Gaining actionable insights from a wealth of customer data sources is no picnic in the park. Yet, harnessing customer data is becoming crucial, as the brands that understand customers best and exploit this knowledge to improve CX will likely win in the digital-first world.
As such, many businesses are enhancing their customer data strategies, aiming to unlock critical insights that inform enterprise-wide performance improvement.
Of course, this is easier said than done. Antiquated approaches to first-party data collection and business siloes are significant sticking points.
To help brands get the ball rolling, we met Thomas Goodmanson, President and CEO at Calabrio, who recommended a forward-thinking method for managing customer data, coining it “CTA”. The acronym stands for:
- Capturing data across the customer journey
- Transforming data into actionable insights
- Applying insights to enhance CX
Delving deeper, here is a closer look at how this data-driven approach can help companies drive customer journey improvements.
Capturing Data Across the Customer Journey
The unfortunate truth is that lots of brands are not listening to customers. While lots of analytics-based tools can capture what they say, helping turn data into information and action, many resist turning adopting these technologies.
Why? “Perhaps a pivotal reason is that compliance recording is so old that many organisations haven’t transferred their approach,” suggests Goodmanson. “They haven’t transformed.”
Yet, even when enterprises transform data, it often gets stuck. Indeed, a 2020 S&P Global Market Intelligence study reveals that 39% of highly data-driven organisations have more than 50 data silos.
Add to this the upcoming doomsday for cookies – which Google Chrome plans to ban by the end of 2023 – and capturing data becomes an increasingly tricky task.
Luckily, Goodmanson offers some welcome recommendations to improve how companies capture customer data. These include:
- Go beyond assessing call recordings alone. Pair them with metadata from screen recordings and keyboard activities, which may provide the spark that inspires business insight.
- Encourage departments to develop a singular way of communicating their insights to break down siloes and better merge them with data from other departments.
- Ensure cross-function collaboration, understanding where there is overlap in delivering customer journeys and what data is mutually beneficial. Build on this.
Those who follow this advice can start using first-party data to build customer trust, drive growth efficiency, and future-proof against potential privacy and regulatory changes.
Transforming Data into Actionable Insights
By streamlining data capture, it becomes much easier to extract actionable insights. For instance, after turning spoken words into text and attaching metadata, companies can begin to correlate pieces of information from within a robust database.
Yet, departments often use point products for data analysis instead of aggregating and integrating raw data from various enterprise systems to build such a robust database. “These can provide excellent insight but contribute to the siloed thinking that plagues many businesses,” adds Goodmanson.
So, instead of nabbing individual pieces of the business intelligence (BI) pie, consider a holistic solution that seizes the entire dessert.
An offering such as Data Management, especially its out-the-box Enterprise CXI dashboards, correlates data from across the enterprise and delivers helpful information between departments at points of overlap within the customer journey.
Building on this point, Goodmanson urges brands to “consider how open their BI system is and whether it offers a selection of APIs that connects various enterprise software.”
“Also, define processes so that departments can access the data, understand what it represents, and know what to do when they get it.”
An example of how this works is using a BI system to connect marketing and resource planning, enabling workforce management teams (WFM) teams to understand the demand that marketing activities create. As a result, contact centre teams may schedule the right people at the right time to do the right things to support customers during marketing campaigns.
Applying Insights to Enhance CX
Like the WFM example above, there are numerous ways to act on BI, enhance operations, and power CX. Many of these include connecting the enterprise data with contact centre insights.
For instance, brands may choose to:
- Connect marketing data with customer engagement statistics to track the impact of campaigns and compare the success rates of various mediums.
- Pull agent performance statistics – from a contact centre quality management system – into HR to gain a complete view of agent performance.
- Integrate financial reports and customer metrics to warrant further CX investment.
These use cases underline the incredible data sources that contact centres can be, unlocking insights across the enterprise. Goodmanson believes that – as more companies recognise this – a new role for the contact centre will emerge. He states:
“Customers tell us what they want and need. By spotlighting these insights, the contact centre can become the brand guardian, helping companies solidify their place in the market.”
While many lack the time, tools, and cross-functional relationships to meet this vision, the goal for the contact centre to supply and help apply insights across the company has many benefits.
Consider GreenPath as an excellent example of this. The debt councillors harnessed Calabrio Analytics to identify phrases customers used – across all customer channels – and correlated them to marketing campaigns.
By doing so, the contact centre deciphered the most successful platforms for reaching its target demographic and passed this information onto marketing. GreenPath then focused its resources on the richest advertising avenues.
As a result, the company realised a 150% increase in calls from its most desired audience. Greenpath also uncovered a need for additional Spanish speakers. After addressing this, it reaped the rewards of a three percent uptick in NPS and increases in client wellbeing.
Partner with Calabrio to Make Business Intelligence a Sustainable Norm
Following the CTA approach allows companies to increase their understanding of customers, eradicate data siloes, and uncover insights that drive better business results.
Calabrio works closely with its clients to achieve these outcomes, transforming data analysis into a simple, compelling, and highly profitable initiative.
Discover more by visiting: www.calabrio.com
