Companies can learn a great deal about their customers’ behaviors, preferences, and needs by analyzing emails, text messages, recordings with their contact centers, and other interactions. Still, analyzing unstructured customer data, linking it to structured information and gleaning insights from the combined information can be challenging.
A recommended starting point for tackling these issues begins with identifying the business problem or the type of discovery a company is attempting to make about its customers or subsets of them. Who are our most profitable customers? What are their common characteristics (demographics, transaction history, lifecycle status, channel behaviors, etc.).
Data visualization and data discovery tools can help marketers and other business leaders identify these types of insights as well as where this information resides (CRM systems, email or SMS exchanges, social media sentiment).
Meanwhile, real-time data streams from news events and social media buzz can alert marketers regarding emerging trends or a social media crisis that may be developing.
For example, breaking news that a company has suffered a security breach revealing credit card information for thousands of customers quickly goes viral in social media. By using big data analytics against streams of unstructured social media sentiment, the company can respond quickly and transparently to assure customers and investors that the problem is being properly addressed.
Marketers and other business leaders can also analyze sentiment shared by customers in contact center interactions and various channel exchanges (email, SMS) to glean sentiment about the products they’re interested in or to identify obstacles they may be encountering in their customer journeys.
For instance, an analysis of online chat interactions between customers and contact center agents for a fashion retailer may reveal that a sizeable number of customers are having difficulty finding information about the retailer’s return policies on its website.
These types of insights can clue in website managers to make this type of information more transparent to customers, which can strengthen customer satisfaction and lower contact center costs by reducing the number of customer inquiries.
Next Steps:
- Please join us on Wednesday, June 4, at 12:00 p.m. EDT, for our complimentary webcast: “Exploiting Digital Data to Relate Brand Awareness and Store Performance.” In the final event of this webcast series, InfomatiX will introduce techniques for connecting digital data sources such as Twitter, Google, and online stores, with classic retail data to find potential correlations between brand awareness and store performance. Join us and learn how CPG&R executives use these strategies to enable strategic decision making.
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