It’s common knowledge that customers are more likely to switch companies because of poor experiences nowadays. However, there’s no excuse for businesses to fail to deliver exceptional, individualised experiences given the amount of data they collect at every point of the customer journey.
Data is available through customers’ mobile app usage, digital clicks, interactions on social media and more, all contributing to a data fingerprint that is completely unique to its owner. Companies must take advantage of this to deliver the experiences customers are looking for.
At the same time, companies are increasingly aware that creating an engaging customer experience can serve as a true competitive advantage. By using advanced analytics, companies can make better use of their customer and user experience data, leading to higher satisfaction and loyalty in the long term.
Businesses can benefit tremendously from data and analytics to drive positive outcomes for the business and its customers, while still maintaining and facilitating the highest level of data protection. The five biggest business benefits that organisations can achieve from data and analytics are:
1. Proactivity and anticipating needs: By sharing data with businesses, customers expect companies to know them, form relevant interactions, and provide a seamless experience across all touch points. By understanding customers’ needs, organisations will be able to optimise the customer experience and develop longstanding relationships.
2. Delivering relevant products: Effective data collation, combined with analytics, helps companies stay competitive when demand changes or new technology is developed. It also helps them anticipate market demands to provide the product before it is requested.
3. Personalisation and service: Companies need to be extremely responsive to cope with the volatility created by customers engaging via digital technologies today. Being able to react in real time and make the customer feel personally valued is only possible through advanced analytics. Big data offers the opportunity for interactions to be based on the personality of the customer. It does this by understanding customer attitudes and considering factors such as real-time location to help deliver personalisation in a multi-channel service environment.
4. Optimising and improving operational efficiency: Applying analytics for designing and controlling the process, and optimising business operations ensures efficiency and effectiveness to fulfil customer expectations and achieve operational excellence. Businesses can use advanced analytics techniques to improve field operations, productivity, and efficiency, as well as optimise the organisation’s workforce according to business needs and customer demand.
5. Mitigating risk and fraud: Security and fraud analytics aims to protect all physical, financial, and intellectual assets from misuse by internal and external threats. Efficient data and analytics capabilities deliver optimum levels of fraud prevention and overall organisational security. Data management, alongside efficient and transparent reporting of fraud incidents, results in improved fraud risk management processes. Furthermore, integration and correlation of data across the enterprise can offer a unified view of the fraud across various lines of business, products, and transactions.
The ability to use data to better understand the customer journey is imperative to creating an optimal customer experience. With the right technology, infrastructure, and analytics in place, it is now possible to unlock the full potential of this data for beneficial business outcomes.
Alec Gardner, Director – Global Services and Strategy, Think Big Analytics
