Improving the customer experience with real-time analytics

One of the fastest ways to gain new customers and increase revenue is by integrating real-time analytics into your business operations. Additionally, adopting real-time analytics to improve your customers’ experience can improve customer retention and loyalty in the long-term. These achievements are a direct result of real-time analytics enabling organizations to meet customers where they are, at the right time, with the right offer.

The ‘world of the now’

Jeff Jacobs of McKinsey & Company’s growth strategy team, explains: “The expectation of consumers today is that everything exists in the world of the now and that their interactions will be personalized.” In a digital marketplace where targeted ads are the norm and consumers no longer have to search for what they want, aligning your customer experience to your customers’ expectations isn’t optional; it’s imperative.

And creating this elevated, intimate customer experience shouldn’t be left to guesswork, it should be clearly plotted, and data-driven. In fact, a recent Harvard Business Review Analytic Services Survey of over 560 business leaders identified setting clear strategies and goals for attaining personalization at scale as being paramount to the success of a customer analytics strategy (and equally so, the business’s digital transformation strategy). Importantly, the survey also identified the ability to produce actionable data and visualizations as being essential to an organization’s ability to overcome the challenges associated with implementing customer experience analytics, and successfully progress their digital transformation efforts.

 

Crucially, any customer experience analytics program must be agile to succeed, meaning insights are gathered at intervals throughout the customer journey, not just at the end of the process. Per CMSWire, a post-experience survey can’t capture the nuance of customer experience — but real-time insights can: “By capturing information about what a customer is doing, as well as information about your own systems and processes, you can more easily see the points in which the customer experience might be breaking down.” And with this more granular insight, you can begin to build a better understanding of your customer experience, and how to improve it.

From insight to action with cloud BI

The reasons to adopt a customer experience analytics strategy are clear: customers expect a personalized, seamless experience – and providing that experience drives retention and loyalty, which in turn feeds profitability and business growth. But there are challenges associated with implementing such a solution, such as actually translating information into actionable insight at the right moment. In fact, a majority of leaders surveyed by Harvard identified this issue as being one that prevents them from getting the most from their customer experience analytics strategy.  Per Forbes, “The biggest gaps in real-time customer analytics capabilities are in the areas of accessing customer data, performing analytics on those data, and taking action based on the resulting insights.”

But these gaps can be filled, and more and more companies are using cloud-based analytics solutions to fill them. By using a cloud-native BI platform for customer experience analytics, organizations can leverage the speed and flexibility of the cloud to harvest real-time data that translates immediately into actionable insights. And not only does a cloud-based solution offer the immediacy that companies need when it comes to shortening the distance between insight and action, it does so by offering a level of accessibility and user-friendliness that catapults an organization’s data capabilities beyond the Analytics Center of Excellence and into every team and department throughout the business.

Astrato is a modern BI solution that offers a rich, no-code creation experience for Business Users, not just Data Experts. It’s a platform that gives organizations greater control over their future by enabling them to understand earlier and act faster. With Live Query functionality and Dynamic Embeds, users can access real-time data to support the pace of business decisions, and enrich the customer experience by infusing data intelligence into everyday business applications, like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools. With these capabilities, combined with world-class analytics and visualizations, businesses can overcome some of the key challenges identified as impeding the successful implementation of customer experience analytics and put their data into context to enable clear, reliable decision-making.

Meeting customers where they are and when they want is mission-critical when it comes to retention, loyalty, and ultimately, growth. And the businesses that arrive on time to these meetings, armed with the right information, are the ones winning when it comes to creating a successful customer experience to drive these metrics.

To learn more about Astrato’s cutting-edge features and capabilities, and to see how Astrato can help you better understand and reach your customers, just schedule a personal product tour with a member of our team.

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