An excellent customer experience is a must for the growth of any business. The most crucial component of creating a great customer experience is understanding the entire journey the customer takes. Data should be your best friend during that process.
Businesses are trying to stand out in a market full of competitors by creating solid relationships with their customers. One of the most effective ways is inputting data-driven customer experience into your marketing strategies. It can be the main factor that will help you build trust with your customers and maintain long-lasting relationships with them.
In this article, we will give you twelve steps to develop a data-driven customer experience. Following these steps, you can build a data-driven customer experience that increases brand loyalty and sales.
The benefits of data-driven customer experience
Collecting data helps you get a clear idea of your current customer experience and can be the basis of making it excellent. Here are the advantages that a data-driven customer experience provides:
- It helps you improve the customer experience
Companies can collect data on what areas they are succeeding and should continue in the same way. Also, they get valuable insights about what changes they need to do to enhance customer experience.
- It provides a personalized experience for your customers
For today’s buyers, a personalized customer experience is the main factor expected when interacting with companies. Data also allows for providing a customer experience based on an individual’s needs and demands. Customers often make buying decisions based on product quality and personalized experience.
Take a look at Monday CRM’s customer data:
- Gives information about your customers’ behavior
Data analytics also gives you information on how your buyers can behave in the future. You can add it to your internal knowledge base and use it for other strategies. This will help you start planning product sourcing or marketing and advertising campaigns.
All these benefits prove that you can’t build a successful customer experience strategy without data. However, developing a data-driven customer experience strategy is still challenging for many businesses.
Twelve steps that will help you develop a data-driven customer experience
Many companies understand the value that data can bring but don’t manage to implement it properly in their marketing efforts. Creating a data-driven marketing customer experience requires continuous effort. Here we will discuss the ways that will help you successfully do that.
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Collect the data and set up a data analytics platform
The first step to devising a data-driven customer experience strategy is to collect data smartly. Consider how, when, and why customers interact with your company and collect information from all possible sources and devices. Sources can include your websites, email subscription lists, social media channels, and surveys.
You can ask your website visitors to give information when they are trying to sign up for your email list or rewards programs.
Moreover, techniques for collecting data are important but don’t forget that the higher the data quality, the more valuable your data insights will be. For example, you can gather data through Google Analytics, which is a commonly used method.
Here’s what the dashboard looks like:
To help you during this process, you should choose a data analytics platform to organize your data and guide you on which parts of your customer experience are most important. This will be based on your business goals, needs, and expectations.
2. Identify your customers and their preferences
To attract customers with a data-driven customer experience, you should clearly understand who your current customers are and find out as much relevant information about their:
- interests
- demographics
- values
- online behavior
- shopping habits
You shouldn’t guess your audience’s preferences but collect relevant and helpful information. You can research social media sites, reviews, and forums to gain complete details about your customers.
Another option is sending them to complete surveys via email or text message. Customers are happy to share what they think of you, how you can provide a superior experience, and what products and services they need.
If you have enough data, you can create segments based on their characteristics and develop customer profiles. After creating segments, you can analyze their differences and similarities and tailor your customer experience to take advantage of that information.
3. Learn about your customer journey
If you have already identified your customers, the next step is gathering information about their customer journey. Customers could take multiple paths before reaching the final destination. And no matter their stage, they expect a positive experience.
By creating a customer journey map, you discover the customers’ pain points and ensure that your customer journey and business goals are aligned. For example, if you own a candy shop and customers want a new healthy product, you have to dedicate time and effort to creating sugar-free sweets, especially for them.
To create a customer journey map, we can suggest there are several steps that you can take this essential steps:
✓ Define clear goals and create user personas
✓ Learn all the touchpoints
✓ Do user research to collect data
✓ Discuss with all your department to find fresh ideas
✓ Check whether you have all the necessary resources and tools
✓ Create a journey map and regularly make changes
Designing a customer journey map requires general steps, varying depending on the company’s type. The customer journey map for travel companies will be a little different from a map created for B2B SaaS buyers. You can read the Hubspot article with helpful insights if you want to learn more about this topic.
4. Centralize and combine your data
The customer experience is spread over different systems, channels, and formats. Therefore one of the essential jobs should be collecting all that together in one place.
Only by bringing them together can you see how customer experience improvements positively impact your key operational metrics. Based on that data, you can make reports and create campaigns to provide your customers with a great experience.
One of the important steps is to define clear objectives. Check whether you have all important databases and software and review the systems. Think about which departments of your company will use the centralized data. Following these steps, pay attention to data security and ensure that combining data can help your teams provide a great customer experience. It is vital to pay attention to the security of email domains and use the DMARK tool to protect your domain from frauding and phishing.
