Customer experience (CX) analytics provides valuable insight into customer sentiments, sales, and expectations. By collecting relevant data and evaluating customers, brands can now easily make data-driven intelligent decisions improving their customer support and experience, and consecutively boosting their marketing campaigns, product innovations, and much more.

Growth Drivers Of Customer Analytics Market

Newer technologies have led to an increase in real-time data availability, and there are growing developments in analytics about customer behavior. According to Grand View Research, the global customer experience management market size was valued at USD 7,540.6 million in 2020. It is anticipated to increase by (CAGR) of 17.5% from 2021 to 2028.

As per the Forrester consumer survey of CX quality conducted in 2020, it was witnessed that 14% of brands improved their CX quality by finding and fixing problems primarily in their back-end systems and processes. In 2021, the number of brands improved CX and reached 27%.

The PwC Global Consumer Insights Pulse Survey 2021 states that the three top-ranked attributes in online shopping are Fast and Reliable Service which amounts to 42% and 36% for easily navigating the website, and 38% for in-stock availability of items.

These statistics show positive results on CX driving business growth and how by improving CX businesses can drive business sales and attract more and more customers.  But before diving into a comprehensive understanding of imbibing CX analytics into the workflow, let us first study the challenges in the CX segment.

RoadBlocks in Meeting Enriched Customer Experience

Though the evolution in technology is providing respite in business operations, organizations face major restraint in choosing a befitting technology to stream big data analytics.

Evaluating ROI of CX: CX leaders face hardships in getting budgets approved as customer experience Return on Investment (ROI) is not always calculated and measured, and without metrics like revenue, turn-around times, and value, ROI cannot be quantitatively predicted. The pain points in this arena are:

• Existence of discrepancies in data
• The unorganized structure where different departments have different needs
• Prevalence of traditional methods in data handling
• Lack of comprehensive schemes

In order to design a modern and responsive CX framework, CX metrics should be used in the current operations.

Identifying CX Problems: The growing customer base is causing everyday hindrances for CX professionals as they are drifted in all possible directions and finding it highly daunting to cater to vast customer expectations. Which is to be prioritized? Which areas need improvement? Which is the right strategy? Which is the right resource? Which is the best platform? Such concerns are piling upon CX leaders and consecutively are seizing the company’s opportunities to grab new businesses.

Lack of end-to-end Customer Experience: Often departmental and functional objectives plan and prioritize their goals with a single business focus in mind. There also stands a dearth of a seamless transition from one department to the other and a lack of transparency across business verticals. A proper mapping should be initiated keeping in mind the overall end-to-end customer experience.

Measuring CX Analytics

How are customers thinking? The current customer behavior trends have to be observed and the metrics should be considered before defining one’s organizational goals.

Identifying Customers and Touchpoints: Businesses can narrow their focus on customers by evaluating data such as who has purchased at a higher frequency, who have recently purchased, and the ones who are likely to purchase if offered customized deals. Such an overview of ideal customers helps enhance customer experiences. Companies can improvise on their customer service by catering to customer problem areas such as new customer onboarding, renewals, cancellations, website footprints, product returns, retracted customers, etc.

Customer Surveys: Customer Satisfaction Surveys help companies in strategically improving their products and services. Different types of customer experience survey aids in giving insights into the current market demands. For example, an enterprise can analyze its customers’ loyalty based on their recommendations made to their friends, colleagues, or acquaintances. This data helps to understand the current standing of the company and can help to predict the company’s future. Companies should periodically study customer feedback throughout their lifecycle.

Web Analytics: Web analytics helps companies in collecting, reporting, measuring customer website data and plenty of other contextual data. They can now map and improvise their entire website ecosystem by the medium of vital analytics such as page views, website traffic, click-to-action implementation, purchase behavior, drop-offs calculations, and other patterns.

