According to Walker Info, by 2020, 86% of customers will rate customer experience as the most important factor they will consider when making a purchase.
Customer experience is defined as a customer’s interaction with a brand or business at all of the different touchpoints. Touchpoints are any way a person can engage with your company and brand, including (but not limited to) websites, online ads, commercials, social media, mail, email, talking on the phone with your support, visiting your store, buying a product and using the product.
Before consumers think about your product or its price, they will think about the experience your company offers them. Even if you offer a great product at a great price, a bad experience will deter people from becoming your customers. This makes it more important than ever to create a data-driven customer experience that adapts to your customers’ changing preferences.
With the right data, you can refine your company’s customer experience, user experience, and data and analytics to improve your bottom line.
A data-driven customer experience relies on people, data, and a process by which to analyze actionable goals from the available information.
Data and analytics are changing the way businesses approach the consumer experience, allowing them to create one that is more dynamic, responsive, and personalized.
A data-driven customer experience strategy is one that is continuously refined by data that you collect at every touch point your company has with a customer. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when using your marketing technology stack to build a better experience for your customers.
An effective marketing strategy will depend on how well you can identify useful data about your customers, capture it, and prioritize it. Every touch point with your company and a customer can yield insights into their behavior. Once you start gathering enough data, you can discover statistically significant relationships between different behavior patterns which you can use as focal points for your marketing efforts.
Data is vital to creating a better customer experience, but the way you analyze data will ultimately determine its usefulness to you. It’s important to understand the life cycle of your own data in order to derive the correct conclusions from it. If you don’t, you could easily be led astray by false trends or by biases which exist in your own gathering methods. However, with a holistic understanding of your data, you can use it to identify areas of improvement.
Tastes, technologies and trends are constantly shifting and changing, which means the way your customers find out about your business could change, too. Data can allow you to keep track of trends so that you can shift your advertising to where they are most likely to see it. If you don’t do this, you could lose customers and could even begin to fall behind your more agile competitors.
Instead of assuming what your customers want, build a profile of them that is based on their actions. With enough data, you can begin to predict the behavior of your customers. You can suggest to them products they have previously purchased or ones they may like based on associated purchases.
With the right data, you could market to customers where they are most likely to see you, be it on a particular social media platform or on a website many of them read. The data you collect can also help you optimize your messaging for each of the personas that frequent the different channels.
To stand out from your competitors, you must identify and emphasize the unique selling point (USP) for your business. With the vast amount of data available to you, you can now identify your USP for each individual customer and the best way to market it to them.
You can better map the buyer’s journey for each of your buyer personas with more data. You can then use this to refine their experience at every stage, making it easier for them to connect with you and for you to connect with them.
Your company needs data to refine its customer experience, but your collection methods should never degrade that experience. Your customers should never be inconvenienced by your data collection efforts.
Collect data from your customers from whatever device they use, whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop. Their behaviors may differ between platforms, allowing you to further refine your customer experience.
You will have to continually evaluate and refine your marketing strategies based on new data you gather about customers and the results of each of your marketing efforts. The right data can help you to adapt to new trends and to the changing tastes and behaviors of your customer base.
Data is changing the ways customers and business interact with one another, but you can leverage it to not only improve your customer experience but your business as a whole. By creating a better customer experience, you could make your organization as a whole leaner, smarter and faster, and better able to adapt and to survive in a changing environment.
In order to start creating a customer experience strategy, you need to know your customer. Download our free World's Best Buyer Persona Guide below. It is the best starting point for getting to know who your customer is.