Gartner defines Customer Experience (CX) as “the customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, systems, channels or products.”

Acquiring new customers is essential, but at the same time, organizations should prioritize improving their existing customer base by providing them with excellent customer experiences, leading to higher revenue and profitability.

Need for Comprehensive Customer Experience Assurance Platform

Customer Experience Assurance is a platform to provide correct feedback to the stakeholders on customer experience (CX) areas at various product lifecycle stages, enabling teams to make informed decisions on CX and continuously improve it.

Several organizations already have done or are in the process of creating a Customer Experience Assurance service as a standalone unit or as part of their customer experience team. This is helping them enable end-to-end automated customer experience monitoring and assurance for various processes.

CX assurance platform is a catalyst to provide deep insights into the customer experience with the help of quantitative and qualitative analysis based upon real-time data on customer behaviour. A typical CX assurance platform will consist of an ecosystem of assurance on areas such as usability, accessibility, availability, performance, compatibility, and service assurance.

Challenges in measuring Customer Experience

Many organizations have their own CX measurement, and improvement initiatives are being implemented in siloes without interfacing with different departments or validating back with their end customers, causing low ROI on CX efforts. There is also an empathy vacuum for customers, leading to higher customer churn.

Solution approach for Digital CX Assurance Challenges:

Understanding Your Customers: It is important to understand your customer to fine-tune your customer experience strategy.

Gartner provides the below framework to Understand Your Customers Better.

Identify Digital Customer Experience KPIs: To enhance customer experience specific to the company’s product, we have to first identify and measure KPIs and then work to improve CX.

In one of the surveys, the top KPIs being tracked for measuring customer experience are depicted below:

• Customer satisfaction score
• Product or service quality metrics
• Employee engagement
• On-time delivery
• Repeat order
• Returns rates
• Customer efforts score
• First call resolution rate
• Willing to be a reference customer
• Churn rates

Each organization can have customizations as per its maturity, resources and long-term business goals.

Digital CX Dashboard: Gartner recommends the below framework for the CX metrics dashboard.

Enhancing Customer Experience for Higher Revenue and Profitability: There are four primary categories of customers’ salient experiences, namely:

• Interaction Experience –These are the evaluations customer makes based on their interaction with an organization.
• Product Experience – Customer Experiences post product/services usage.
• Brand Perception – Customer’s perception towards a brand and how the brand is delivering value to them.
• Price – Customer’s view on the value received in the price paid to the product

Though all these four areas are important to provide a great customer experience, Continued improvements in the product experience are rewarded with greater loyalty.

Every organization must continuously work to improve customer experience on all the factors described above to retain the existing customer, increase customer loyalty and stay ahead of the competition.

Benefits of Customer Experience Assurance solution

The CX assurance platform has helped organizations keep a tab on CX metrics and fine-tune their strategies to improve customer experience. The following areas have been found to improve with meticulously designed customer experience assurance solutions:

• Real-time insights on CX metrics
• Improvement in customer lifetime value
• Journey mapping and orchestration
• Higher customer loyalty
• Greater operational efficiencies and higher profitability

Conclusion

IGT Solutions is well placed to deliver a customer experience assurance platform to enable organizations on providing hyper-personalization, sentiment analysis, and trends in CX changes coupled with real-time intelligent data analytics.

Author:

Yatender has 20+ years of experience in software test engineering. As the head of Testing Practice at IGT Solutions, Yatender is actively involved in innovations related to test engineering covering new tools, technologies, and solutions, and enabling IGT’s clients to achieve faster time to market quality improvement, and optimization of developer efforts in overall SDLC. A result-oriented leader, proficient in delivering high customer value and achieving excellence in service delivery management with proven skills in consulting and managing large and complex test programs. When away from work, he enjoys reading on a variety of topics and spending time with kids.

The post Digital Customer Experience Assurance appeared first on IGT Solutions.

