Customer Analytics – Keep Customers at The Centre of Digital Transformation

Westpac Banking Corp., a leading Australian Bank, has very effectively used technology to build its “KnowMe” program. This program offers a 360-degree view of the customer to the bank. Under this program, the bank captures all the information about its over 12 million customers through activities such as call center interactions and ATM usage. It the uses this information to conduct behavioural analysis and match the new offerings and programs as per the precise needs of the customers. This program has helped the bank in improving its customer engagement rate from 1% to 25%!

Customer analytics is the backbone of today’s businesses. It represents modern technology-driven processes that utilise information emanating from customer behaviour to arrive at key business decisions. This suite of technologies is used in conjunction with data mining protocols to enable businesses to predict customer behavior, forecast customers’ buying habits, and decipher lifestyle preferences.

Digital transformation is a hot topic of discussion amongst the CXOs today and measuring and optimising the digital customer experiences are at the heart of digital transformation. It is about embracing technology to create delightful customer experiences at every possible touch point in the customer experience lifecycle. Let’s take a deeper look at this topic.

Customer Service

Modern customers value engagement beyond mere commercial transactions. Most of the industries are moving to accommodate innovation powered by customer centricity at all times. Companies are leveraging modern technologies like IoT and sensor analytics to drive business processes that can enable their products to report service issues, alert customers to maintenance schedules, and perform self-diagnostics in a bid to deliver higher value to end-users. Essentially, companies are equipping their products and services to boost the ‘smartness’ quotient; this is essential given the fact that consumers’ decision-making processes have moved from linear to cyclical.

Marketing Optimisation

Today’s customers are extremely connected and empowered. They have all the information at their fingertips. Therefore, knowing the customer has become very important and, hence, customer analytics plays a critical role for businesses. Through the right customer analysis, businesses can identify factors which can help them drive customer loyalty, improve profitability, and achieve sustainable growth. With customer analytics, the marketing teams can connect with the right customers at the right time with the most relevant offers and increase the response rates and ROI. It can also help them reduce the campaign costs by making the campaigns more targeted. When the analysis shows the marketing teams some predictions about possible customer churn, then they can run some proactive campaigns to retain the customers.

Personalisation

Customers, especially the Millennials, don’t like to be treated as a group with a bombardment of irrelevant messages. They expect their experiences with the brands to be highly personalised.

Research shows that 45% of online shoppers are more likely to shop on a site that offers personalized recommendations.

Customer analytics helps businesses create personalised experiences with customers. Using the right solutions, brands can target the right customers with the right offers through the most appropriate channels such as social, mobile, or digital. They can address the specific needs of the customers based on the actual behaviours of the customers and create more cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. It also helps them in engaging with their customers with the right message. Using predictive customer behaviour modelling, companies can also predict the future behaviour of customers and take appropriate actions to avoid churn, retain customers, and create customer delight. Using social media and survey data, companies can also measure customer sentiments and identify future trends which can help them with product or service innovation.

In-store Analytics

Traditional brick-and-mortar retail stores have started adopting new tactics and frameworks to improve in-store customer experiences by leveraging analytical tools powered by big data and cloud technologies. Retailers have started deploying specialised analytics suites that help them combine in-store and online data to gain a deeper understanding of customer behaviour, enhance their employee efficiency, and increase sales. Using these solutions, retailers can get real-time information about store traffic and sales. It can, then, help them measure their sales vis-à-vis the traffic to the store. By leveraging such insights, the stores can plan their workforce requirements. It also helps them analyse the store performance, make optimal procurement decisions, make better merchandising decisions, and also improve their overall marketing efforts.

Data-Driven Innovation

Businesses have increasingly started using insights gathered from data and analytics for strategic purposes, to refine core business processes, and to innovate new business models. Analytics-driven innovations tend to deliver competitive business advantages. Using customer analytics, brands can gain a better perspective on their customer relationships. That offers them opportunities to better understand the adoption of a certain type of product or offering. With easy presentation and interpretation of customer data, organisations can understand and gauge the potential of an idea and deliver innovative solutions. Customer analytics helps in the quick and easy validation of ideas.

With the vast amount of data being generated every day, the role of customer analytics has become critical for today’s digital businesses. Businesses are benefitting from the futuristic proactive decisions which are now possible through forecasting, data mining, predictive analytics.