Demystifying Customer Analytics

 DATA…..DATA….DATA

 There has a been a lot of hype and talk about data everywhere like data is the new oil, it gives a competitive edge to the brands. No doubt data is important and plays a vital role in strengthening strategic planning and helping you to take informed decisions but do we actually know what all data is available and how well it can be used. 

 While there are many interpretations as to various phases of data life-cycle but a typical data life-cycle looks like this.

Data --> Information --> Insights --> Impact

 If we specifically talk about Customer Analytics it is a combination of activities which includes Collection of data, standardizing the date to make it uniform and easy to read, slicing and dicing of the data by using advanced statistical or tech tools to get some meaningful insights out of that and then finally using that data to see the impact.

 The most essential part of Customer Analytics is Descriptive Analytics which means interpreting the customer data by looking at the trends and pattern to assess what’s working or what are the opportunity areas where the business should focus on. Descriptive analytics mainly has 3 quantifiable components:

• Who your customers are, where they are from and what is their profile.
• What kind of transactions or engagements they have with your brand and what is their spend pattern or buying behavior.
• When do they engage or transact with you, are they frequent or come and go.

This descriptive analytics acts as a stepping stone for the predictive and prescriptive analytics ( forecasting basis the historical data) and helps in designing the forward looking strategy to match the outcome from predictive models.

Once the data is in place and you know what is the end result or outcome you are chasing it’s time to leverage on the technology for transforming the heavy data into meaningful and refined clusters.

Listed below are few tech platforms which can be very useful to store heavy data and optimize the desired results.

 1.  Customer Data platform – A great tool which enables organizations to centralize their data collection and unify customer profiles from disparate sources. It also helps in and creating and managing segments.

 2.  Business intelligence tools – BI tools transform raw data into meaningful and useful information to enable more effective strategic, and operational insights and decision making that contribute to improving overall enterprise performance. It’s also an effective tool for reporting and data visualization.

 3.  Customer Journey mapping – These tools help you identify the most important moments in your customer’s journey which brands can fill with relevant offerings matching customer needs.

 4.  Marketing automation – It’s a platform to plan, coordinate, manage and measure all the marketing campaigns, both online and offline. It is an effective tool which reduces the manual effort of creating and deploying a campaign.

Simplifying the data and using it basis your objective give direction to your efforts......so use it wisely.