Customer insight solutions provide answers to the unknown

Many companies around the world are hamstrung by a fundamental problem: Limited knowledge about their customers. That’s where customer insight solutions provide actionable insights through digital transparency. Once a company has the tools to measure a customer’s experience, it becomes possible to shape the digital landscape to customer preferences. Tailor-made product offerings are easily achieved, provided the right information is available. Fortunately, customer insight solutions can capture, record, analyze and replay all digital interactions between a customer and a company. Any time customers navigate away from a website or experience problems, these performance-related issues can be identified and corrected. The right software can also help to drive down operational costs by channeling resources to specific areas where customer assistance is needed.

Customer experience analytics is a new age technological phenomenon. It has been fine-tuned over the years to bring significantly enhanced insights to the customer journey. Major difficulties, like cart abandonment or navigating away from a website, can be remedied by way of a better understanding through a customer’s perspective. Too many businesses are hamstrung by this myopia; not being able to see things from the other side. Once a business understands exactly why customers are jumping ship, they can put plans, processes and procedures into effect to reverse this trend and to drive up revenues. For example, the absence of an effective CTA (call to action) button may hinder a business’s ability to generate profits.

When customers contact the call center with queries, complaints or concerns, the customer support staff can quickly and easily access detailed records of that customer’s interactions with the digital assets of the company. For example, when the customer says that ‘there wasn’t enough information about the product I was looking at…’, or ‘the page took too long to load, and I abandoned the purchase’, these issues can be fully investigated and sent to the relevant departments for further inspection and analysis. Customers automatically feel that their concerns are being taken seriously when the customer support representatives can accurately identify with them. This eliminates frustration on the customer’s part, since every on-site navigation is accounted for, and every click, delay, login, view or other action can be processed and followed by support representatives. Viewed in totality, this enhances the online customer experience. One of the obvious benefits of such technology is easy dispute resolution, and compliance with organizational procedures.

Features of experience analytics software

The digital interface of a company includes multiple components, such as mobile applications and web sessions. Whether it’s iOS or Android, Windows or Mac, it’s important to be able to track customer experience with precision. Once this information is recorded, it can be replayed for enhanced understanding from the customer’s perspective. Of course, the software must be enterprise ready, and nuanced enough to pick up on the most intricate details. Fortunately, it’s easy measuring customer experience analytics when you have the right software to work with. The goal in all cases is to enhance customer engagement levels, to drive them towards purchases and ultimately to become repeat customers. If there are any problems along the way, customer insight solutions can provide the necessary information to rectify these issues.

The focus shifts from a business-centric model to a customer-centric model, which virtually assures improved ROI over time. Moving from awareness mode to purchase mode is easier when you have the right tools to work with. In the days of old, all purchases were made as a result of marketing efforts on TV, radio, newspapers, or magazines. Today, the digital arena has completely upended conventional systems. We are now bombarded with a myriad of online ads linking back to an even greater number of e-commerce platforms. Each and every touch point on a website can make or break its appeal.

The touch points include any contact between the customer and the company across all devices. Thanks to digital customer journey mapping, a framework can be created which identifies all the important stages that customers go through on digital channels. For this data to be effective, it needs to be compressed so that storage is not cost prohibitive. Additionally, security and privacy concerns must be factored into the equation. All of these factors work towards a better understanding of the customer experience. Consider the type of information that can be collected from experience analytics:

• Where the traffic comes from
• Customer mouse movements and clicks
• Mobile, iOS or Windows operating systems
• Customer segmentation and customer demographics
• How long customers spend on each page, and where they click off

Once all of the information is collected, the customer insights may need to be sent across the organization – up or down to the relevant department for processing. Both customer satisfaction and business outcomes are significantly improved when touch points are explored to enhance the customer experience. Understanding the customer experience is crucial since there may be gaps between performance criteria across devices, departments, or channels. Once these have been identified, a much better outcome is assured.