An Effective Data Strategy will Help Organizations Improve Customer Experience

Organizations all over the world are trying to deliver the best possible customer experience. While engaging with the brand, decision-makers need the right kind of data about their customers. Customer data is not just demographic information. It tells you more than that like what can make people feel good about your brand.

Leveraging right data and creating a comprehensive data strategy to deliver the right experience can improve every brand-customer interaction. We are living in the digital era. This gives organizations access to huge amounts of customer data. However, just huge volumes of data is not sufficient enough to make a clear strategy.

With advancing technologies, organizations don't have a clear idea of how to create it. Organizations can use analytics to create a Data Strategy and improve customer experience thereby having better retention rates and loyalty.

Absence of a data strategy, an organization cannot organize data and harness insights from it to adapt to evolving marketing conditions. Since data so available is fragmented, siloed and scattered across the organization, the key is to connect all this data. It is important that organizations provide data-driven personalized customer experiences for more conversions.

Consumers have become more demanding than ever before. If customers face poor experience, they'll simply switch with some other organization. The worst mistake organizations make is trying to gain the much-valued 360-degree view of the customer before they have a well-defined data strategy.

They think of a data lake which has data from several channels, standardize it, and magically spit out valuable insights. They believe that once all data is collected, it'll be easier for them to know more about their customers, which will help them to deliver optimal customer experience.

For a matter of fact, creating a data lake is troublesome and costly. Moreover, most organizations don't have optimal resources to invest in it. Ultimately, if they manage they create one, this often ends up in creating more problems rather solving some.

According to Svein Olslund, Senior Director of Digital Analytics and Accountability at Cisco, instead of trying to gain 360-view of the customer which is often never the solution, start with comprehending most important questions which you need to answer in order to improve customer experience.

For instance, Pampers as a brand targeting new parent buying diapers is trying to improve customer experience. Some important needs the brand must focus on –  I need a lot of information about which size and type to buy, I need recurring delivery, and I need them delivered just before I run out.

By prioritizing the data, the brand can fulfill those needs, thereby delivering great customer experience. All this can be achieved without using data about gender, age, location etc. Companies can focus on gaining a 45-degree view of the customer. Companies shouldn't think of just accessing the data, but the goal should be to access only the right data.

Companies can get a holistic customer view by leveraging organized data. This ensures companies to offer personalized customer experiences at every stage of the customer journey. Manufacturers can notify customers about their orders via an email or messages wherein they can track shipping and offer predictability.

Though the ultimate goal of the organizations should be to optimize the experience at each stage of the customer journey, it is recommended to focus on improving one part of the journey first. This ensures prioritizing the data you need to access, as some organizations lack necessary resources to improve each stage at the same time.

Also, probably one stage will have more impact on customer experience than any other stage. Discover that stage that greatly impacts customer's emotions, positive or negative. What stage are they when they're feeling positive about the brand? At what stage are they immensely satisfied with the brand? When are they feeling negative about the brand? The answers could be different for different industries and customer segments.

If data is used effectively, it can influence every person involved in the food chain. Evolving technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT are being used by multinational manufacturing organizations to optimize inventory levels and anticipate equipment failure. All of this relies on the analysis of sensor data, site monitoring data, and asset management systems.

To effectively set this mechanism in place, it is more than collecting real-time data and data governance models that cram databases into silos. It requires an experienced architecture for organizing the data, a conceptual model to understand what can be delivered and using an appropriate technology that brings them together.

To understand how much you know about the customer and their digital behavior, audit and monitor all of your digital channels irrespective of the business unit. Mapping the information leads the road towards unifying teams to consider the data holistically. This will urge them to identify data points beyond their own departments and channels when discovering insights about customer's needs.

Organizations that are not letting go of legacy structures, past strategies, will have difficulties in achieving customer experience enhancements, simply because of their resistance to change. Have your goals clearly set. Clear goals and objectives help in connecting the right data.