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A Deep Dive Into Customer Data Can Help Improve CX

The role of marketing has gained importance thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, with marketing expenditures expected to grow. Customers are demanding a better and more personalized experience as well and yet customer experience spending has decreased over the past year.

The difference in budgeting and expenditures highlights a growing issue in the customer service realm. According to the 2021 CMO Survey, spending on customer experience (CX) has been declining since June of 2020. At the same time, researchers found that CX has become the top priority for marketers across all industries, driven by customer demand.

To deliver the high-level CX in demand by so many consumers, marketers and businesses need to do a deep dive into customer data to provide contextualized and personalized customer interactions. Accenture's latest technology vision report along with data from Forrester outline how businesses can gain a "forensic-level" understanding of customers' demands.

According to Forrester, three of the top five marketing priorities this year are centered around data. These include how to improve the quality of customer data, how to improve the use of data and analytics and how to improve the quality of leads and opportunities. Overwhelmingly, businesses are using marketing responses, identity and transaction data and demographic data and social media content to shape the customer experience. Technology ownership and usage, applications, sentiment and preference data, journey and situation data all rank lower on the priority list.

Web and mobile behavior data, despite their prevalence, are not specifically included in the list and neither are beacon, sensor nor location data. These types of data certainly have an important role to play in providing a contextualized, personalized customer experience.

Data also has an key role to play when it comes to optimizing the customer engagement cycle. Four stages are included within this cycle, and each offers a unique set of data that may be optimized to provide an improved customer experience.

The listening stage offers context about the customer's current situation, location and changing needs. It can provide data about transations and interactions as well as an opportunity to analyze sentiment. The understanding stage of the customer engagement cycle can focus on identifying the customer and their history and relationship with the business. It offers real-time context to create a better overall picture of the customer.

The decision phase includes identifying and evaluating options for response. It consists of applying analytics to the data gathered in the first two phases to help guide marketers and service representatives to better shape the CX. The final stage is to act on the data and information gleaned to provide an optimal customer experience.

Even if businesses don't want to allocate additional budget to the customer experience, they can still make improvements. By taking advantage of the data already gleaned from the customer engagement cycle, marketers and businesses can provide a more personalized and contextualized CX while improving their levels of customer service and retention.

Edited by Luke Bellos