A business can’t run without customers.
You’ve got to draw in customers, then ensure they keep coming back. Ideally, they’ll love your products enough to introduce them to their friends. The better the experience they have with your brand, the better your relationship with them will be.
But how do you monitor that sort of thing? And how do you use details about customer behaviour to generate actionable insights?
We’re going to answer these questions (and more).
What are Customer Experience Analytics?
Customer experience (CX) is made up of the impressions and feelings that your customers come away with after interacting with your brand. It also includes the way they feel throughout the steps of their customer journey.
Customer experience analytics (CX analytics) focuses on collecting customer data that gives insight into these feelings. That data is then processed so it can be used to help improve CX, as well as other aspects of the way your business is run.
The vast majority of businesses recognise the value CX brings to their company, and we’re going to get into the reasons why.
Why Do You Need to Analyse Your Customer Experience?
Put simply, analysing your customer experience lets you gather CX data, which is highly useful for a variety of reasons. Three of the most important ones are because the right CX data lets you do the following:
Make Informed Decisions
Analytics tools exist to help you do many things for your business, including making data-backed choices. That means having facts to back up any decisions you make, so you’re never acting blindly or in ways that go against what the data suggests.
Analysing your customer experience is particularly helpful when it comes to business decision making. That’s because customer experience data shows you exactly what needs work to provide a better CX, paving the way to stronger customer relationships.
Track Essential Metrics
It’s vital to track your key metrics and KPIs so you can quantify your business’ performance in those regards.
One particularly useful metric to track is your Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS measures how likely a customer is to recommend your brand, which tells you about both their customer satisfaction and the lifetime value you can expect to get from them.
CX analytics gives you insight into NPS, customer effort score (CES), and many others of these kinds of metrics.
Identify Process Bottlenecks
A process bottleneck is a problem that slows down your company’s productivity and workflows by creating “traffic jams” that stop things from moving forward as they should. This is a visual representation of how one might form, and what that looks like:
Identifying these bottlenecks before they have a chance to become major problems is very helpful. That’s another reason why using a CX analytics platform is so useful – it helps your company identify process bottlenecks in customer interactions.
What Industries Can Benefit From Customer Experience Analytics?
Most customer-centric industries can benefit from CX analytics to an extent. This is doubly true for industries that place a lot of emphasis on things like customer loyalty and catering to customer needs.
We’re going to consider some of the industries that stand to gain the most from using CX analytics.
Call Centres
Few places focus quite as much on customer support as call centres. Having access to more customer insights is particularly valuable to contact centres for precisely this reason.
Contact centres help their associated companies boost their customer retention rates –if the centres handle their CX well. That means gathering data, and understanding and acting on it.
The better call centre agents understand customers’ needs and the reasons behind their CSAT (customer satisfaction) scores, the more they’ll be able to lower customer churn rates. CX analytics paves the way for this understanding.
Retail Businesses
The happier the customers of a retail business are, the more likely they are to spend money with that business and remain loyal. Since CX analytics make it easier to decide what to prioritise to create the best CX, they’re invaluable to retail businesses.
Customer experience analytics solutions also amplify the benefits that the best retail management software brings to retail companies. That’s because they support the CRM aspect of retail management, ensuring retail businesses build up great relationships with their customers.
Health Industry
In the health industry, few things improve patient relations quite like efficient analysis of data sources. In other words, since effectively processing your customers’ information lets you help them improve their health more, CX software is incredibly useful to the health industry.
Improved CX analytics leads to more personalised experiences that directly address and resolve pain points. That’s never more important than when those pain points might be causing literal, physical pain.
Hospitality
The hospitality industry is structured around providing real-time experiences to customers. This means it stands to gain plenty from CX analytics, since those are hugely helpful in improving the customer experience.
Ecommerce Brands
The world of ecommerce relies on excellent customer experience management. That’s one reason why CX analytics are so crucial to the ecommerce sector.
Additionally, CX analytics can help direct the optimisation process that ecommerce sites must continually go through.
How To Start Analysing Customer Experience
Beginning the CX analysis process might seem daunting if you’ve never done it before. However, once you’ve got it down, it can turn into one of the most must-have marketing tools out there. After all, there’s no better way to market to customers than by basing your marketing strategies directly on their data.
Determine Customer Data Which is Essential For Your Business Processes
This step depends entirely on what you need to know to run your business efficiently. Do you rely on sentiment analysis, or is it more important to your business to act based on customer feedback?
In this stage, it’s also important to plan out what sorts of business outcomes you’re after, and which algorithms you’ll need to get you there.
Identify All Channels Used By Customers
For your CX analytics-fueled digital transformation to achieve the most impactful results, you’ll want to ensure it covers all bases. That means identifying each channel customers use so you can guarantee, later down the line, that you provide that critical consistency across channels:
This is also the key to great omnichannel strategies that create a seamless experience across channels and boost customer engagement universally.
Aggregate All Data From Existing Customer Channels
It’s a good idea to unify, in a single dashboard, everything customers have said in their communications with your business thus far. That includes conversations that happened via messaging services, social media, and any other touchpoints.
How Does Data Analytics Help Improve Customer Experience?
Data analytics can be used to various ends, including to generate predictive analytics that help you guess customer behaviour before those customers have interacted with you. We’re going to look at how the things data analytics can do improves CX.
Prioritise Issues Based on Revenue Impact
Machine learning programs can help you generate the kinds of predictive analytics that will make it easier to gauge the revenue impact that any given issue has.
What that means in practical terms is that you can optimise the way your business runs without needing to try a hundred options first – you can get straight to the heart of the issue, ensuring you make your stakeholders and customers happy.
Know Consumer Behaviour to Influence More Conversions
It’s no secret that the power consumers hold is on the rise:
That’s at least partly because customers have the power to drive your conversions when they’re impressed with your brand. By harnessing the power consumers have to support your company, without putting a strain on your financial services, you can increase your sales and make more customers happy in the process.
Create Messaging Personalisations
More customer data means easier personalisation opportunities. Greater degrees of personalisation mean you can make your customers feel heard by your brand.
When you effectively use and analyse customer data, you can craft messaging personalisations that will address customers directly and let them know you value them as individuals.
Forecast Customer Needs
What’s better than finding a brand that knows what you need before you even need it?
Forecasting the needs of your customers lets you cater to those needs in advance. That means never leaving customers waiting, and always being prepared when they’ve got a request for you. In other words, you get to provide much better customer support.
Differentiate Yourself From Competitors
It’s easier to stand out when you can make your customers happier than all your competitors, which is exactly what CX analytics helps you do. You can also differentiate yourself by using CX analytics to improve and optimise the way your business runs.
Start Analysing Customer Experience With RingCentral Solutions
RingCentral lets you use real-time analytics to get an up-to-date grasp on the status, needs, and preferences of your customers. That means you’re always right on top of any new developments, and can act quickly to cater to their needs.
With RingCentral, you can derive your analytics from within the same UCaaS platform that you use for all your communications.
Originally published Dec 29, 2021