Using Intelligent Data: Intelligent data provides knowledgeable insights into the latest market trends by analyzing details of the current CX status of the company and data related to roadblocks, campaigns, etc., which helps executives to better access the marketing activities and ROI across places, segments, services, products and many more. Using Intelligent Data helps to gain transparency in the work structure, plan future activities, effectively streamline operations thereby reducing advertising costs, strategically introducing a new stream of activities amid others.

Benefits of CX Analytics

Customer Experience is the backbone of any company’s growth and affects each and every aspect of marketing and business KPI.

CX analytics data helps in studying customer details pertaining to their demographics, behavioral patterns, and purchase history allowing the company to map their next product and service in line. Sales agents can use this data to enhance conversion rates wherein executives can make informed decisions to boost marketing, sales, and product development.

Central Database: CX Analytics defines itself as a centralized system that incorporates customer behavior analytics, and touchpoints across all platforms. It involves front-end interactions coupled with back-end data that are transferred from various tools that a particular enterprise is using to attract and engage customers. Here a customer journey’s footprints are cohesively collected into one central database system. The additional benefits include:

• The recorded time of a particular customer’s action on the channel
• Customer actions like data of a number of page views by a particular customer followed by their product purchase, transaction made, etc.
• A robust identifier to tie the activity to the user

Unique Identifiers: Companies embed in their systems newer tools to engage customers which help track unique identifiers. Data scientists spend long hours and efforts collating data from various tools and places which makes it highly time-consuming and tedious. However, CX Analytics uses a centralized ID graph system that analyzes customers’ journeys throughout and saves customers’ interactions in a data format as a whole.  It evaluates a customer footprint from the first moment, for example when he/she visits the website to become an identified customer, with details through click-to-actions like forms, email, phone numbers, internet accounts, cookies, etc.

User Case Study

A retail company leveraged data and marketing channels that weren’t being used and CX analytics provided added resources that helped drive the most out of digital transformation and customer experience management.  By creating a customized Customer Data Platform(CDP), the company was able to enhance its advertising and marketing internal culture. CX analytics helped this retailer with benefits such as:

• Unified customer views
• Complete and accurate, real-time customer data
• Personalization across platforms
• Smart segmentation
• Agile internal culture

Business interactions with customers can now be constantly analyzed with analytic tools helping them measure the products, services, and offerings of a company. CX teams can better evaluate current metrics, KPIs and challenges, and work towards prioritizing and tactfully investing in the growth strategies of the organization.

Sources: Grand View Research, Forrester, PwC.

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A Single Source of Truth

A great experience that can convert over 90% of the first-timers into brand loyalists is the sum of a broad spectrum of data points, including primary customer attributes, behavioral and attitudinal records, transaction history, and much more. CDP technology simplifies the task for the customer services teams by harnessing the required data from different sources, accelerating the journey towards exceptional service personalization. Investment in CDP assets can pull in a host of enabling capabilities for companies, allowing them to ingest customer data at the scale and speed of business, combine and orchestrate omnichannel feeds, and deliver real-time outcomes for stakeholders beyond marketing, in sales and UI and of course ensure compliance. Applying machine intelligence and Advanced Analytics on top of such a deep and comprehensive customer data processing ecosystem can bring forth the information advantage and functional ease, positioning organizations to be highly competitive in closely contested landscapes.

Enabling The CDP Outcomes

While CDP is an indispensable component of the modern marketer’s toolkit, organizations looking to transform can either opt for Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products or build their CDP stack. Although being substantially costly due to the hefty licensing overheads involved, the pre-packaged solutions can enable a rapid time to market due to their plug-and-play features. However, building a CDP from scratch can bypass the avoidable expenses and allow the flexibility to bring customized flavors that suit the marketing taste of a particular business, realizing value within merely 3-6 months. Notwithstanding the path a company is intending to walk, a CDP worth the investments in enriched CX should be able to deliver:

Simplicity: In the US, the estimated cost of customers switching due to poor service quality is $1.6 trillion annually. Also, Salesforce reports that 83% of the service agents acknowledge the desperate need for assistance to do their job well. When shifting customer expectations and business demands are already testing the limits of the service teams, next-gen data solutions must improve their access and maneuverability. For example, a CDP should neatly organize the available data for immediate use. Also, its setup and maintenance should discount the technical complexities otherwise involved in traditional data warehouses, and its outputs should be fit for consumption, even by a non-technical audience.

