The science of customer analytics has become increasingly sophisticated – so sophisticated, according to a report by Ventana Research, that organizations that try to assemble and develop their own analytics often find their customer analytics initiatives to be unmanageable and unreliable, with significant wasted time and effort and a less-than-optimal time to value.
In fact, Ventana Research found that over half (52%) of the time spent on customer analytics processes is dedicated to data-related tasks rather than the analytics-related work organizations need to perform in order to drive toward their key business goals.
The report, “Modern Customer Analytics for Customer Experience,” found that for the vast majority of organizations, customer experience (CX) is among those key business goals: Nearly three out of four (72%) of organizations say improving the customer experience is a primary objective of analytics. Most organizations, however, have been unable to fully leverage analytics to modernize the customer experience – and a lack of knowledge about customer satisfaction is largely to blame.
“Truly transformational value gains from optimizing customer experiences have yet to be realized,” according to the report. “Even after decades of focusing on CRM as the main tool for improving customer relationships, organizations still struggle to fully understand their customers.”
Modern advances have the power to change all that. The tools and techniques available today can help advance the customer experience by:
- Determining optimal interactions.
- Engaging customers effectively.
- Improving CSAT across all channels.
Advanced analytics capabilities available today leverage machine learning to assess customer satisfaction and intent by analyzing conversations on speech and text channels alike. Sentiment analysis “greatly expands the depth and type of analysis that can be performed on customer-related data,” according to the report.
Insights aren’t enough, though – organizations need to be able to deliver personalized analysis in context. Reporting should be available at a wide range of levels, from the customer or agent level, by topic or issue, or tailored to the specific role within the organization.
AI-powered analytics tools enable organizations to move beyond operational metrics like AHT and FCR to use an expanded set of measures that more accurately reflect the customer experience and tap into data from across the business. Ventana Research found that organizations consider financial data (60% of organizations), agent performance data (53%) and contact center operations data (45%) when analyzing customer experience. New metrics for customer experience require the blending of traditional metrics, like CSAT, with customer analytics insights drawn from voice and text interaction data, sentiment, and agent and customer behavior.
How to modernize the customer experience
Organizations can leverage analytics advancements to improve the customer experience by taking the following key steps identified by Ventana Research:
- Make investments in customer analytics that will provide benefits beyond existing approaches, such as improving communications with customers (considered a key benefit by 59% of organizations) and enhancing the overall customer experience (considered a key benefit by 50% of organizations).
- Build the case for advanced analytics by tying benefits to other key metrics for the organization, such as lower contact center costs.
- Examine whether the technology in place is designed to analyze voice and text interactions for advanced, AI-driven applications.
- Choose technology that is capable of generating insights to guide agents in real time.