Top 5 Guiding Principles for Customer Analytics

The significance of customer analytics for businesses of any scale cannot be overemphasized. It’s the key to understanding consumer behavior, analyzing it with the right models, and making predictions that can make all the difference.

The world’s changing. COVID-19 has left an indelible mark on mankind, fundamentally challenging everything we know about driving businesses in the right direction. Customer analytics holds the promise of showing the way in these difficult times with massive opportunities to fill voids in the times to come.

Customer analytics is ultimately all about fostering a great customer-brand relationship that can contribute to better customer experience and with the long-term goal of promoting brand loyalty. At a deeper level, customer analytics helps you understand customer behavior, examine the relevant demographics data, and see their preferences to be able to match them closely.

Remember, delivering the right product at the right time, optimized for the right channel and at the right price can get you greater conversions. Businesses can benefit from the five core elements of customer data that can provide powerful insights indeed:

1. Sentiment analytics: This practice refers to the measurement of customer feedback and their affinity towards your products, services, and the brand as a whole.
2. Customer 360: This is a holistic approach that studies complete datasets related to the customers’ activities. It helps you assess when a customer is about to leave.
3. Customer segmentation: This is a great way to understand what works for your customer base. Ultimately, segmentation helps strengthen your relationship with your customers through a targeted approach.
4. Next best offer: Here, you basically supply what is needed at the right time at the right price. Keep customers engaged and get them to try new things.
5. Journey analytics: Utilize the right channels and sales readiness for conversions.

Customer analytics is not just about analyzing data but also about the approach taken towards execution that is required to synthesize that information and take the necessary steps for greater engagement. From my experience, I can confidently share with you the following 5 powerful tips that will serve you well in building impactful customer analytics:

1. Build Customer Profiles as the first step towards personalization

Analyzing data to capture customer behavior trends can help businesses understand their consumers’ preferences, needs, and requirements. Data mining across customer interaction points can yield rich data reserves that can then be tapped into.

With this information at hand, organizations can then take the game a notch up by using data to make accurate predictions about customer behavior and buying habits. This typically involves building profiles for customers, more so for those who routinely interact with the business and make profitable purchases.

1.1 Use Real-Time Metrics to Visualize Trends

The customer profiles can be pretty comprehensive and this will help increase the accuracy of future behavior predictions. The world, post-COVID-19, will undoubtedly witness drastic changes in customer behavior.

Mapping these changes in near real-time and adapting business strategies with the power of machine learning and AI will be a real game-changer.

However, merely capturing customer data won’t suffice. It is imperative that companies use the data to estimate KPIs and metrics of interest. Real-time dashboards can greatly streamline the process and help marketing executives see key metrics to simplify the decision-making process.

2. Competitive Analysis for Better Engagement

Businesses should strive to analyze the market trends and explore the places where their customers make a purchase. It is pivotal to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the brand offerings too. After all, this will be a constant source of improvement. Measure your market share, understand the impact of the competition, and look at the scenario from the point of view of a customer. This is all that’s needed.

Following this, apply tracking and nudging techniques on your digital channels to engage the customers on a regular basis. Remember, consistency is key here. This will allow you to learn from the customers’ responses and develop better offerings to best fit the expectations of your customers. Constant feedback and survival analytics combined with the right digital channel triggers can help you retain, acquire, and cross-sell. All you need is the right analytics strategy, expertise and tools.

3. Re-invent Customer Segmentation for Targeting

Once customer profiles have been established, customers with similar interaction/behavioral patterns can be grouped together into one segment. Since the entire customer portfolio associated with a business is typically very broad, customer segmentation divides customers into easily manageable subgroups.

While the criteria for such groupings abound, the following are some of the most commonly used ones:

• Similar demographics
• Similar interests
• Similarities in lifestyles
• Common needs and preferences

Once segments have been created, targeting customers based on their interests and requirements is greatly simplified. The primary reason that drives market and customer segmentation is the need to create customized marketing campaigns for these different segments. Without customer segmentation, marketing campaigns are akin to shooting arrows in the dark, after all. Product prices and promotional schemes are all tailored around these segments.

Customer segmentation thus helps reach the most profitable customers. Not only that, but company executives can also then reposition brands, products, and services to cater to the needs of specific customer groups, which is bound to yield higher engagement and returns.

4. Adopt Customer 360 for Relationship Building & Increase Conversion Frequency

Customer 360 is the practice of capturing a complete 360-degree view of your target audience. Consumers today engage with brands across multiple channels including brand stores, social media, e-commerce stores, and mobile apps.

It is, therefore, crucial for companies to monitor all channels and strive to provide the most consistent experience across all platforms. In addition, mining the customers’ digital data trails as they interact with your brand across the digital touch-points will yield valuable insights.

The post-COVID-19 scenario will only serve to accentuate the customer 360 practice as customers embrace digital channels and engage with them in more profound ways. The onus is then on the brands to utilize analytics and segmentation in the best possible manner.

4.1 System Automation Can Work Wonders

Once the system begins generating revenue, businesses should consider automating the whole system by bringing together the analytics model, customer data, and the strategies.

Triggers can be configured and the system can be programmed to alert the managers when certain threshold conditions are met. Customers can be engaged with the best promotional offers at the right place and time, resulting in higher profits.

5. Streamline Customer Journey for Monitoring

It is important for businesses to develop a keen sense of the complete value chain, operational systems, and internal processes that support every single interaction and transaction of every customer. Identify the steps that could be automated for faster responses, develop processes to manage and retain loyal and ordinary customers, and finally, utilize analytics to match customer expectations.

Customer Journey Analytics is the process of modeling customer touch-points and profile data into customer journeys for three key purposes:

1. Predictions
2. Pro-active monitoring
3. Root cause analysis

The output of customer journey analytics is extremely significant. You obtain actionable insights that drive cost reductions, customer satisfaction improvements, lead to higher retention levels, and cross-sell/up-sell uplift.

Needless to say, analytics can greatly streamline customer journeys in favor of the customers and brands. It’s a win/win situation.

Conclusion

Customer analytics, 360 and segmentation, when done the right way, can empower businesses to respond to customer expectations in faster and more meaningful ways. It is one of the core building blocks of a digital transformation journey.

#Technologies Required - #BusinessIntelligence, #WebApp, #MobileApp, #MLLibraries, #BigData, #DataWarehouse, #AI, #Cloud, #RPA, #Automation, #AnalyticsPackages, #Algorithms, #AIOPs and others

Talk to us about our in-house solution. You can reach out to us on [email protected] for any help in this area.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Disclaimer: This publication contains general information and is not intended to be comprehensive nor to provide professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, and it should not be acted on or relied upon or used as a basis for any investment or other decision or action that may affect you or your business. Before taking any such decision you should consult a suitably qualified professional advisor. While reasonable effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this publication, this cannot be guaranteed, and neither associated organization nor any affiliate thereof or other related entity shall have any liability to any person or entity which relies on the information contained in this publication. Any such reliance is solely at the user’s risk. This article may contain references to other information sources.