Every year, customers generate zettabytes of data, much of which can generate value, but only with adequate data analytics and – of course – action.
Yet, there are many customer data analytics tools to choose from. Picking the most appropriate option depends on the data available, customer needs, and company objectives.
With this in mind, here are various customer data analytics tools, some delivering enterprise-wide solutions, others designed to meet specific use cases to particular departments.
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool that sheds light on digital experiences, analyzing website traffic and user actions. Unlike other solutions, it does not require data engineers to establish data pipelines. Instead, it uses JavaScript to extract data from the company website to assess customer behaviors. The platform also measures, processes, and analyzes customer actions as they navigate the website. Alongside this, it enables custom segments to slice users by traits or actions, pinpointing how these differ from others, extracting insights into digital experiences. Regular Expressions (regex) is a complementary feature that enables more granular search options within the platform.
2. Tableau
Tableau allows users to transform and shape data for analysis by connecting spreadsheets, databases, and big data. It does so thanks to visual customer dashboards and intelligent grouping algorithms, which simplify the process of reorganizing data. With new workflows, users can access data visualization techniques to build narratives, change perspectives, and create deeper meaning. Through the cloud, everyone can access these customer dashboards, view critical findings, and conduct their own analysis in a trusted, secure space. There are also management tools that give control to business leaders over user permissions to data source connectivity.
3. Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics captures digital data from across the enterprise, including the website, a mobile app, and even in-store kiosks/screens. It also monitors audio and video consumption, alongside offline data – from tools such as a CRM – third-party platforms. Harvesting all these sources, it feeds data into a central analytics hub, which various teams can access to improve CX strategies, marketing strategies, and much more. With this access, users can access unique customer profiles for strategic individualization and robust hyper-personalization plans, thanks to the system collecting, aggregating, and rationalizing all this data. Teams may also spot broader trends by harnessing the Analysis Workspace, which includes reports and dashboards, which users can share via email and spreadsheets. Its analytics tools helped Adobe achieve leadership status in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms.
4. AWS Data Analytics
To manage increases in customer data, companies take their data from siloes and aggregate it into a central data lake. Such a centralized system paves the way for companies to maximize the use of AI and analytics technologies. AWS aims to help companies create such a resource alongside a data warehouse and purpose-built data stores, which enable unified data governance and easy data movement. Then, there are its unique data services. Some excellent examples include:
- Amazon Redshift – A cloud data warehouse that provides fast results to complex queries
- Amazon OpenSearch – A suite that allows users to log data, aggregate it, and search analytics quickly
- Amazon EMR – A big data platform that makes it easier to process data at scale
Other tools include real-time analytics, relational/unrelational databases, and interactive query. Data flows between these tools, allowing easy data access and enhanced insights.
5. Microsoft Power BI
Positioned as a market leader by the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms 2022, Microsoft received praise for its Power BI solution. Indeed, the analyst lauded the leading technology vendor for the alignment of its BI solution with Office 365, Teams, and Azure Synapse. These deep integrations allow the BI platform provider to offer visual-based data discovery, augmented analytics, and interactive dashboards. These tools enable a well-rounded data strategy while increasing enterprise connectivity.
6. Optimizely
By combining A/B testing, personalization tools, and feature management solutions in one place, Optimizely aims to help brands make the right decision with real-time insights. In doing so, users may test and learn to optimize digital experiences. Indeed, the company aims to “replace digital guesswork with statistical rigor”, taking the risk out of decision making. As such, brands can invest in ideas that are much more likely to drive positive results. The ability to combine experimentation data – gathered through tests made on the platform – with existing insights heightens confidence in data-driven decisions further. Companies may then harness the other tools within the Optimizely digital experience platform to action these insights.
7. Acquia Customer Data Platform
The Acquia Customer Data Platform takes transaction, engagement, and profile data and assesses it through identify resolution, machine learning, and segmentation methods. As a result, CX teams, marketing, and digital advertising teams can gather a whole host of insights to improve performance. The identity resolution engine is particularly powerful, enabling a single customer view, such as their purchase history, website visits, proactive engagement, and much more. Machine learning then digs into this data to identify preferences and suggest possible product recommendations. Another nifty feature is grouping customers by households, which helps streamline communication. Other groupings are also easy to create, offering cohort insights to increase customer intelligence.
8. Oracle Analytics
Oracle offers an array of data solutions, including business analytics, business intelligence, and data visualization software. With this structure, companies can choose which tools they want to access, moving data from spreadsheets to analysis in a matter of minutes. All this is available on a platform as a service (PaaS) model – which comes with a subscription – alongside the option to add capabilities such as cross-environment partitions and drill-down reports. Users may also access “Essbase cubes”, allowing them to integrate third-party applications and introduce new data sources into the unique environment.
9. InsightSquared (Mediafly)
The sales intelligence solution enables sales operations professionals to assist their leadership in developing accurate projections, analyzing pipeline trends, and maximizing agent impact. It can predict what is relevant to customer-centric organizations and provide data in user-friendly formats for accessing reports and gaining insights. There is a report for each use case and role-based data dashboards for managers, sales representatives, and contact center executives.
10. BryterCX
BryterCX is a customer experience management package that enables organizations to visualize, quantify, monitor, and optimize engagement across processes and touchpoints. Through analytics, BryterCX enables professionals to obtain visibility into opportunities, call center performance, and customer detractors or promoters. It also assists organizations in transforming omnichannel event data into a clear map of customer behaviors and journeys. Meanwhile, brands may monitor and measure the actual journey against critical benchmarks. As such, it is possible to identify frictions and quickly remediate issues to increase satisfaction. Finally, its features include the ability to determine the impact of digital channels on customer moments of truth, track changes in customer behavior, and quantify the impact of agent efforts.
Many of the highlighted solution providers offer comprehensive data platforms. Discover more about these by reading our article: What Is a Customer Data Platform?
