Editorial
The Gist
- Data-driven decisions. Driving the customer experience with data allows for targeted improvements.
- Optimized outcomes. Effective use of data can create seamless, personalized customer journeys.
- Unified teams. Accessible data fosters collaboration and innovation across departments.
The term “moments that matter'' has been used to describe specific impactful steps along a customer journey within the CX world for years. But, how do you know if these moments actually matter? And what they matter to? What value does improving these moments provide to the customer, to the business, and to the employees? This article will delve into the importance of driving customer experience with data.
By driving customer experience with data, we can focus on moments that matter most to customers. We can create a framework to measure across all aspects of success. This allows teams to not only have visibility into granular metrics like page loads and bounce rates but also how a swath of minor improvements ladder up to broader metrics like conversion rates, CSAT scores, etc. which in turn should be mapped directly to topline business objectives.
This measurement approach also allows teams to see across the journey and how customers are impacted throughout the entire customer experience. For example, pushing users to auto-pay is a great way to reduce friction and drive payments, but further down the journey it limits the business’ ability to drive engagement. The ability for every team member to view the customer journey more holistically ensures efforts within different parts of the organization are always working in concert.
Driving Customer Experience With Data: The Role of a Customer Analytics Center of Excellence
Having isolated analytics team members tied to different business areas can create a lot of data and insights but doesn’t always allow for dispersed teams to have clear insight across all touchpoints throughout the customer journey. By creating a dedicated analytics Center of Excellence (COE) within your organization, you will be able to develop a framework and workflow that allows for data to turn into valuable insights that can be disseminated across all product/business teams.
An analytics COE is a worthy investment, as it serves as a critical decision-making asset, uncovering trends and surfacing segment behaviors in intuitive and reliable reporting tools.
When establishing an analytics COE, it’s important to:
- Clearly define your customer journey.
- Employ service design to uncover business, process and technology impact.
- Align team leads across each main step of the journey (this can scale based on investment).
- Create a central function/role to define success across the journey and drive cross team collaboration.
- Develop a reasonable cadence of collaboration between teams and central function.
- Create dashboards and readouts which visualize individual success as well how these successes ladder up to overall business goals.
Related Article: Customer Journey Analytics Basics for Better CX
Do More With Less in Customer Data Circles
Now that your organization has a COE stood up, how can your team be optimized to deliver more valuable insights to design teams, business owners, IT and internal teams? Rather than focusing on gathering more and more customer data, teams can focus on getting the right data and spend more of their time servicing the business.
With a focus on driving customer experience with data, teams can spend less time on busy work and chasing around team priority disconnects and more time driving valuable insights and solutions.
You don’t need to find net-new datasets in order to create net-new customer experiences. All you really need is to get creative with the insights. For instance, go beyond traditional metrics like CSAT and net promoter scores to tap into other data sources by investigating the top five issues that prompt contacts with your customer care department. Can you create self-service experiences that address those specific concerns?
Asking these questions won’t require gaining access to new data, it means going deeper into the existing data for analysis purposes to unlock insights that improve outcomes. With a little ingenuity, companies can leverage existing data repositories to drive success.
The key is to audit the customer data and determine what can be tracked, as you can’t manage what you can’t measure.
Driving Customer Experience with Data: Normalizing and Organizing Your Customer Data
Data is obviously a crucial component to creating exceptional customer experiences, but it’s not enough to simply have a dashboard to monitor it. To truly harness the power of driving customer experience with data, it should be at the center of an organizationowned by a multidisciplinary team that includes product owners, designers, technologists, marketers, customer care center leads and frontline workers.These are the people who own the moments that matter, and they can harness the insights from your data to directly influence the customer experience, make informed decisions, and take action in real time.
If your goal is to encourage a customer to take a specific action, how can your designers create an experience that leads customers through that process? Data will tell them where to focus their attention.
In order to use that customer data, however, you will need to invest in normalizing data — for example, tie it directly to your CX Journey Maps — so that it is useful and actionable for every business unit or group.
Upskilling and training may be necessary to fully leverage the potential of customer data, but the investment will pay dividends well into the future if it results in a seamless and personalized customer journey.
Related Article: What Defines Customer Data Today?
Let Customer Data Unlock New Relationships
When data is accessible to all the teams that touch the customer, new opportunities for collaboration and innovation within the organization will emerge. Data becomes a shared focal point around which teams share ideas and insights and identify new ways to improve the customer experience.
Think of it as a campfire around which people gather to share stories and ideas which allow for new opportunities to emerge across the organization. Data gives disparate teams new reasons to connect. In a siloed organization, product owners work with designers to design products, technologists work with data teams to do data analysis. When we put customer data in the middle all teams rally around a common theme.
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It's time to shift our approach to data, replacing old notions with a nimble, smart and hyper-focused mindset. Embracing a holistic and structured approach unlocks the potential for driving customer experiences with data through new insights and approaches.
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