Artificial Intelligence and Digitalization are creating new waves of change across industries and empowering them to meet customers’ ever-changing expectations. Customer 360 – an Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled analytic framework, aids companies to efficiently create a workflow best-suited for their customer requirements, facilitating enriched customer experience.

Market Scenario

The market landscape of each segment, from retail, travel to hospitality, showcases significant disparities. While the retail market is booming, the travel and hospitality sector is yet to embark on growth.

Industries like: travel and hospitality are still facing the brunt of the pandemic, and there’s significant disruption in ensuing safety measures in international and domestic travel. Also, hotels, resorts, home-shaping platforms like Airbnb have faced a considerable jolt.  While these industries are recuperating, polishing their work structure will help them build greater resilience and stability, putting them on the growth path.

According to recent studies, about the retail sector, in 2019, the global sales generated by the retail market were approximately $25 trillion, with a forecast to reach $27 trillion by 2022. The retail market is flourishing – whether it is physical, in-store retail, or online retailing/e-commerce channels. One of the core reasons is that retailers are constantly fine-tuning their daily operations using digitalization and new-age technologies. Gaining insights and analytics helped them drive a better consumer experience which opened up new business opportunities.

Customer 360

The advent of intelligent technologies like Customer 360 caters to the needs of the modern-day customer, enabling them to connect with brands and have instant access to informative content through multiple channels. These channels include mobile apps, customer support, online communities, social media marketing, and many more. Such customer-relevant data can be processed and analyzed to personalize the customer experience in real-time.

The success driver for any service organization is the customer happiness index. Service providers in retail, travel, and hospitality can stand out by combining customer interaction footprints through all channels. With a 360-degree view of customers, service providers can offer personalized services best suited for their customers, augmenting their overall experience.

Customer 360 Benefits

Today, it has become challenging for most industries to meet the demands of the widely scattered customers -geographically and demographically. While most companies have opted for digitalization into their workflow, how to drive value from it still remains the big question. It is important for companies to understand their digitization capabilities, and implementing the same in their operations shall empower them with better analytical tools, reduce their costs, and expand their businesses.

Companies now have huge customer interaction with them, thanks to digitalization. With customer 360, it’s easier for companies to segregate their customers into different categories by analyzing their patterns, purchase behavior, social media interactions, interests and geographies, and ancillary sales.

Customer 360  in Retail Sector:

Retail brands are constantly looking to boost their marketing KPIs and enrich customer experiences. However, they face challenges like dealing with various data sources and disparate systems, making it difficult to create and manage a centralized index of records.

With customer 360, brands are now able to connect with external systems for new analytics and have access to master customer product data. Brands are enabled with a clear and single view of the customer. Customer 360 allows an automated combination of integrated workflow capabilities, and companies can now improve cross-team collaboration and understand relevant data to use. Useful information such as customers’ profiles, preferences, different transactions, and their relationships with other suppliers empowers them to develop innovative marketing and advertising strategies enabling growth. For example:

Customer 360 enhances FMCG retail’s merchandising and marketing activities and provides a single view of the product, pricing, and promotions. A digital analytic assistant offers customers with latest trends in aspects of grocery and hard goods. It also provides predictive analytics, which proves beneficial for future actions to be taken. With alerts and notifications about the latest events and customer behavior patterns, retailers can scale their businesses.

Customer 360  Driving Business

Customer 360 also provides the Next Best Offer analytics, which uses predictive analytics to identify the product or services that the customer needs. This data helps to add an extra dash of personalization to the customer’s experience. Customer 360 helps retain the loyalty of customers and stitches together an offer that meets their requirements.

IGT Solutions provides Customer 360- Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled analytics that aids companies to understand their customer profiles, purchase behavior, customer engagements, and preferences with Customer 360 intelligence. This technology’s vast suite of features facilitates the unique identification of customers, situations, and decision-making propensities, enabling contextual and actionable recommendations to drive the subsequent optimal outcome.

