In an increasingly digital global marketplace, customers generate reams of data every day. The most successful organisations leverage this data intelligently to offer the best prices, personalise CX perfectly, and optimise their operations. For example, Amazon is known to collect over 2000 historical and real-time data points for every order, to be analysed by ML. Due to this, it can change product prices around 2.5 million times every day, staying in sync with customer expectations.
One of the most overlooked aspects of data utilisation for CX is metadata.
What is Metadata?
Simply put, metadata can be explained as data about data – an indicator of what exactly a dataset comprises. You could define metadata as a user attached data label that allows you to track, classify, and better utilise datasets as they are transformed throughout the customer experience process. While metadata was traditionally part of application programming (as developers needed a way to tag data inside an app) it is now extremely relevant for CX professionals as well.
3 ways to Leverage Metadata for a Better CX
Metadata is everywhere around us, giving us more information about specific assets (when was a file last modified or the original author), making information more searchable, and ensuring that content reaches the right customer. It is essentially a labelling practice that enriches the data you already have to make it easier to consume.
Here are three ways in which this can influence customer experiences.
- Metadata can increase your content marketing ROI
Content marketing is often perceived as a high-returns, low-investment activity – a necessary evil if you will. But metadata lets you link specific content assets to greater engagement, interest, and conversion, thereby demonstrating its importance in the revenue generation process. Let’s say you have a repository of a hundred content assets. You can analyse your audience and assign clearly demarcated attributes to audience segments using metadata. Next, you can classify a hundred assets using metadata, and observe how traffic to these assets are behaving. Metadata helps to plot correlations and arrive at accurate inferences for decision making.
- Metadata in customer feedback simplifies analysis
A mid-sized to large company is likely to collect customer feedback from a variety of channels, from online forms to website widgets and SMS or emails. It is only by collating this entire information and conducting a holistic analysis that you can arrive at an accurate, 360-degree picture of the customer. Metadata can be attached to feedback on multiple platforms, and using the same metadata labels will make them searchable in a consolidated manner. This dramatically improves the analysis process giving you better insights on how to improve customer experiences.
- Metadata in product descriptions increases searchability
Finally (and perhaps the most important of all), your product descriptions need the right metadata tags to make them visible to your intended audience. Otherwise, there will be a misalignment between customer demand and product/service availability, bringing down the quality of CX.
