Make customer experience the center of all your innovation.
While thinking about cx management, digital teams often aspire for real-time interaction to improve engagement and sales, with customer experience consulting being a valuable resource. A common recommendation to achieve this is the chat feature. In the days Immediately following the implementation of the chat functionality, they see a steep increase in customers reaching out and asking questions on the website.
Enterprises in most cases define the strategy by what they want to achieve, not what the customer wants to experience. They decide the products they want to highlight, often based on the latest pricing/promo deals. So visual merchandizing decisions are based on what the merchant wants to sell off, not what the customer wants to buy.
In retrospect, the fallout seems obvious — there are multiple levels of impact of initiatives such as these. Yet day after day, organizations implement point solutions for customer analytics, which lead to decisions like this, or worse. Here’s why.
An inside out approach to organizational strategy
Enterprises define the strategy by what they want to achieve, not what the customer wants to experience. For instance, in a typical retail organization, websites are updated by merchants. They decide the products they want to highlight, often based on the latest pricing/promo deals. So visual merchandizing decisions are based on what the merchant wants to sell off, not what the customer wants to buy.
As a result, customers get put off by irrelevant deals and uninteresting displays. This is also true of marketing campaigns, promotions, etc.
Customer experience is an afterthought
In most organizations, customer insights is a support function for marketing/product teams. For instance, marketing teams look at the analytics and think, “here is the list of new leads; let’s send them a promotional campaign.” Or product teams might think, “alpha version is selling better than beta: let’s double down on that.” By doing so, customer needs take a back seat, and factors like where customers are in their buying journey, what will encourage them to decide, and the insights provided by customer journey analytics are neglected.
Instead, this approach creates solutions and retro-fits customer needs into it.
Gleaning insights in silos
Every team has customer analytics. Marketing, website, mobile app, sales, logistics and transportation — every team is gleaning insights for their particular use cases. And each of them optimizes their activities based on these insights. However, the sum of these parts doesn’t make up the whole. So, the marketing teams might look at increase sales in one area while the logistics teams are sending inventory in the opposite direction.
Point solutions optimize locally, not globally. This can have an adverse effect on the overall customer experience.
Organizational goals mismatched from customer experience
The goal of a marketing team, through customer segmentation, is to increase return on investment (ROI) by reducing the cost of acquisition, increasing lifetime customer value, and delivering personalized experiences. Similarly, the packaging teams’ goals might be to minimize cost and optimize efficiency. This can come from changing packaging material, quantity, etc. In isolation, each of these goals are achieved by the teams. Yet, its impact on customer experience is hardly measured.
If serving the customer is an organization’s ultimate goal, why aren’t all goals mapped to it?
IT isn’t ready
Decisions around IT infrastructure and solutions are made with little or no contact with the customer experience teams at all. So, roadmaps for customer touchpoints and business processes are at loggerheads with IT readiness.
As a result, IT and data investments don’t power customer experience effectively.
If this is how you’re implementing customer analytics in your organization, you’re not alone. Gartner states that 85% of all big data projects fail. Even last year, over half of the leaders surveyed said that marketing analytics, including voice of the customer analytics has not had the influence…that they expected.
Fragmented and point-wise implementation of customer analytics causes more harm than good. It allows each team in your organization to have a myopic view of the customer, treating them as mere data points than as a real person. It fails to leverage data that the organization already owns! Incorporating customer experience data analytics can bridge this gap and ensure better alignment between technology initiatives and customer-centric strategies.
At Tredence, we propose a radically different approach to customer analytics. We recommend that you place the customer at the center of all your analytics initiatives and build innovation around them:
- Business innovation to identify value, reimagining customer touchpoints and journeys (across channels and locations). Bring together the voice of the customer and other key performance indicators (KPIs) as an integrated value chain.
- Process innovation to enrich data and re-engineer organizational systems. Move your analytics from sequential, one-at-a-time, and periodic strategy towards parallel, rapid experimentation in real-time.
- Platform innovation to pilot, measure, improve and integrate all your technology assets for a holistic customer view. Integrate disparate data assets and measurement into DDOM, CDP, and test-and-learn platforms for continuous improvement.
- Service innovation for value realization through monitoring, measurement, and governance. Operationalize analytics for scale with repeatability across channels.
With this approach, your organizational strategy is anchored around the stakeholder who matters the most — your customer. With a holistic view of the organization and a clear understanding of the impact of new initiatives, you can build marketing, sales, and operational plans that optimize the customer experience.
Don’t waste your time and resources in fragmented customer analytics. Choose cross-functional, holistic, organization-wide customer experience management instead.
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