Turn on a dime: Business agility starts with customer data management
Business agility requires great customer data management. Understand customers with a single, enterprise-wide view of data to pivot on a dime.
Nowadays, investing in data analytics tools to collect, analyze, personalize, and improve customer experience has become vital to business success. After all, how can you create experiences that bring customers back without insight into what they need and want?
But transforming CX — and driving revenue — takes more than just a commitment to data and statistics. Leading brands are using customer data to help them understand the entire customer journey and deliver positive experiences that increase customer loyalty.
They’re using data-driven insights to achieve a truly customer-centric business model.
Using customer data to spot friction & improve CX
The customer journey is the storyline of every engagement a customer has with a company or brand.
A journey map lays out all of these touchpoints—from the moment they first hear of a brand to their direct interactions with a product, website, or support team—and includes all of the actions a customer takes across a period of time.
These touchpoints point to where you can and should collect customer data. Data that, in turn, allows you to define your customers’ processes, needs, and perceptions—and understand where you can improve their experience with your organization.
You can collect CX insights at the following stages of the customer journey:- Online discovery
- Purchase and/or sign a contract
- Onboarding to your platform or product
- Use of product or service
- Service requests (i.e., when something goes wrong)
- Renewal or upgrade
By collecting data at all of these stages, you can better understand the friction points in the journey—and use those insights to take meaningful action.
Benefits of first-party data: Spot-on marketing, fantastic results
With the rise of the privacy-first web, marketers need to focus on harnessing the power of first-party data for gaining competitive edge.
Data-driven decisions drive customer loyalty
Customer loyalty is the trust people have in your brand after a period of interactions and positive experiences.
Loyal customers can become brand advocates, and tend to spend more. You want to motivate them to continue to buy from you even if there’s a hiccup (or two) in their customer experience.
But in order to keep customers satisfied, you must have customer data. Using customer data, your company can:- Find out when new customers are referred by existing customers—a direct result of them acting as your brand advocates
- Know when current customers make repeat purchases, plus what they’re buying (e.g., an upgraded or add-on purchase)
- Trial new ways to retain customers, such as with loyalty or rewards programs
- Discover where there are issues and use those insights to reduce friction
- Understand what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to closing customer experience gaps
You already know that repeat business is good for business. Moreover, it’s always cheaper to retain customers than acquire new ones. Use the data you’ve gathered from your customers to pinpoint how to keep loyal ones happy and coming back for more.
How to build customer loyalty: 3 moments of truth
Winning customer loyalty and developing brand advocates requires getting these three key customer touchpoints right.
Data allows you to put customers at the center of everything you do
More than ever, customer centricity—the act of putting your customers at the heart of everything your organization does—is critical for post-pandemic business success.
But achieving a customer-centric business model requires taking a holistic approach; one that aligns across all facets of the business, including operations, product, marketing, services, and sales.
And of course, it also requires a deep understanding of customer expectations and perceptions — which is where customer data comes into play.
To achieve customer centricity, companies must not only understand what their target and most valuable customers want, but also use customer data to understand their near term and future needs. Delivering on those needs will extend the customer lifetime — a critical metric for driving future sales.
By gathering data about your customers’ purchase behavior, preferences, and interactions, you’ll be able to deliver a better experience across the customer journey, build loyalty for your brand, and achieve true customer centricity.