Companies can leverage IGT’s Customer 360 to deliver hyper-personalized services to their customers. The framework identifies and segregates different areas of personalization under ‘NORC’, ensuring that valuable insights are extracted from the enormous data volumes NORC is related to the travel sector.

Customer 360 in Travel:

Travel companies can now eliminate silos with the help of Customer 360 and effectively manage their online and offline interactions. These companies are now capable of interacting seamlessly with their customers using real-time communication. For example:

Airline companies are now enabling customers to interact with them across multiple channels, providing them with ease of use and flexibility. Customers can directly call or use apps and social media to make reservations and raise queries or complaints. In case of any disruptions, travel companies can respond to their customer queries faster with the right message and the right channel.

Ticket bookings from all touchpoints are integrated into the cloud. Airline Company’s reservation and customer experience teams now have access to a unified view of customer interactions. During Covid-19, customers’ calls and queries were handled effectively by airline companies using Customer 360. Also, companies were successful in transitioning their teams from the workplace to work from home successfully.

Other Added Benefits:

• If travel plans have been changed or cancelled, eligible customers can now receive their compensations in less than 24 hours which traditionally used to take four to six weeks.
• Today, people simply don’t wish to buy a ticket but also want to be informed on various hotel options, events to attend while on stay, commute, and others.
• Airline ticket systems can now compare pricing with more accurate data from the cloud using Customer 360 predictive analytics and data discovery capabilities.

Personalization –Key Driver for Success

Industries’ complete range of ancillary services is often neglected, leading to poor customer experience. The cause can be primarily because of the lack or incomplete customer behaviour profile. Even through OTA or any other channel, the seller cannot anticipate the right ancillary service for the customer and therefore misses out on a great revenue generation opportunity.

By analyzing past behavior, social media activities, and customers’ online behavior, travel service firms can target the right cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and use the right channel. Customer 360 view provides ease of operations by providing a dynamic view of tested data. Customer 360’s data discovery capabilities help get accurate data from the cloud, which can be later applied across all verticals enabling them to grab the attention of more customers and retain the present ones.

Customer 360 Personalization in Hospitality

Hospitality industries are now proactive in analyzing revenue generation by collecting information from various venues and understanding customer activities. They can now make enhanced data-based operational decisions that will benefit both- the hotels and customers. For example:

• Hospitality segments can now update or inform customers or prospective customers in real-time using the marketing cloud over email, SMS, and Push notifications.
• Hotels can now segment customers by demographics, age, preference; and change their offerings dynamically. It can now add a personalization touch and create a WOW factor for its customers.

Customer 360 can amplify business operations with deeper analytics and customer data widening the scope for business scalability.

Sources: Statista

The post Customer 360 – A Solution Hub for Customer-Facing Challenges appeared first on IGT Solutions.

The pandemic has given many companies the opportunity to grow and innovate during these times. Some organizations have been able to take this opportunity and reinvent themselves and have started offering varied and need of the hour value based resources, while some continue to struggle. All in all, the pandemic has made businesses more conscious about where they spend their money and look for new and innovative solutions to optimize their customer service and experience.

The need for data analytics:

The rise of Artificial Intelligence & Analytics in the past few years had many organizations applying its core data practices to scale their businesses.  The coronavirus pandemic has further expanded these opportunities and also accelerated them in some cases. Organizations are quickly adopting data analytics; what once took months or years for companies to build came to life in a matter of weeks because of COVID-19.  As per a study by Analytics Insight in May 2020, 55% of businesses have started utilizing data to improve efficiency and rely on it to predict changes and outcomes. Forty-seven percent look to their data as indicators of how they can better support their customers, and 45% count on data to predict business outcomes. It is not surprising that companies have started to recognize data analytics for its problem solving capabilities and identifying potential disruptions.

