In the last couple of years, customer experience has been a top priority for businesses around the globe, and 2020 won’t be any different. The situation is pretty clear: if you treat your customers better than your competitors, you’ll be more successful than them. Simple as that. Studies show that companies that use customer data insights to improve their consumer experience outperform their competitors in 85% of situations. Let’s see how you can use data to gain a competitive edge in your industry.
How Customer Data Insights Affect Your Strategy
The data you collect is only as good as you use it. If you want to use your data to improve the experience of your customers, you need to:
- Identify Relevant Information: The data you collect needs to be relevant to your business. It needs to show what your customers want and need. User data that doesn’t concern your business is practically useless, seeing how it can’t help you improve your business in any way.
- Track Customer Data: Once you see what data is relevant, you need to track it properly. There are many ways to track data, and it depends on the type of business you’re running.
- Keep Your Workers In the Loop: All of your workers need to know about your plans. Also, they need to be able to access customer data, so it would be wise to create a database.
- Identify Patterns: Last but not least, you need to recognise critical patterns and use them to improve your data collection process. You can optimise the current data collection technique or even come up with a new one that will give you better results.
By doing all the things above, you’ll be able to eliminate the guesswork from analysing customer data, gather real insights, and in the end, improve the experience of your customers.
How to Make the Most Out of Customer Data Insights
If you want to use customer data to make actionable decisions, you need to do the following:
Connecting Data Points
This is the toughest part of your job for most marketers, understanding all customer interactions across numerous touch points is their number one challenge, according to the Forrester research. Understanding how customers interact with your service or product at all touch-points will give you their full image and allow you to improve your business.
Team Communication
Communication between team members plays a huge role in overall team performance. More than 85% of workers and business executives feel that a lack of communication is responsible for workplace failures. Help your employees work with each other. Allow them to collaborate on collecting and analysing data to avoid any mistakes that could negatively impact your operation.
Data-Driven Actions
Lastly, don’t forget to get the right tools for the job. You can’t expect to collect, evaluate, and use customer data without social monitoring, surveying, and data tracking tools. A third of elite marketers feel that having the right technology is key in analysing and understanding customer behaviour.
Be Smarter With Your Goals
In the end, if you want to make use of your customer data, you need to set guided goals for your entire team. This goal-making technique incorporates everything, things a person needs to focus on their efforts and increase the chances of achieving their goals by focusing on these factors:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Timely
Moreover, finding the right tools and platforms will help you create a plan and measure your efforts. Find a platform that will help you segment your customer base and put all the data in context. Remember: the better you use your customer data insights, the better you can treat your customers.