How Integrating Data Can Improve Customer Experience

Customer intelligence is one of the most prominent areas that organizations are now focusing on. That’s unsurprising because recent data from Forbes’ report titled Proving the Value of CX shows that customer experience alone influences about 74% of consumers to make a purchase.

But how can you improve customer experience?

By integrating customer data to extract insights that drive key decisions.

Organizations now have access to more data than ever before. This does not only include data about your customers and how you can contact them but also data about their likes and dislikes, their behaviors, and how they interact with your products and/or services. What’s more, all of your marketing channels from social media to email can paint a picture of how your customers and prospects perceive your brand and what kind of messaging resonates with them the most.

Access to such data and having the ability to integrate it with other data streams can translate to powerful analytics that can pave the way for better decision-making, improved efficiency, and shorter project delivery timelines. Effective customer intelligence can also help your organization build powerful relationships with your customers and improve product and service offerings.

Here’s everything you need to know about integrating various data streams to improve your customer experience.

Integrating Data to Improve CX: The What, Why, and How of Customer 360

Unifying your customer’s data has many benefits to it. Integrating data from different touchpoints can help you map out your customer’s journey and evaluate how satisfied your customers are with your services and customer support. This concept, more commonly known as Customer 360, allows organizations to view their relationship with their customers in an experiential way, allowing them to identify potential stumbling blocks across different touchpoints and amend them according based on their gathered intelligence.

Why is Integrating Customer Data Important?

When searching for a new product or service, customers now prioritize customer experience a lot more than ever before. This means that focusing on making your customer’s journey as convenient and hassle-free as possible is bound to bring in more business.

From a customer’s perspective, going the extra mile to personalize messaging and validate feedback makes all the difference. With so much competition out there, it’s safe to say that customers will go with the company that makes them feel heard and valued.

Creating a unified platform to integrate data from all touchpoints in your customer’s journey can help with just that.

Once you have insights into the likes, dislikes, behaviors, and expectations of your customers, it will be easier to create well-defined, data-driven marketing strategies that will resonate with your audience. Since failed marketing plans can waste both time and money, relying on data-driven strategies is your best bet to make sales without spending a fortune.

Here are a few more reasons why you should integrate your customer data:

Customer 360 Can Increase Customer Loyalty

Customers are likely to stay loyal to your company if you’re providing them with a great customer experience. In fact, a study from experience management firm, Walker, also found that at the end of 2020, customer experience will be the key brand differentiator, leaving both price and product behind. Forbes also claims that personalization can even go on to increase customer spending as much as 50%.

Creating a single source of truth will allow you to dive deeper and create meaningful relationships with your customers and prospects. Needless to say, if you respect the preferences and feedback of your customers, they are bound to stay loyal to your company. What’s more, great customer service can even encourage your customers to refer other people to your company thus increasing your revenue.

A Unified View of Customer Data Can Lower Costs of Acquisition

It’s common knowledge that acquiring a new customer can cost far more than retaining old customers. After all, you will not only have to spend time and money on marketing your products and services to these prospects but you’ll also have to ensure that you get the after-sales journey right before your customer decides that they want to stick with your organization.

The right customer data can make all the difference. Once you have the complete picture of your customer journeys, you will be able to pinpoint the exact stage at which customers – both old and new – stop engaging with your organization and go forward with your competition instead. Digging deeper, you’ll also be able to identify the exact reason why your customers are leaving – be it price, quality, or poor customer service – and make amends to ensure that your customers remain satisfied and continue paying for what you have to offer.

Customer 360 Can Help You Upsell

Think of the last time you shopped for groceries online. Chances are, you were shown a product based on what you added to your cart or showed interest in. And if you’re like most people, you probably even gave in and ordered an item that you were shown based on your purchase behavior.

Most companies today are able to leverage upselling opportunities solely because they were able to integrate multi-touchpoint customer data. Once data is gathered from you and enough other customers, these organizations are able to predict your spending patterns with a certain degree of accuracy – and that’s often enough for them to make a sale.

Roadmap for Integrating Customer Data to Enhance Customer Intelligence

If you’ve read this far, you probably have a good idea of how integrating data can support your customer intelligence efforts. Integrating customer data and getting a holistic view can help you strategize better, reduce costs, and even increase customer loyalty.

But how will you go about integrating customer data specifically for this purpose?

Here are a few pointers that you can follow to improve your customer experience using data:

1. Create a List of Existing Customers

If you don’t already have a list of your existing customers, that needs to be your first step when you’re trying to use data to improve your customer experience. This list should not only have details about the customer and how you can contact them but also additional information including their preferences, interests, behaviors, and purchasing patterns. This information can be gathered from social media channels, monitoring email marketing campaigns and how your customers interacted with your emails, website and mobile app analytics, and even by seeing how satisfied your customers were with your support team.

Once all of this data is consolidated, you need to clean and transform it to ensure you can extract valuable insights.

2. Look for Gaps in Your Analysis

Now that you have a clear picture of how your customers are interacting with your business, you can start looking outward to see what the general perception regarding your business is. You can leverage social media listening tools and general surveys to see what customers and prospects are saying about their customer experience. This step can also help you understand which channels and methods of communication both prospects and customers prefer, allowing you to modify your strategies accordingly.

3. Use Data to Create Winning Strategies

This is where you’ll put all that you’ve learned about your customers into practice and create strategies that are aligned with the data you gathered in the first two steps. The idea is simple: if the data gathered in steps one and two revealed that there’s not enough personalization or that customers find it difficult to communicate with your business, you should use this data to improve everything from your messaging to your user interface to provide them with a better experience.

Creating customer 360 profiles and strategizing according to buyer personas would also be a good idea at this point. Doing so will not only divide your customers into easily trackable segments but will also allow you to perform better A/B tests to see what resonates with each customer group.

4. Measure Results and Repeat

You’ve gathered the data and made the strategies … what now?

Refer to point number three.

The only way you’ll really know if you’ve made a ‘winning’ strategy is by tracking results. Ideally, you’d want to continue using the channels, messaging, and tactics that are working well for you.

Are your emails being opened and read?

Are prospects engaging with your social media posts?

Are any issues your customers are facing being dealt with promptly and efficiently?

Tracking the results of your campaigns and strategies should be a continuous process – one that helps you learn from (and rectify) your mistakes and leverage data to experiment with new strategies. This way, you’ll always be able to provide your customers with what they are looking for and never lose to your competition based on customer experience.

How Astera Centerprise Facilitates Customer Data Integration

With built-in connectors for 40+ sources including databases, web applications, and file formats, Astera Centerprise can be used to build seamless data integration pipelines to integrate your customer data and enrich it with transformations. Once your data has been consolidated, you can use data visualization tools to view your data in a whole new light and even automate the execution of your workflows to ensure that incoming data is integrated promptly.

Astera Centerprise also comes with a parallel-processing engine, allowing you to integrate large volumes of data simultaneously. With data quality rules and validation checks, Astera Centerprise also ensures that only accurate, up-to-date data is being used for processing, giving you peace of mind when creating new strategies.

Ready to experience Astera Centerprise firsthand? Get in touch with our team to view a demo or discuss your specific use case.