Leveraging Customer Experience Initiatives to Boost the Bottom Line
Customer experience is a broad term that refers to how your customers feel about your company and its brand. Essentially, it’s a customer’s evolving opinion of your company, based on all of their interactions and impressions over time. This ongoing relationship is sometimes referred to as the customer journey, and it includes the customer’s experiences of finding, evaluating, and buying, as well as interactions via social media, web browsing, and CRM interactions.
Customer experience is dictated by the brand and how consumer-facing teams shape the way customers engage with the company. Treasure Data’s vision of Connected Customer Experience recognizes how customers want to have the same experience with a company on all channels, and uses the Customer Data Cloud to help businesses realign internal teams for a more well-connected customer experience. While CX itself is not a value proposition, it has increasingly featured in brand strategies to win market share.
After repeatedly upending the business-customer relationship in an unprecedented number of recent global disruptions—waves of viral pandemic mutations, lockdowns, restricted travel, economic downturn, global unrest, etc.—consumers—especially the younger generations—know that a simple web search can unearth a dozen alternatives to a company’s product or service. The increasing commoditization of products and services places greater emphasis on customer experience as the next competitive advantage for brands today.
Customer Experience Initiatives
Market leaders know that the best customer experiences can win the toughest customers’ loyalty, even in spite of a better deal from competitors. Great bargains may catch a lot of attention, but only a few brands win customer trust for a lifetime. Conversely, customers who experience frustration with a brand may not leave any feedback for potential improvements: they just leave.
That being said, customers do want to build relationships with brands that offer quality products and services. Customer experience initiatives, then, center not only on ensuring consumers enjoy every interaction but also on purposefully meeting clients’ specific needs—often indicated via feedback—to move them closer to conversion and loyalty.
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) like Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud empower brands to win customers’ trust and create great experiences. Check out these examples of data-driven customer experience initiatives that produce tangible results and boost revenue:
Know Your Customers Well
Understanding your customers goes hand-in-hand with providing a great customer experience. Ask yourself:
- Do I know my customers well?
- Am I familiar with my customers’ habits?
- Do I know what constitutes a great customer experience in my customers’ eyes?
- Am I aware of their expectations, desires, and pain points?
- Do I know what makes them stay or drives them away?
Gut feeling no longer suffices to answer these questions: data is the key to unlocking your customers’ identities in the digital age. But an “identity,” in this case, means more than simple contact information. Getting to “know” your customers means that you’re able to infer their values from data and behavior and anticipate how they’ll respond to a particular campaign or initiative. This gives brands a good foundation to meet their needs, build trust, and craft great experiences. A CDP offers several methods for building reliable substructures of customer knowledge.
Omnichannel Data Collection. A CDP collects data from all channels—website, mobile, IoT, social media, in-store records, purchase history, transaction records, and more. This means that brands can use every piece of customer data available—legally and with consent. A CDP can also ingest event-level and streaming data to capture real-time snapshots of customers as they interact with brand touchpoints.
Profile Unification. CDPs stitch disconnected pieces of information to specific individuals. A CDP matches data to customers either through identifiers like email or phone numbers (deterministic matching) or through an intelligent estimate that pins information like device type or IP address to a user (probabilistic matching). After unifying profiles, a CDP assigns a permanent ID to customers so brands can track their movement across channels.
Profile Enrichment. Sometimes, first-party data or data collected from a brand’s own channels is not enough. CDPs enrich profiles by seeking second-party data (other brands’ first-party data on the same customer) and third-party data (external information such as weather, public demographic information, and others). Using these additional data, a CDP builds a well-rounded customer profile that brands can use to better understand their customers.
These techniques help brands get to know their customers more deeply so they can tailor CX to their unique needs. The next step is understanding what customers do in their journeys.
Understand Customer Journeys From the Inside Out
Customer journeys contain clues about people’s experiences when engaging with brands on their way to a purchase decision. Starting with the customer’s point of view—instead of a marketer or a sales agent—offers a better perspective from which to assess potential improvements. This spares companies from implementing generalized CX initiatives that relate very little to customers’ actual experiences.
Do your customers really need another chatbot or just a more efficient way to reach the right support agent? While outside observers can speculate on what makes an experience great for customers, nothing beats an inside tip about what customers truly want—and expect. Here, a CDP offers brands several techniques to understand customer journeys from the inside out:
Journey Analysis. Teams can use a CDP to analyze and map customer journeys to understand behavior stages, customer goals, and critical touchpoints. Brands can apply these insights to invest in important customer touchpoints and align CX initiatives to customers’ goals.
