
• Using real-time data to drive in-the-moment decisions through instant offers
Data is an infinite source of value for a company that knows how to unlock its power. Companies can extract value that can be shared across teams to improve customer engagement continuously. The most successful companies no longer review and analyze data in the silo it is created in but in an aggregated, holistic environment.
This was once a large feat, especially when big data broke out on to the scene as the new paradigm. Companies may have instinctively wanted to break data down into manageable partitions, but now, new ecosystems exist that allow a fully integrated and smartly modeled processing to occur. These processes allow companies to quantify and qualify experience; thus driving positive customer engagement.
