Why you need to become a customer intelligent enterprise and how to get there?
Most businesses intuitively realize their customer relationship is at the heart of their operational model. In an era of ever-escalating consumer empowerment, new strategies to engage clients seem to generate a buzz every few months. This recent focus on reimagining the customer experience is largely because such strategies deliver positive outcomes and operational advantages. A customer intelligent enterprise identifies and analyzes customer behavior to generate and embed a dynamic response within its processes and functions.
A 2013 study by Accenture found a lack of brand loyalty among millennials as one of the primary challenges faced by businesses today. The 2018 PWC Global Customer Insights Survey determined a larger percentage of customers are being influenced in their purchasing behavior by social media, rather than individual retail websites and marketing.
Lack of brand loyalty and changes in purchasing behavior make it increasingly apparent that businesses must set up a responsive feedback loop to strategize effectively and to achieve optimal outcomes in their actions and processes. This feedback loop should include customer perceptions and behaviors to gain a true understanding of customer needs.
Customer Experience Produces Tangible Results
In what can sometimes seem like a rush for easy answers and clever jargon, strategies built around customer experience and intelligence are validated by the results they generate in market share, customer retention, and inflated profit. For example:
- By redesigning their customer experience to deliver a more personalized experience and shorter wait times through increased throughput, customer insights consultancy Lenati was able to deliver an increase in revenue of $400 million for Starbucks.
- The Amadeus IT Group’s use of customer intelligence to optimize business behavior within the travel sector is helping to rationalize a particularly dynamic and volatile industry.
- Vodafone UK developed an app to deliver real time graphical data on their network performance which resulted in a 54% reduction in escalated complaints requiring callback. In an industry first, the company used the app to deliver a network satisfaction guarantee that compensated any drop in services with bonus data, in real time.
Moving Past Transitional Customer Research Models
When used alone, traditional customer research and feedback mechanisms are no longer enough to collect data that can be used to create actionable insights. Given the climate of today’s customer-centric approach, a company needs a comprehensive and continuous flow of information to make effective business decisions driven by customer engagement. This real time data can then be analyzed to create solutions that will create an enhanced customer experience. Additionally, contextualized data can be used to generate strategy and specific actions.
Creating intelligent analytical metrics that incorporate domain knowledge are critically important for a business to infuse the data it collects with context. Businesses need to act according to the customer’s terms, and they must also find ways to derive actionable insights from these interactions. Furthermore, these interactions need to be enriched by creating and acknowledging context (i.e. mapping data onto particular demographics, behaviors and conditions to generate targeted actions).
Effective Customer Experience Processes
An effective customer experience process should center on creating a relationship, enriching interactions, interpreting data into insight, and generating actionable responses. As you streamline your customer experience processes, consider the following:
- Move beyond the demographics and raw data. In order to create an enhanced customer experience, a business must move past the mere who, what, where, and when to a comprehension of the why. The aim is to engage the customer into a richer interaction than with previous traditional models to generate contextualized data for real time results.
- Streamline data input. Separating the signal from the noise is a key component for an enhanced customer experience. While there are clear benefits to interacting with customers in a fashion that is engaging and ongoing, the data generated is often unstructured. It’s important that a business streamlines their data, choosing the correct set of filters and metrics to make sense of the information.
- Align business processes with customer experience. Among the primary focuses of a customer intelligent enterprise lies aligning business processes with customer experience. More often than not, it’s the business culture that demands a reimagining (rather than individual processes). Businesses need to take their customer’s perspective, in order to develop actionable strategies that will benefit them.
- Create a customer value proposition. As Mark Cuban famously put it, “Treat your customers like they own you, because they do.” A customer value proposition is the final actionable goal that a customer intelligent enterprise is driving towards. In the age of the empowered consumer, it’s important for businesses to concede that dynamics between enterprises and their consumers have changed. Rather than bracket customer data into categories that reflect the company’s priorities alone, actionable insights must be mapped onto the customer’s preferences and needs. Only then will a business deliver an enhanced customer experience.
Stand Out with Enhanced Customer Experience
Given the current climate of shifting and transient loyalties, it’s imperative for businesses to develop an engaging relationship with their customers. To truly differentiate themselves and retain customer loyalties, businesses must consider data from the perspective of the customers whose actions and statements generate it. Truly game changing insights require businesses to take the customers’ perspective in order to generate actionable strategies to meet those concerns.
At Kanari, we are all about your customer and their experience. Our innovative customer experience management solutions provide a reliable, flexible, and scalable platform to help your company create better customer relationships. Contact a member of our team to schedule your customer experience management consultation.
