Businesses are adopting formal customer-centric programs in the hopes that they can distinguish themselves from their competition. While these programs might differ by name, their underlying functions and goals are the same: to ensure the customer receives value from the solutions and exhibits a high degree of loyalty toward the company. These customer-centric programs include Customer Experience Management (CXM), Customer Success (CS), Customer Advocacy, Customer Feedback, Customer Loyalty, Customer Satisfaction and Voice of the Customer (VoC) to name a few.
These customer-centric programs also have another thing in common: they generate a lot of customer data, including attitudinal, behavioral and usage data. Attitudinal data are collected via assessments, scraped from social media sites and gleaned from call center conversations. Behavioral and usage data are housed in CRM systems, tracked in Google Analytics and received from telemetry systems.
Value of Data and Analytics
As companies continually look for ways to outperform their competitors, many are applying analytics to their treasure trove of data. Data, after all, is not valuable by itself; data becomes valuable when you do something with it. In 2010, researchers from MIT Sloan Management Review and IBM found that organizations that used business information and analytics outperformed organizations that did not. Specifically, top-performing businesses were twice as likely to use analytics to guide future strategies and guide day-to-day operations compared to their low-performing counterparts. In 2013, MIT and SAS released the results of a study which identified some of the reasons behind these differences. They surveyed 2500 respondents (55% being executives) across a variety of industries about how their organizations use data to advance their business objectives. They found that, to maximize the value of analytics, businesses need to:
1. Focus analytics efforts on problems that directly impact customers. Use analytics primarily to increase value to the customer rather than to decrease costs/allocate resources.
2. Aggregate/Integrate different business data silos and look for relationships among once-disparate metrics. The sum of your data is greater than some of your data.
3. Gain executive support around the use of analytics to encourage sharing of best practices and data-driven insights throughout your company. A data-driven mindset is needed at all levels of the organization.
It’s clear that applying analytics to all your customer data and building a data-driven culture will help you drive your business forward. How well is your company leveraging their data to improve the customer experience and customer success?
The Customer Analytics Best Practices Assessment
We developed a self-assessment to help companies understand how well they adopt best practices in customer analytics in their customer-centric programs. This assessment was specifically designed for customer-driven professionals. After completing the assessment, you will: 1) Receive immediate feedback on how well your company adopts analytics best practices, and 2) Receive the executive summary ($499 value) of findings (after we receive enough responses). Take the Customer Analytics Best Practices Assessment Now.