Below are a few ways data analytics can help companies in building resilience during COVID-19:

• Tracking and responding

Data analytics has the ability to analyze large sets of data from numerous sources. Data such as news updates, hotel and airline booking trends, population density, demographics to name a few. Such information can help companies keep a track of upcoming trends and work a solution around it. For e.g. the Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases dashboard is using data analytics to trace the coronavirus.

This dashboard is not only helping us visualize the affected areas, deaths and recovered cases, but is also helping health officials learn how it is affecting different regions and communities.

• Sales and revenue

The customer behaviour is an ever evolving one, even more now as demands shift to online completely. Collection of data, analysis of customer sentiments and behaviour and experiences on all platforms etc. are some of the ways data analytics can help in carving new revenue streams. For e.g. a retail brand, which was brought to a standstill because of the lockdown managed to generate a revenue of Rs 34+ Lakhs by only spending Rs 27,000. The brand switched from offline to online and used a predictive modeling technique to arrive at segments of customers most likely to purchase and ran targeted and personalized campaigns to this set of customers.

• Working with emerging demands

Companies that run call centers to perform sales and customer service functions are facing huge pressure. By using analytics and artificial intelligence to identify customers most likely to be affected by the pandemic, companies can prepare a proactive communication plan to inform these customers about changes in policy and services. Furthermore, they can also use data analytics to segment queries based on urgencies.

• Keep an eye on competitors

Data analytics can give insights on steps taken by competitors to mitigate similar risks faced by your organization. Not just this, it has the ability to present insights into financial status, company profiles and updates, SWOT analysis and mergers of any kinds. A thorough competitive study of market players can help in evaluating the market, highlighting opportunities and decision making.

Keeping the ball rolling

Analytics and AI have gained more momentum rather quickly in these last few months, the behavioral and economic shift in the way businesses function has increased the demand for AI and analytics. Organizations had no choice but to fully align themselves with analytics driven solutions to prepare effectively for the business challenges that emerged overnight. However, investing in analytics and AI is an ongoing activity, as companies start to rebuild, leaders will have to rethink their business strategies and models consistently to stay in the competition game.

Below are a list of actions that the leaders must keep in mind to make the progress of data analytics stick:

• Communicate the importance of analytics and digital transformation to employees
• Treating AI and analytics resources as top priority
• Offer virtual learning and up skilling opportunities to employees to help structure agile teams
• Conduct regular audits for necessary fixes and implementing new modeling techniques
• Establish protocols to ensure consistency and efficiency in evaluating and developing new models and tools

Data analytics and artificial intelligence have largely helped the healthcare industry with COVID-19. Researchers and experts have leveraged these tools to do everything from tracking capacities in hospitals to identifying patients at high-risk. Many believe these technologies are vital for preparing for similar situations in the future too. Data analytics will turn out to be the star performer that will help in meeting customer’s needs, help make decisions, rethink operational models and help drive businesses to the new normal. While it will take effort and skill to adapt businesses to the evolving consumer needs, organizations who pay heed to the changes COVID-19 has brought to companies and work towards building a more resilient business which will be different from the past and have the potential to survive in the post COVID world.

IGT’s Analytics Services provides industries with specific advanced analytics solutions and personalization with the help of its cutting-edge technologies. We help customers make well-informed on-time business decisions throughout their digital transformation journey. Read more about our analytics solutions.

Author :

Gurmeet Oberoi is a researcher and writer of change tactics and technologies in travel and other verticals, she frequently posts across the digital ecosystem. With 9-yrs of experience in communications and marketing, Gurmeet has a passion for travel and reading among other things. She can be reached at gurmeet.oberoi@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

The post Accelerating analytics to build business resilience in the new normal appeared first on IGT Solutions.

Techniques involved in the execution of the VOC

A traditional form of VOC which many brands have been using, is customer feedback in the form of emails, over the phone or even in person. Other forms include on-site surveys, recorded call-data, and the usage of management tools like Net Promoter Score etc. While these are great tools and having all kinds of techniques is only beneficial, one form of VOC that can’t be ignored in today’s age are the ones available on social media and the internet.

