Data speaks loud to whoever wants to listen

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Customer Analytics is all about knowing, mapping and managing your customer journey collecting data from each step, understanding their thought process and predicting their needs.

Once you have the data, the results will come by organizing, integrating, analyzing, extracting insights and converting into actions. 

Data speaks, and speaks loud to whoever wants to listen.

If you do it all, you will be successful with happy customers piling up at your door willing to give you a bigger share of their wallets to fulfil their needs.

To make it happens the organization and processes must be customer centric based listening to the customer and the product thru data.  

You must pay much attention to this channel, which tells you exactly what you need to do, to improve, to correct, to stop doing. You need just to know how to listen and convert into actions.

You can even call it an asset of the company and worth zillions…

The benefit list can be quite long but let me summarize to some important outcomes:

• customers behavior learning and understanding what add value      in each step of the journey and extract important insights increasing the      efficiency of the action plans
• dynamic customer segmentation, based on customer      behavior 
• predict customer churn and recommended activities to      mitigate churn
• customer prioritization with urgently recommended      actions
• predict financially relevant life time events of      individual customers & products
• understand, in details, the life cycle of your product      and act to deliver high reliability
• increased customer satisfaction and increased customer      loyalty
• expansion of the market share by enlarging the customer      share of wallet
• increased productivity of customer-oriented resources
• short setup time of the solution
• reduction of marketing costs
• get closer to your customer and his decision-making      process

How to get there? What should be done?

Here I list a sequence of the basic steps/requirements which you should follow / implement:

1. Unified/integrated company mind set

     a. customer centered

     b. integrated analytics 

     c. actions and results oriented personnel and processes

     d. inherent will for continuous improvement and seek for excellence

     e. customer passion

     f. teamwork

2. Processes and Organization review putting customer at the center of everything

     a. Map the customer journey and all the customer touch points, the moments of truth and find a way to be able to track them by creating KPIs for each experience or at least for the ones you elect as relevant.

     b. Understand and identify which data you need to collect, independently of the difficulty to do it, to be able to follow-up the experience and manage the KPIs.

     c. Identify and create an environment, system (infra-structure) and processes which will allow the needed data to be collected. Analysis of costs x benefits/added value will be needed in this step. Basic requirements:

         · Have a system which integrates all different moments of the customer experience with your product and company and let everybody be aware

         · Use data mining & analysis technology for real time experience with focus on extracting insights which will be returned to the customers in the form of new experiences (real time or not) allowing:

         · Anticipating customer needs and offering solutions

         · Personalize the solutions

         · Following-up your own products / processes and reviewing based on data analytics

         · Produce a 360 view of the customer experiences and the product.

     d. Create action plans (short-mid-long term) with contingencies, and temporary methods and follow closely the execution.

     e. Create the process of transforming data into information. Here you will need specialists in data analytics, processes & system specialists.

     f. Once you have the information, you need to produce insights for your organization. (until this point you have not added any value). An integration of data analytics and people who knows how to read and understand de analysis (functional areas, CRM, etc) is paramount. 

     g. Looking at the entire customer journey and mapping these insights will give you a broader perspective allowing you to determine the best action plans.

     h. Listen to the customer all the time. Have customer board groups (or equivalent depending on the business) to expose what you have done/propose and listen to their feedback. This mitigates risk to your action plan and naturally increases the efficiency.

     i. The participation/ownership of all responsible (direct and indirectly) teams in the creation of the action plans will give you more assurance that the plan will be executed on time. Make sure you do have.

     j. The need for organizational changes will naturally show up in the discussions and shall be treated accordingly.

     k. Have the teams prepared for this new approach. 

          · Willingness to understand the customer

          · You will need people prepared for action-oriented focus and with critical competencies

          · Invest in developing essential digital and data analytics capabilities

          · Engage experts skilled at leading technology innovations based on best practices, with proven results.

          · Open minded people for disruptive solutions

3. Implement a strong “learning organization process”. That’s what is going to perpetuate the new focus and mind set.

4. Implement Customer & Results Continuous Integrated Management.

5. Address properly Data Policies guaranteeing compliance with security and privacy requirements.

Everything that is related to customer is interesting and you must be willing to know.

Customer Experience improvements are already in most of the CEO’s plan, but who really knows how to do it, or do it efficiently?

The faster your decision-making process is the better the customer experience will be, considering that your analytics are accurately demonstrating customer interactions.

Customer centric model based on data-driven processes is the answer for today’s competitive market which needs actionable customer insights, faster product innovation and disruptive business models. 

Make sure your company is moving in this direction.

Do not let organizational silos, legacy processes and lack of data analytics skills be standing on your way and prevent you to be the answer to your customers.

Data Analytics (or AI) is positively influencing in every single process. 

Your business sustainability will depend on how deep and fast you get on board.

Mar 2020