Are you managing customer experience from the outside in? Customer experience may sound like a simple concept – how your customers perceive their interactions with your company.
But in a soon to be published book called “Outside In,” Forrester Research argues that customer experience is a fundamental business driver.
In fact, it’s the only source of competitive advantage in an age where customers and potential customers have unprecedented access to reams of data about your company and competitors.
“Despite its economic power, customer experience remains the most misunderstood element of corporate strategy today,” argues Forrester analyst Kerry Bodine. “You must manage your business from the outside in – bringing the perspective of your customers to every decision you make – and you must do it in a systematic and repeatable way.
One of the best ways to bring the perspective of the customer to business decisions is by using data analysis and CRM analytics to find correlations, isolate patterns and track trends to serve up the type of information to allow a company to tailor the customer experience for improved engagement and better profits, according to an article by Marianne Cotter at CRMSearch.
Here are five reasons to integrate big data analytics to your CRM:
- Better Customer Understanding. CRM analytics can integrate all customer data points including call center, the Internet, email and social media to group customers according to their behaviors. This allows a company to identify the most profitable customers who should receive special offers or get preferential treatment to boost their lifetime values.
- Better Understanding of the Customer-Facing Operations. Analytics will provide proof of how the company is performing in terms of service, sales and marketing. Most CRM projects are launched to drive down costs in these areas; without analytics to demonstrate the ROI of CRM, moving into new areas, like linking CRM with social media, will be hard to justify.
- Decision Support After defining the value of customer-facing operations, changes can be made to drive operational investments. Companies can answer questions around building new call centers or outsourcing based on this analysis.
- Predictive Modeling. Predictive analytics will allow a company to forecast how customers are going to respond in the future based on their past behaviors and their segmented demographics. For example, a telecommunications company could find out how likely a customer is to turn to another carrier when his wireless contract expires. Or, a consumer products company could predict how well a certain demographic will respond to a new marketing initiative based on past purchasing behavior.
- Benchmarking. CRM analytics will allow a company to track over time how well it’s performing related to a strategy or to competitors. Benchmarking analytics in areas like customer satisfaction, retention, cost per customer service call, and revenue per call will expose operational areas that are lagging behind and those that are up or above company and industry standards.