Using social media to evaluate your customer’s intent

According to Global Web Index, people spend 2 hours and 23 minutes daily on social media browsing and messaging. Additionally, 98.55% of people use at least four social media platforms daily.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp etc have been an important part of all our lives, thanks to them, people of all ages are able to connect with each other, express their opinions on trending topics and share experiences, good or bad, in the form of messages, comments, views etc. Customers share sentiments and unfiltered views directly on a brand’s social media platform, they leave messages through features like online chat, social media groups and online reviews and expect a brand to respond directly to them.

According to PwC, 17% of customers will walk away from a brand they love if they have even a single bad experience with it. On the other hand, 59% of them will abandon it after several bad experiences.

These sentiments can be turned into hard data and analyzed to take corrective measures, this is where sentiment analysis comes into place. Sentiment analysis is the process of determining whether any feedback (review, comment etc) is positive, negative or neutral. It helps in understanding a customer’s behavioural pattern by assessing their tone, context and emotion. Brands can use sentiment analysis to research on the public’s opinion of them. It also helps in competitor analysis and evaluate their own performance.

A few ways brands can leverage social media sentiments:

1. Run targeted social media marketing campaigns.

By staying on top of the game in analyzing data, as a brand, targeting the right audience with messaging they are looking for becomes easier. The idea is to have a holistic approach to run campaigns that address the customer’s needs at the right time.

89% of marketers use Facebook in their brand marketing efforts as per a study by SproutSocial.

2. Detect early signs of potential critical periods.

People like to share their experiences of travel, stay and journey with their friends, family members, and followers on social media. They also alert other users about any instance like delay, security breach, and natural calamities etc which impact their natural course of life. These sentiments become a vital source for the service provider to investigate and take necessary action in case measures are not being taken as per operational standards.

3. Strategize and evaluate new concepts and solutions.

For travel and hospitality service providers, social media is an essential tool to keep a tab of events around the globe and take immediate action required to turn a negative sentiment into a positive or a neutral one.

4. Possibility of adding new features to meet the customer’s needs.

From enabling chatbots to upping their game with virtual tours, the travel and hospitality sector has as much competition as any other sector. To stay in the game, brands have to not just also provide what their competitor is providing, but also do one better.

Social media sentiment analysis has helped organisations convert emotions into actionable data points. It helps gain insight on the target audience and helps organisations take a customer centric approach just by capturing and analyzing feedback on social media channels.

In a time where using social media is almost a habit, it has shaped the way we look at it and the numbers are only increasing.

Social Media Sentiment Analysis platform by IGT

IGT’s Analytics framework is designed to cater to the requirements of the travel and hospitality sector. The platform plays a key role in classifying problems into relevant buckets and derive upward or downward trends. The segmented data buckets of market behaviour, sentiments and patterns help gain clarity from a brand perception standpoint. Prior to social media prominence, traditional tools like CRM, reservation systems and loyalty were used to extract relevant data. With the addition of social media comes buying patterns, likes, and dislikes, interactions and opinions.

How IGT’s Analytics platform assesses this data

1. List out customer’s key issues
2. Overall positioning of the brand vs. competitors
3. Focus on improvement areas such as:
   1. Operations
   2. Pricing
   3. Customer Service
   4. Product/Service type offered
   5. Campaign idea formation
   6. Analysis of campaigns run and its re-evaluation

 How IGT’s Analytics Platform can help your Social Media Strategy

• Discover unique market insights
• Develop a customized digital marketing strategy for your brand
• Develop digital marketing campaigns that resonate with your target audience
• Evaluate the performance of your campaigns

IGT’s analytics platform combines traditional data and customer sentiments to provide a 360 degree understanding of customer’s behaviour and offers a larger, more reliable analysis of the customer’s mindset. Social media is always evolving and so is technology. Our advanced analytics framework is enabled to analyze vast amounts of data and seamlessly provide insights that can help your brand manage, maintain and develop new relationships with your customers.

