E-commerce analytics: Real-time insights fuel smart CX

It’s hard to overstate the importance of e-commerce analytics for businesses today.

Real-time insights into your e-commerce channels are essential to competing in the experience economy. They help create innovative, data-driven strategies for seamless engagement across channels. They deliver the products, experiences, and value your customers expect.

Anything less, and customers will regret agreeing to share their information with your company.

E-commerce analytics: No more guessing games

Speed has always been an advantage, especially in business and now more than ever. E-commerce is quick as data streams and information flows. You have mere moments to catch your customer’s attention with the right message at the right place, time, and price.

Some businesses still make their best guess. They throw a line out and wait. Smart businesses get take the time to listen to their customers and apply analytics. They work to understand who their customers are, what they want, how they feel, and when they want to hear from them.

Customers expect you to walk a fine line. Know them well enough to bring the perfect personalized offer when they want it, with the least amount of friction possible. Do all of this and deliver exceptional experiences without hovering, without hounding, without annoying, and without being creepy.

Without the right tools for the job, it doesn’t take long for the task to feel like you’re expected to perform neurosurgery with a lawnmower blade.

Data driven customer experience: Delivering value at the right time

Data-driven customer experience puts the customer first, delivering exactly what they need at just the right time.

The benefits of analyzing e-commerce data in real-time

The experience economy is evolving at the speed of innovation, machine learning and AI, gathering data through every digital channel available, including the Internet of Things. The flow of Big Data is constant.

Digital platforms operating on-prem and in-the-cloud provide real-time data analytics and actionable insights into commerce as it happens, wherever your customer is and through whatever channel they choose to engage with your brand.

As intelligent digital tools grow more powerful and affordable, businesses of all sizes and from all sectors are closing in, making their moves. They’re integrating commerce solutions with visibility bordering on clairvoyance compared to those businesses waiting for hand-picked data to filter in before running reports.

Here’s what you can do with real-time visibility into e-commerce:

1. Analyze and understand behavior of customer segments at any granularity. Know and understand the emotions driving customer decision-making processes. Measure the effectiveness of your business efforts across your entire organization, breaking down silos and integrating previously disconnected information.
2. Adjust and improve the performance of your marketing, sales, and service. Take action in the moment, rather than waiting for other, slower, traditional metrics to arrive. After too long, the opportunity is already long gone (possibly along with a potential customer who went to the competition).
3. Respond immediately to activity on social media, whether nurturing positive engagement or correcting problems as quickly as possible. Make customers happy and convert observers and prospects into customers.
4. Seize the competitive advantage of increased predictive power to better anticipate customer needs, emotions, and attitudes. Deliver exceptional customer experiences by developing a deeper understanding of your customers as they change in the moment and over time.

Making the neural connection in e-commerce analytics 

Modern intelligent digital solutions gather, manage, and analyze vast amounts of data from across every channel into a single 360-degree view of your customer.

This experience data (X-data) is a vital complement to your operational data (O-data). AI and machine learning find patterns and insights among yottabytes of data that appears as utter chaos to the human observer.

Real-time insight into X-data and O-data provides a holistic view of the relationship between your organization and your customers. Correcting weaknesses and pain points is only possible when you truly understand customers. Seeing only one side of the story can allow problems to go undetected, costing money, reducing productivity, and stifling innovation.

Through the Internet of Things, smart devices, mobile and Web, and connected retail spaces, data is gathered and integrated from multitudes of sources:

1. Social media
2. Web and mobile traffic
3. Chatbot interactions
4. Customer service call centers
5. Sales engagement (in-store, on-site, online, etc.)
6. Marketing engagement (email, SMS, mobile, etc.)

Do you have the right tools for the job? Are you doing brain surgery or lawn maintenance? In the end, choose the right data analytics solutions for your organization based on your goals, customers, and resources.