Single Customer View: 84% of businesses are more likely to purchase from vendors who understand their goals better. Also, 66% of the customers across B2B and B2C segments want their brands to be emphatic about their unique needs and expectations. This heightened state of awareness is only possible through a 360-degree view of the customer that a CDP should build on the data harnessed and assimilated into individual data profiles of each user. Further, it should read customer and related master data from semi-processed data sets, enrich data from multiple sources and merge various customer profiles and hierarchies to provide golden records. Finally, the validated CDP outputs should answer fundamental questions around how the end-users consume products and services and how successful they are in meeting their purchase objectives.

Customer Data Unification: Diversity is the cornerstone of a successful omnichannel CX delivery strategy, and today, more than half the businesses use at least eight channels to interact with their customers. A CDP should be capable of spearheading an effective information fusion strategy, pulling data from all channels, using event-based triggers into a single, interactive repository. The information pool should provide a reliable base for powering a broad spectrum of marketing use cases, from customer segmentation, acquisition, conversion to retention.

Data Sharing: The data contained within the CDP environment should be accessible to the other MarTech applications operating downstream. For instance, the demographics data correlated with the cost sensitivity insights of the prospective customers in CDP should guide the Campaign Management System on how to best appeal to the target audience.

Limitless Analytics: On top of all the digital engineering complexities under its hood, a CDP should be layered by enabling analytics. In fact, 90% of the global executives are dependent on data analytics to drive great CX, and 65% consider it vital to mission success. The visibility layer of CDP should enable enterprise decision-makers to discover a nonlinear correlation between divergent trends and patterns, allowing brands to connect meaningfully with customer requirements.

CDP In Action

But how can CDP bring the desired strategic and tactical depth for businesses looking to stay ahead of the curve by leveraging personalized CX? Perhaps this can be best understood in the context of the highly competitive Hospitality & Travel Industry manifesting solid signs of recovery as the COVID wave ebbs down. Here, customers interact with businesses across multiple touchpoints, including reservations and ticketing, check-ins, baggage information, airport information, passenger refunds, notifications, payment information, website traffic, and social media analysis, generating massive volumes of data in real-time or near real-time.

In the pre-travel phase, if a customer tweets or posts inquiring about beach destinations in an open social media forum, CDP can quickly align it with their previous bookings and purchase history and the trending beach destinations data to target the customer with preferred beach destination-related campaigns or offers, improving the conversion probabilities. Similarly, an airline can enrich the in-flight experience by tapping into the past ancillary bookings data and discovering attributes like the customer’s preferred cuisine, seating orientation, travel companions, and budget. Then, suitable offers can be pushed upfront to ensure that the traveler makes purchases that are most likely to make the trip enjoyable.

Also, CDP running on actual event-based scenarios can play a pivotal role in pre-empting negative experiences or compensating them early to prevent adverse brand impacts. For instance, in case of flight delays, customers can be offered relevant gift vouchers based on their social media activities as compensation, or their cab and hotel bookings can be auto-adjusted accordingly to deliver a one-order experience. Cost-conscious travelers considering themselves overcharged can be given a proactive price alert on their next booking, and apology emails can be issued to prevent a dip in the CSAT score.

Conclusion

The potential of CDP is not just limited to delivering a single customer view but helping organizations with the insights to put it into effect, elevating brand image. It helps companies target the right customer segments, user journeys, conversations, and response timing to improve customer lifetime value (CLV) and prevent churns. However, in an omnichannel environment, with an experienced digital engineering and analytics partner, businesses can effectively shape their CDP assets into a tool for revenue growth, even amidst wide-scale market disruptions.

Sources: Emplifi.io, v12data.com, sharpencx.com, Salesforce, Zoominfo, Forbes, hospitalitynet.org, Gartner.

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