Know more about IGT’s Analytics Services and the customer-specific solutions we have developed to improve operational performances for the travel and hospitality sector.

Author :

Taj Mohammad is a Senior Project Manager at IGT Solutions’s Digital Travel Analytics Division. Carrying with him over 16 years of experience in IT delivery across various domains. In his 12 years at IGT solutions Taj has worked extensively on application development in Microsoft technologies before moving into fulltime project management. He has worked on various projects in Travel and Technologies including Datawarehousing, Reservation systems for Airlines, Alliance & Hotels. He can be reached out at taj.mohammad@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

The post Social Media Sentiment Analysis – To identify true pulse of your customer appeared first on IGT Solutions.

The answer is- DATA

Is it right to conclude that DATA is the most valuable asset for an organization?

If we look around ourselves, our day to day routine – we as customers are expecting more and more personalized content with even better experiences without incurring any extra cost. This is where DATA becomes more valuable for any organization to provide their customer base with personalized content and a flavor of special attention to them.

Almost every organization is generating or capturing data from multiple sources. These sources may be systems/applications which exist within an organization like social media, CRM, marketing platforms, log files or systems which are not a part of the organization like competitor data and many more. Data exists all around but the variety, volume and velocity with which it is growing makes it unusable.

How can such data be made useful? A Datalake might be an answer

What is a Datalake?

A datalake is a system which stores the RAW data in its original format. We may or may not know what type of data it is, what is the format of the data – data can be structured, unstructured, machine to machine, log files, real time. Such vast amount of data is not processed and made actionable till the time its needed or the purpose of its usage has been identified by the business. Datalake is often blended or mislead with the term datawarehouse

What is the difference between Datalake and Datawarehouse?

Any DATA related discussion is often not concluded without these two terms being discussed. People often confuse these two as synonyms to each other but the fact is that they are very different with a resembling criterion of data storage. Therefore, it’s important to identify the difference between the two as they serve different objectives for the business.

The user base for these two systems is entirely different – Datalake is being often used by data scientists or data engineers to fetch the raw datasets for different operations e.g. machine learning operations etc. whereas Datawarehouse is being used by data analysts or business owners to get actionable insights for a specific identified business usage. Datalake is to make RAW data useful, accessible and identify a purpose to use it for business intelligence and analytical needs.

At IGT, we identified a business problem for a low cost carrier operational within APAC and Europe.

The carrier had ample amount of data available with them and most of it existed in raw and unprocessed state which was never analyzed to deliver any insights. The cost of storing, accessing and processing the raw data without any defined purpose was too high and could not be absorbed by the business. They already had a datawarehouse which was serving their analytical needs with a set of limitations- like inability to perform operational analytics and real time intelligence.

IGT proposed and implemented datalake solution. It provided them the ability to integrate and blend different types of data and different data types in a faster and efficient manner for their operational and real time intelligence needs. The data which was earlier in an unusable state and was never accessed and utilized became available to users at a minimal cost.

Datawarehouse was also migrated to a new scalable solution within the datalake. Some of data sources which existed in datalake now became source for datawarehouse as they became more readable and their usage was identified.

IGT’s datalake solution enabled unstructured data analytics for the users as they now had the capability of self-service BI, update the raw data in lower costs, analyze raw data to identify more useful business cases and then transforming the data as needed. The new system had capabilities to parse and provide complex analysis which was also not possible earlier

The solution also led to cost reduction in resources – resulting in reducing 40% hardware infrastructure and 50% performance improvement due to scalable nature of the architecture

After IGT’s datalake implementation, the customer is also introducing other business areas to be integrated in the same solution to provide more targeted content to business, marketing and sales. The data is now also being used for machine learning and predictive modeling for revenue and inventory management.

The post Datawarehouse to Datalake Modernization appeared first on IGT Solutions.