Audience Segmentation. While customers’ journeys vary, certain audiences exhibit similar characteristics and behavior. Brands can use a CDP to segment audiences to better understand how groups of customers differ. For example, younger shoppers may be eager to close a big purchase online (like a car) while older customers prefer to meet in-store sales personnel first. By segmenting audiences, teams can tailor CX initiatives to address generational differences as well as segmented needs.
Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) Modeling. Treasure Data’s CDP utilizes a unique multi-touch attribution modeling that uses Shapley values. This model gives marketing teams a better picture of what contributes to a customer’s conversion by scoring all touchpoints—not just the first or last.
MTA modeling gives brands an idea of what channels and touchpoints are most effective in engaging customers, as well as those that create friction in the customer journey. Teams can then translate these findings into customer experience initiatives for smoother journeys.
Orchestrate Journeys
Only with a deeper understanding of customers and their journeys can brands create truly consumer-centric CX initiatives. By addressing real concerns and felt needs, brands can orchestrate journeys that make it easier for customers to move toward conversion.
A CDP enables teams to orchestrate customer journeys and create good experiences through the following techniques:
Address pain points. CDPs analyze customer journeys and identify where past pain points have occurred. Using this data, a CDP can leverage machine learning (ML) to predict where pain points will occur in similar segments. Brands can use these forecasts together with real-time customer behavior to preempt problematic CX events and prevent them before they occur.
Predict decision moments. In the same way, brands can leverage a CDP’s ML to identify critical decision moments in customers’ journeys and predict similar opportunities in other audiences. Teams can use these predictions to make it easier for customers to convert when the moment of decision arrives. For example, brands can send relevant offers or messaging when a shopper considers completing the purchase of a previously abandoned item.
A/B Test. Lastly, teams can use CDPs to test whether CX moments and pain points occurred as predicted. Teams can run A/B tests on selected segments and compare results to forecasts. This enables brands to refine journeys and customer experience initiatives quickly to win conversions.
CDPs like Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud harness ML, Journey Orchestration, predictive analytics, and real-time A/B testing to help brands orchestrate journeys and create great customer experiences.
Good CX Requires Good Insights
None of these customer experience initiatives are possible without insight. Customer insights are interpretations of trends and patterns uncovered in customer behavior that can be used in initiatives to impact business outcomes more meaningfully. Customer insights offer a more precise set of actionable information than market research, which deals with broader industry trends. It’s going to take more than surface-level data for brands to create exceptional experiences that meet customers’ expectations and drive results.
CDPs like Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud produce in-depth consumer insights that unlock the best customer experience initiatives for audiences. Starting with a rich customer data foundation, Treasure Data applies ML techniques and predictive analytics to derive actionable insights.
Step 1: Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud builds a rich customer data foundation comprised of 360° unified customer profiles. Each profile consists of omnichannel data, enriching information from second- and third-party sources, and updated data from ongoing brand interactions.
Step 2: The CDP’s ML techniques process millions of data points to uncover trends and patterns in human behavior. These analyses can be enriched by comparing results from different audience segments. Examples of customer insights include:
- Common traits among audiences and segments
- Which profiles are likely to churn
- Which profiles are likely to become loyal
- Best recommendations for upselling and cross-selling offers to specific segments
Step 3: Teams apply Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud’s machine learning-derived insights to customer experience initiatives such as personalization, targeted campaigns, and optimization across channels.
Step 4: Teams measure outcomes and further refine for success through campaign performance tracking, A/B testing, and comparison of forecasts to results.
With CDPs like Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud, brands can boost their bottom line by creating the best customer experience and winning customers’ trust. Brands can use Treasure Data to learn their customers well, understand customer journeys from the inside out, and orchestrate journeys to move customers closer to conversion with each interaction.
Unlock The Best Customer Experience With Treasure Data
Treasure Data’s enterprise-grade customer data platform is trusted by Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies around the world. We help brands transform customer journeys by delivering exceptional experiences at the right place and time to the right audience.
Treasure Data’s Customer Data Cloud is an integrated suite of cloud-based customer data platform solutions that helps companies improve campaign performance, achieve operational efficiency, and create connected customer experiences. See what you can do with Treasure Data:
- Collect and centralize customer data from all sources
- Unify customer profiles using online + offline data
- Segment audiences by attributes, user behavior, and others
- Derive actionable insights using Machine learning techniques
- Personalize customer experience at all customer journey stages
- Predict customer behavior
- And more
Watch Treasure Data in action below:
To learn more about how brands can use Treasure Data’s CDP to leverage customer experience initiatives and drive results, consult an expert today. Want to learn more? Request a demo, call 1.866.899.5386, or contact us for more information.
