Use Big Data and Customer Experience Analytics to Increase Revenue and Much More

Scott Walker, CEO, ethosIQTM | Business Magazine | CIOlook
Scott Walker, CEO, ethosIQTM | Business Magazine | CIOlook

The big data market is massive in today’s corporate environment. The sourcing of projects, within the global big data industry, has grown to a 42-billion-dollar market. Big data and business intelligence give companies the missing puzzle pieces to complete a cohesive past, present and future strategic vision. While the power of big data can be harnessed for a multitude of things, my favorite by far is using disparate data to measure, manage and enhance customer experience.

If you hadn’t already heard, customer experience is extremely important. But why, you ask?

A study published by Forrester Research reported that company experience leaders grow revenue 14 percent faster than companies who are customer experience laggards.1 A study by Walker projects by the year 2020 customer experience will reign above price and product as a key decision factor when purchasing a product.2

Customer experience has become so important, in fact, Gartner predicts that more than 50 percent of organizations will redirect their investments to customer experience innovations. By 2020, more than 40 percent of implemented projects for data analytics will revolve around customer experience. 3

Why has big data and analytics become such a big deal in customer experience?

Business intelligence and disparate data solutions compliment customer experience data well; there is a lot to learn by analyzing customer satisfaction, customer effort and customer retention. These actionable-insights allow companies to make organizational changes with quantifiable data on their side.

So what is the catch?

Getting the right type and amount of data can be difficult in measuring customer experience. Often companies start to gather customer experience data, but some don’t gather enough, some don’t gather the right data, and some don’t invest in a solution that ties all the data together.

Customer effort, customer satisfaction and customer retention all play parts in measuring customer experience.

Customer effort relates to tasks and actions performed by a company’s employees that directly affect the customer. Take a contact center for instance; an employee is 20 minutes late to their shift and the contact center is experiencing an abnormal serge in call volume, now consumers have a longer wait time because the center is short staffed. Customer effort can have a direct impact on your customer experience.

If you aren’t measuring customer effort, you can’t accurately measure and gage your customer experience.

Customer satisfaction is the overall client appreciation of a company’s solutions and services. As I stated before, companies that placer a higher emphasis on a customer-centric culture increase revenue faster than those that do not. It is also important to measure employee satisfaction. Happy employees, especially those that work directly with customers, lead to happier customers.

If you aren’t measuring customer satisfaction, you can’t accurately measure and gage your customer experience.

Customer retention is the number, or percentage, of clients that come back to repurchase a product or a service. Big data helps companies predict if a client might buy from a competitor and understand why a client purchased from a competitor. The possibilities are truly endless.

The bottom line; customer experience should be measured cohesively and collectively.

Customer satisfaction, customer retention and customer effort should be measured simultaneously. Yes, you can look at one singular portion of an equation, but you must view all parts to get an answer.

How to do this?

Find a provider that will tie this customer touch-point data all together. Reaching an optimized customer experience requires painting a full picture before you dive into the granular details.

By measuring, analyzing and managing all customer experience data, CFO’s can increase profits by increasing customer retention as little as 5%, which can increase profits up to 95%. Also, big data analytics helps companies reduce cost, increase efficiency, maintain capacity for growth and change and improve support and service.

Big data helps drive data decisioning, leading to a higher customer satisfaction and customer retention, thus driving meaning and impactful results to a company.

While this market is new, big data and business intelligence are here to stay to help organizations, not only measure and manage their customer experience data, but far beyond. The possibilities are truly limitless.

About Scott Walker

Scott Walker is a veteran high-tech executive with over 24 years’ experience. Scott has collaborated with numerous companies— like Apple, Microsoft, Ticketmaster, Nike and many more. In 2009, Scott founded ethosIQ, a software company focusing on business intelligence and customer experience in real-time. Today, ethosIQ collects and correlates data for over 183,000 agents across the globe daily.

About ethosIQ™

Headquartered in Houston, Texas, ethosIQ’s cloud and premised-based software has delivered business intelligence to multinational corporations and government agencies since 2009. ethosIQ’s award-winning software collects, correlates and presents data from multiple disparate systems, empowering organizations to make informed, real-time decisions. ethosIQ software solutions provide analysis and actionable insights that enable enterprise and government organizations to deliver better customer experience while ensuring operational efficiencies and maximizing technology investments. We provide the data that enables decisions in minutes, not days or weeks.