Gaining actionable insights from a wealth of customer data sources is no picnic in the park. Yet, harnessing customer data is becoming crucial, as the brands that understand customers best and exploit this knowledge to improve CX will likely win in the digital-first world.
As such, many businesses are enhancing their customer data strategies, aiming to unlock critical insights that inform enterprise-wide performance improvement.
Of course, this is easier said than done. Antiquated approaches to first-party data collection and business siloes are significant sticking points.
To help brands get the ball rolling, we met Thomas Goodmanson, President and CEO at Calabrio, who recommended a forward-thinking method for managing customer data, coining it “CTA”. The acronym stands for:
- Capturing data across the customer journey
- Transforming data into actionable insights
- Applying insights to enhance CX
Delving deeper, here is a closer look at how this data-driven approach can help companies drive customer journey improvements.
Capturing Data Across the Customer Journey
The unfortunate truth is that lots of brands are not listening to customers. While lots of analytics-based tools can capture what they say, helping turn data into information and action, many resist turning adopting these technologies.
Why? “Perhaps a pivotal reason is that compliance recording is so old that many organisations haven't transferred their approach,” suggests Goodmanson. “They haven't transformed.”
Yet, even when enterprises transform data, it often gets stuck. Indeed, a 2020 S&P Global Market Intelligence study reveals that 39% of highly data-driven organisations have more than 50 data silos.
Add to this the upcoming doomsday for cookies – which Google Chrome plans to ban by the end of 2023 – and capturing data becomes an increasingly tricky task.
Luckily, Goodmanson offers some welcome recommendations to improve how companies capture customer data. These include:
- Go beyond assessing call recordings alone. Pair them with metadata from screen recordings and keyboard activities, which may provide the spark that inspires business insight.
- Encourage departments to develop a singular way of communicating their insights to break down siloes and better merge them with data from other departments.
- Ensure cross-function collaboration, understanding where there is overlap in delivering customer journeys and what data is mutually beneficial. Build on this.
Those who follow this advice can start using first-party data to build customer trust, drive growth efficiency, and future-proof against potential privacy and regulatory changes.
Transforming Data into Actionable Insights
By streamlining data capture, it becomes much easier to extract actionable insights. For instance, after turning spoken words into text and attaching metadata, companies can begin to correlate pieces of information from within a robust database.
Yet, departments often use point products for data analysis instead of aggregating and integrating raw data from various enterprise systems to build such a robust database. “These can provide excellent insight but contribute to the siloed thinking that plagues many businesses,” adds Goodmanson.
So, instead of nabbing individual pieces of the business intelligence (BI) pie, consider a holistic solution that seizes the entire dessert.
An offering such as Data Management, especially its out-the-box Enterprise CXI dashboards, correlates data from across the enterprise and delivers helpful information between departments at points of overlap within the customer journey.
