The experience a customer attributes to a business or brand comes from all the different interactions or ‘touchpoints’ they have with it.

These touchpoints can include the business or brand’s website, online ads, TV/press ads, social media, emails, customer service team interactions and store visits. 

Together each part forms an overall impression of whether the experience was a good one (and worth returning to) or a poor one (and worth avoiding in future).

Why customer experience is becoming a key differentiator

It goes without question that to be valued as a supplier your product or service quality has to be good. Increasingly important is also the quality of the experience your business wraps around its products or services. With many providers offering similar things at similar prices, it’s the customer experience that often secures customer loyalty.   Over time it can even motivate customers to becoming ambassadors and referring others to your business or brand.

How to fuel a positive customer experience from data

To create such a positive customer experience, you need good data and you need to be ready to monitor it and adapt to the changing needs and preferences that a person has in relation to your brand.  Human nature being what it is, changes will occur over time.

6 ways data and analytics help improve customer experiences:

1 Personalisation

Armed with detailed information about your customer’s behaviour, their marketing/sales channel preferences and their buying patterns, you can personalise content and offers to them.  The relevance and timeliness of these will make the customer appreciate you understand them. This will make their experience that much more enjoyable.  The information behind this will lie in your systems’ data ana alytics.

2 A more effective marketing mix

Your data and analytics will also inform you which of your marketing efforts are more effective and which are not.  This enables you to fine-tune elements such as channel mixes, campaign timings and targeting methods to be more attractive to customers… and effective. 

It will also help you to reduce investment in areas which are proving (and unlikely) to generate a good return.  Regular analysis will help you to spot buying behaviour trends so you can refine your approach.

3 Strengthen key channels

Following on from this, the data will help you to understand how the customer responds to the different channel touchpoints – for example apps vs. websites.  This can be a great help when planning new campaigns or looking to invest in new areas.

4 Deliver more relevant and real-time experiences

One of the new areas which businesses are investing in for their marketing and customer experiences is AI and machine learning.  Drawing on customer browsing behaviour data, these technologies can serve up tailored product or service experiences, present upselling suggestions and respond more quickly to customer interest. 

This makes for a much more intuitive and engaging experience for each customer.  It also enables you to adapt quickly to changing customer behaviour.

5 More realistic lifetime valuation calculations

Marketers are often asked to estimate likely future revenues to aid the wider organisation’s planning.  A common model used is lifetime value or a customer.  Again data can help here.  Using modelling and segmentation for lifetime value can help to determine different revenue scenarios. This ensures effort is then focused on those channels and campaigns which will bring the most reward.

6 See your customer journey clearly

Few businesses have true clarity of their customer journeys and what influences customers to purchase at a given point.  Drawing on their marketing and sales data, businesses can now understand what path a customer takes across the different channels in their customer journey to purchase.

Summary

In short, data and analytics are changing the way businesses approach the customer experience.  They arm them with the information they need to be more dynamic, responsive and personalised for customers.

Here at Fusion Analytics our specialist data consultants and analysts frequently help companies uncover what is driving their consumer behaviour. We also help them segment customers and refine their targeting.

Our product Webfusion also joins data from both online interactions with offline marketing campaigns. This gives businesses a complete identifiable view of their customers and their interaction with the organisation’s marketing and sales channels.

Can we help?

Get in touch today if we can help with any of your data or analytics challenges or if you want to know more about our unique product.