Last updated: Improving customer experience through customer data—CDP for CX

Improving customer experience through customer data—CDP for CX

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Customer experience (CX) is the number one battleground for brands trying to differentiate themselves. In fact, for 89% of companies, CX is the primary opportunity to outperform the competition. And today, the most powerful tool on that battleground is data—enter CDP for CX. Choosing to improve customer experience through customer data management makes intuitive sense – and companies have plenty of valuable data to pull from. But having a tool and using it effectively to improve customer experience are two very different things.

On top of my day job writing about business technology or employee engagement, I’m also a fitness instructor, teaching group classes. Once or twice a week, I do my Clark Kent/Superman transformation, becoming unrecognizable once my glasses are off. What on earth does that have to do with improving CX through customer data, you may be asking? Well, there are actually a couple of valuable lessons to be gleaned here, so indulge me as I share my experience with CDP for CX:

Lesson 1: People contain multitudes—use data to improve customer experience

Customer experience, in laypeople’s terms, is making sure that people feel good about something. In the grand scheme of things, this is something we can do and CDP makes it easier.

None of us are completely single-minded. We are complex and nuanced, with a vast array of interests and traits that permeate everything we do. I’m not just someone who writes about business technology, any more than you are just a person who reads about it. Moreover, I am as much me right now, typing at my computer, as I am at the gym. I bring all of me to my customer experience. But often, brands try to deliver experiences based on singular bits of data, without any understanding of the larger context. And that will only get you so far. The ability to contextualize data and continue to develop deeper insights through customer data management is the path to seeing all of a person.

Customer experience, at its core, is the relationship between a company and its customer. And relationships are built on interactions. Every conversation, every wave, every social media post provides context that fuels that relationship. Knowing that I teach fitness classes outside of work tells you something about me you wouldn’t otherwise know. It shines a light on something that’s important to me. And that insight may impact our future conversations, what content you think to share with me, or what tack you’ll take in trying to convince me to do something. We improve customer experience when we see and listen to our customers. If you take this to a larger scale, the potential for a company to use insights from a CDP for CX is enormous. And keeping the smaller scale in mind, people love to be seen.

Businesses are being judged on the quality of their relationships and the customer experience, said in a different way, when businesses don’t use the resources available to them, or that their competitors are using, customers will move along. If one company uses CDP for CX and another doesn’t, chances are it will be the former that customers return to.

In personal relationships, we process and judge unconsciously. But for businesses, it’s not that easy. Companies have accumulated tons of customer data over the years, but have fallen short when it comes to using it to build stronger customer relationships. And that is where customer data platforms come in.

Customer data platforms turn your plethora of data into real-time insights you can use to actually get to know your customer better. The CDP uses those individual interactions to build a rich customer profile, just like you use every encounter with an acquaintance to understand them a little more. When you have a better understanding of your customer, you can create more effective, customer-centric experiences and sustainably improve the customer experience. Sales and marketing aren’t one-sided, they are each co-star to their brand and their customer. The payoff of taking the time to consider the customer is the customer feels seen.

This brings us to Lesson 2.

Lesson 2: Improving customer experience is not about you—please the customer and elicit the desired response.

This is a lesson that many people need to re-learn over and over again, so let me say it again: It’s not about you.

As a fitness instructor, you feel like the star of the show. You design the workout. You pick the music. Your class regulars show up week after week, and all eyes are on you as you lead them through the workout.

But the best instructors out there know that’s a false narrative. It’s not about them at all – it’s about the students. Yes, you put in the work behind the scenes to plan and deliver a great class, but the class isn’t for you, it’s for them. And it’s critical to be able to pick up on cues from them to determine if what you’re doing is working, or if you need to adjust. There is space where your objectives and your customers intersect, allowing for a mutually beneficial transaction or relationship. A CDP for CX supports the exercise of getting to know the most relevant parts of who your customers are and how you can best cater to them.

How do you improve customer experience?

The way to improve customer experience is by coordinating customer data management to extract real-time data to understand your customer and what they want from you. And, to further improve customer experience, it is adapting your approach based on those insights. A CDP for CX is a guarantee that your data, goals, and strategy are aligned in ways that will yield benefits for customers and brands.

For those of us in the industry, we’re likely quick to spout off keywords like “hyper-personalization” or “frictionless omnichannel engagement,” and those aren’t wrong answers. But pretend for a moment that you aren’t in the industry. Put on your consumer hat – then what would you say? It’s more likely going to be something like “when a brand gets me” or “great customer service.” They don’t talk about sales and marketing, but they might talk about messages and ads. How customers evaluate their experience is always going to be based on how you showed up for them. And that is done through things like hyper-personalization and frictionless engagement, but those things are only as effective as your understanding of your customer and what they want.

For brands, and more specifically for the teams behind those brands, it’s easy to get caught up in your priorities, your KPIs, and how cool you think you are. But to become truly customer-centric and deliver experiences that customers want to engage with, you need to stop thinking about the experience you want to deliver and start thinking about the experience your customer wants. It sounds like a lot, but the reality is that with customer data platforms contextualizing data across multiple departments, like sales and marketing, is easy.

Customer data platforms make it easier to look at all of our data collectively and identify patterns that teach us how effective our strategy is. And sometimes that data from a CDP shows us changes we can make so that a thing we were really excited to launch will resonate as much as we thought it could. The key, then, is to pivot. To take an agile approach and actually respond to the feedback you’ve been given.

Because no matter how much we may want something to work, we have to remember that it’s not about us.

CDPs are the most powerful tool to improve customer experience through customer data

When it comes to creating stellar customer experiences, the challenge for businesses has not been a lack of data at their disposal. It’s been in wielding that data for maximum impact. Customer data platforms have emerged as the most effective way to make your data work for you.

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