How to Beat 50% of Your Competitors in the Customer Loyalty Arena

0
128

Share on LinkedIn

Everyone’s talking about driving a more data-driven customer experience (CX) – but is this all just talk? A scary 52% of organizations rely on educated guesses or ‘gut feelings’ to make business decisions.

We now have enormous access to customer data at our fingertips – yet 80% of data is “dark and untouched,” and is never actually used to make improvements to CX and earn loyalty.

“If a company can’t access their own customer data, record behavior, analyze purchase history and access all information in a single repository, then we (airlines) can’t even get close to attaining customer-centricity,” asserts Christina Heggie, Investment Principal at JetBlue Technology Ventures, on the loyalty challenge.

Studies suggest that 91% of brands agree that personal data is critical to the customer journey – yet only 51% are confident in their ability to serve a data-driven customer experience. Indeed, 50% of organizations admit that their back office is siloed and unable to support a seamless digital flow. That’s half of your competitors.

That’s a major strategy/execution gap, with pretty dire consequences.

Closing the gap

Forward-thinking organizations that commit to closing the gap between the customer data that they have and the data that they actually leverage have a huge opportunity to move the loyalty needle in their favor.

Take, for example, Carnival Cruises, which uses machine learning and the Internet of Things to gather data about guests to create experiences that probably exceed many of their customers’ expectations. Imagine walking into one of its ship’s bars before dinner and having the bartender already preparing your favorite cocktail, because Carnival detected that you prefer that drink at that time.

One of the most common things I hear from clients when discussing data analytics is how difficult it is to gain a clear picture of the customer and customer journey when today’s CX spans so many departments and touchpoints (omnichannel strategy, anyone?).

To make full use of the rich insight data offers, it’s critical to unify all data analytics – whether that be cross-functionally within your organization or across all partners in your value chain. To do this you need to have a mutual understanding across your value chain of the importance of customer data – and work with partners who agree not just on a data-driven customer experience, but champion it.

Republished with author’s approval from original post.

Peter Mullen
Peter is Vice President of Marketing for VXI Global Solutions, one of the world's largest customer-care and customer-experience (CX) companies with 35,000 employees worldwide.

ADD YOUR COMMENT

Please use comments to add value to the discussion. Maximum one link to an educational blog post or article. We will NOT PUBLISH brief comments like "good post," comments that mainly promote links, or comments with links to companies, products, or services.

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here