CIOInsider India Magazine
"You May Like..." Data-Driven Customer Experience
Increased competition in digital marketplaces is putting high demand on companies to increase their focus on customer experience. Peter Drucker, Author and Management Consultant once said “The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer".
We are now in a digital world where markets are dominated by millennial, digital savvy, informed and empowered customers and consumers a far cry from the industrial economy of yester years where markets were dominated by a few powerful companies that could easily push products and services to consumers.
Customers today are more demanding than ever before in the digital market space. With customers now expressing their individual preferences, personalization is the key to ensure effective customer interactions. This drives companies to collect and analyze customer data to gain insights and create solutions and to make changes to improve their business’ Customer experience. According to Forrester 72 percent of businesses say improving Customer Experience is their top priority.
In this age of cut throat competition, every business is trying to become customer driven. But to really be customer driven, businesses must
first become data driven. Context of Data itself has expanded from just Transactions a few years ago to a comprehensive context that supplements transactions with even more important aspects of Observations and Interactions. With this change, traditional databases limit the possibilities to process the sheer volume of data both structured and unstructured to derive customer insights.
Big Data analytics are important for the future success of new and established companies. Big Data enables limitless opportunities to unlock value from diverse set of data to maximize the opportunities for companies to improve customer experience. Big Data along with basket of other digital technologies and techniques like Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Mobile Computing,
Cloud, Cognitive, Social, Internet of Things, Augmented and Virtual reality will be really transformative. They allow enterprises to not only be faster, better and cheaper but also be different. These technologies provide opportunities for businesses to re-imagine customer value propositions, reconstruct business models, re-configure supply chains and increase efficiency.
But to really be customer-driven, businesses must first become data-driven
Advantages of Big Data analytics include but are not limited to:
• Limitless scale and flexibility to collect the huge volume of data from connected people, connected devices
• Collect and Analyze broader variety of data
• Realtime data collection and analysis to aid agile needs of the companies
• Analysis of large volume of data generated in call centers combined with voice data is pivotal in addressing customer experience
The best companies in the world are masters of harnessing Big Data technologies for custom¬er experience - Amazon in books, Netflix in movies, Google in advertising; Uber in Transport, Nike in sportswear. These companies harness the full spectrum of digital technologies to deliver great Customer products, services, experiences at superlative margins. They leverage technology not just for efficiency but as a core competitive differentiator. Though these companies deal with anything from movies to shoes,a single common trend amongst them is that, they provide great Customer Experiences. They win because they anticipate and satisfy their customer's needs, they sense and respond quickly, interact with them and their products or services conveniently, continuously.
Advancement in technology coupled with the usage of Big Data to analyze information from various sources, will see the following take center stage to improve customer experience:
• Realtime analytics to enable companies to have two way dialogue with customers in the digital world
• Companies focusing on spotting problems and fixing them before the customer even notices
• Artificial Intelligence taking the front seat while companies create better customer experience solutions
• Chatbots that enable online text conversations fuelled by personalized insights,creating positive experiences for the customer
It is imperative that before an enterprise can become customer driven it has to be data-driven. Big Data is a key in making an enterprise Data driven. According to Gartner's 2017 executive surveys, Customer experience(CX)continues to be at, or near, the top of the CEOs, CMOs,and CIOs' agendas. We will see increased usage of digital technologies with Big Data and the use of insights to improve Customer experiences. Without core data infrastructure enterprises will operate on a series of guesses and whims.
