Mining Actionable Insights from Customer Data

At the time you are reading this, a person is booking a ride on one of the ride-hailing apps, few tourists are pointing their smartphone cameras towards an ancient structure to scan and learn its history, and yet others are lounging comfortably on their sofas or beds and browsing through the list of recommended movies on their favourite OTT apps.

What’s the common thread that binds these scenarios?  

Data.

Take, for example, a ride-hailing service. The data gathered from hundreds and thousands of customers helps the mobility service provider to determine an approximate arrival time to a particular destination, study the usual traffic pattern on given days, or even predict surge in bookings in a particular region, which in turn can feed the data-pool that can be used to train the algorithm to improve the company's service.

Numbers don’t lie:  Only 3% of potentially useful data is labelled, and even less is analysed.

Similarly, image recognition technology enables individuals to point their cameras towards any tangible object and label it with relevant details so that the rest of the world can gain knowledge from it.

Thousands of conversations are exchanged between customers and marketing teams, customer support teams, and other customer-facing teams every day and these conversations get logged in the system. The interactions vary from product or service-related enquiries to complaints and feedbacks from customers.

If left unattended, these conversational pieces become a jumbled set of unstructured data that fails to contribute positively to the growth of the business. To add meaning to these conversations, it is important to label and categorise the interactions.

Importance of Data for Hyper-personalisation of Customer Experience

We live in an age where customers expect brands to understand their desires and needs even when they are unable to convey it. It is important for organisations to adapt to the constantly shifting dynamic of the times we live in and make use of the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to gauge pulse of their customers and thrive.

Before we move forward, let’s take a quick stock of few key business objectives that are largely driven data.

Numbers don’t lie: 63% of businesses cannot gather insights from collected data. Data experts waste half of their time in making ad-hoc reports for teams.

• Drive Revenue

This one’s a no brainer. Which business does not wish to be profitable? From predicting business outcomes and improving business strategy to driving better customer engagement, insights derived from capturing customer sentiment can be leveraged to drive various avenues of revenue growth.

• Competitive Advantage

To gain first mover advantage, it is important to keep a tab on your customer’s conversations and their expectations. Little nuggets of gems are hidden within their pain-points, feedbacks, suggestions.

• Scalability and Agility

Getting a good start is half the battle won. Implementing the winning model at a larger scale is a different game altogether. To be able to scale for masses, businesses need to break away from the traditional barriers that may limit their employees from contributing optimally.

• Customer Affinity

It cannot be debated that retaining existing customers is equally important, if not more, than attracting new customers. It is also tough to do so, and businesses are constantly looking for ways to increase customer loyalty. Businesses cannot increase their customer’s affinity towards their brand by carpet-bombing them with one-size-fits-all communication tactics. Personalisation is the mantra to follow to build loyalty and advocacy.

Numbers don’t lie: 2,000,000,000,000,000,000 (2 quintillion) bytes of data are generated every day across all industries. Despite this, most businesses only analyse 12% of the data they have, which means 88% of the data do not see the light of the day.

5 Ways to Extract Actionable Insights from Customer Data

Many businesses follow the outdated concept of selling first and serving later. It is time to flip the notion on its head and build meaningful relation with customers first, sales will follow. Businesses need to create more personalised experiences for their customers in order to build a long-lasting bond, and to build personalised experiences, they need visibility of their customer’s pain-points, needs, expectations from them. Customer interaction data is only as good as a business’s ability to leverage it.

Having said that, here are 5 ways in which organisations can derive actionable insights from customer data.

Numbers don't lie: Data-driven businesses are 23 times more likely to acquire customers.

• Eliminate Complexities By Connecting All Touchpoints

While it is important for businesses to offer their customers the flexibility to connect from any channel of their choosing, it is equally important for them to have a unified view of the interactions between the customer and their employees on a single platform. Many communication platforms claim to offer omnichannel solutions. However, the fact of the matter is that most of these solutions fail at bringing all the data under one roof. Without centralisation of the data, it is next to impossible to gather, categorise, and analyse customer information into a structured database and create holistic experiences for your employees, and your customers.

• Keep Your Customer Data Clean

Businesses need to maintain the data quality through regularly reviewing and purging redundant customer information and duplicate data from their database. But as they say, prevention is better than cure. While labelling customer enquiries can provide businesses with heaps of data, it is important to follow a systematic naming convention for the labelling process, or there’s a good chance of ending up with lots of duplicate or even useless data.

• Centralise Data Storage and Avoid Fragmentation

It is important to store your customer data on centralised platform to avoid inefficient workflows within the various units in the organisation and to prevent poor customer experience. Customers will connect from mediums and devices of their choosing. Businesses should be able to view and analyse the information in real-time, on one platform, to be able to have a holistic view of their customers. It is important for businesses to have a cohesive information collection and labelling process.

Apart from lead nurturing and engaging with customers, a wholesome CX solution should be capable of unifying data from all communication channels for your staff to be able to connect the dots and see and close experience gaps. Fragmentation of data can be avoided when a system allows data to flow freely between internal and external systems, providing a truly end-to-end comprehensive solution that maximises business values and helps to deliver a frictionless customer experience.

• Comply With Data Protection Policies

Businesses dealing with customer data must take significant steps to secure data quality and security. A data governance strategy should be put in place to create rules for storing and managing customer data and exchanging the data across various internal departments of the business.

Organisations should assign clear roles and clearance levels to their employees for accessibility to customer data. Businesses should also take measures to train their staff on data protection policies and practices.

• Use Real Data to Empower Your Employees

It is important to collect, organise and process critical data that can deliver better ROI for your business.  

Empowered teams proactively drive conversations with your customers. They create opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell your products and services, instead of waiting for customers to come to them with enquiries. But to be able to do this, your employees should have accessibility to customer data.  

Your customer support team forms the first line of defence for your business. They field hundreds, if not thousands of customer enquiries every day. That’s a goldmine of training material of what-to-do and what-not-to do for your team. The captured data can be used to formulate the best approach for a similar situation, craft the best responses for sensitive grievances, and identify frequently asked questions that can be automated.

Numbers don't lie: Just 10% increase in data visibility can give businesses an additional $65 million boost in net income.

The world runs on data, and the businesses that are able to leverage these structured data to optimise their services and share the information seamlessly across various customer-facing teams will be better-placed to operate most efficiently and act with agility when disruptions occur. Total experience platform like CINNOX, provides you with a single-window, command centre view and control over interaction data from all digital and telephony mediums, to aid your business in making data driven decisions.