In addition, it will be beneficial to use data vizualization tools to simplify the management of a company’s data. These tools will help you collect and integrate various sources and formats of data from different channels into a single source of data.
5. Enrich your marketing and content production efforts
The data you gather about your customers’ behaviors and pain points are changing quickly, so marketers should transform their marketing strategies according to new data.
You can use the opportunities data gives to create highly personalized marketing strategies. With the help of consumer data, you can figure out what methods can help maintain excellent relationships with your customers.
To create successful marketing campaigns, you must understand your target audience. Data can help you target them by giving geographic, demographic, and psychographic information about your customers. Your next step should be creating marketing campaigns concentrated on the needs of specific groups.
Maybe your target customer is a young person who is new to the world of freelancing, therefore, suggest time-tracking software for freelancers to improve their productivity.
Here’s what it looks like from Hubstaff:
For content, you’ll be able to understand the topics and formats people want to interact with. With those insights, you can increase traffic to your web properties and funnel visitors to your product pages.
6. Measure results and be ready to make changes
Your job doesn’t stop when you put data into action. Instead, you should track and continually optimize customers’ experiences. This helps easily adjust to changes in your customers’ needs. Ensure that you examine your customer experience strategy regularly. If the data gives actionable insights, improve your strategy to keep delivering great customer experiences.
Data can help you discover at which stages in your user journeys your customers stop being engaged. As you keep monitoring and measuring the results and taking action to improve, a great data-driven customer experience will be guaranteed.
7. Put data analytics into your team culture
Research has shown that data-driven companies are six times as likely to retain customers, and are nineteen times more likely to be profitable.
Typically, customer experience teams are people-oriented, as their goal is to solve customers’ problems and understand the importance of data to achieve that. A data-driven customer experience does not contradict that. It puts the customer first, delivering what they need at the right time.
If your goal is to provide a data-driven customer experience, your first step should be hiring data-driven people. Data allows you to combine support, marketing, sales, and teams and align their efforts to provide an amazing customer experience.
Your employees from all departments must understand why data-driven customer experience is vital. Encourage action by converting research results into areas for improvement.
Thinking in terms of data, first of all, is a mindset. Therefore start creating the right environment from employee onboarding to help your teams use data and new technologies.
Communicate with your customer experience and other teams about why you are establishing a data culture in your company. Provide your employees with essential tools and ensure they get access to the data quickly. Organize training and courses to help use data in a more organized way.
8. Make predictions based on data
After you’ve used your data to fix any glaring holes in your customer experience and adopted data-driven initiatives as part of your company culture, you can start to improve in other ways.
Predictive analytics is predicting future events, behaviors, and outcomes based on historical data. Due to predictive analytics, businesses can anticipate customer needs based on previous purchases.
You can gain predictive analytics by phone calls, emails, and other data from different touchpoints. It helps businesses find the best way to learn about specific customer demands and desires. As the market is full of competitors who suggest similar products, this can help you have loyal customers and stand out in the market, offering customers the best experiences.
Your primary responsibility should be to define your purpose using data for future predictions. Check if you have the relevant data. Ensure you clearly communicate with your teams and encourage them to use the data when making decisions.
A few steps can help you not just guess but discover and predict what your business needs in the future. The first step is just collecting high-quality data. Then you should center all information and tools to implement this data. If you own a real estate business, with the help of data, you can clearly understand what kind of properties your buyer would prefer. Data can help predict and avoid risks.
9. Build trust with your customers
Many modern buyers love to share customer feedback but are also deeply concerned about how their personal information may be used. Customer data is a key factor in the highly competitive market. If companies are honest about the information they gather, people will be more likely to trust them and continue to provide their data.
There are a few steps that you can take to build trust with your customers to collect their data. First, be transparent about how you will use the personal data you gather. Don’t give their data third part sides to earn money. Next, ensure that the data customers give is used to provide value to them. It includes improving customer experience or creating products and services that make their lives better.
After building trust start collecting customer feedback.
There are various methods for that, starting from long-form and short in-app surveys to customer interviews. If you ask for feedback for your email subscribers, give them updates about your product. Give them incentives like coupons and discounts to encourage them.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The formula is pretty easy. The quickest way to lose customers is poor customer experience. And the most effective way to gain customer loyalty and business growth is excellent customer experience. But putting this into action isn’t as easy as it seems. And because of that, we have data that provides the right value at the right time and therefore creates a great customer experience.
Developing a data-driven customer experience relies on people, data, and a process by which to analyze the available information. And in this article, we went step by step and discussed the journey that will help formulate a data-driven customer experience and grow your business.
