3 ways data democratization improves the customer experience

Creating a unified customer experience is critical for brands to differentiate themselves from the competition and delight customers. Over the past few weeks we’ve discussed how to:

• Understand customers’ changing expectations and the impact on your brand
• Set up an omni-channel listening strategy to capture unstructured data
• Deploy an AI-powered solution that converts that data into actionable insights

But, there is still one important piece missing. That is, how do you share this data with your teams, other departments, your leadership, and even your customers, to improve the customer experience, grow your business, and protect your brand’s reputation?

The truth is, if you’re using manual processes, siloed data, and a disconnected mix of point solutions, it’s just not possible to do this effectively. There is just too much data in too many places, resulting in an even bigger problem: analysis paralysis. You have so much data that it’s difficult to know where to start or to coordinate actions across teams.

Data democratization is a real challenge for a lot of brands. According to Forrester Research, 77% of CX leaders said they lack a technology framework to coordinate CX activities across their organizations.

As we discussed earlier this week, that can result in a painful experience for your customers. Imagine a customer complains online about your product, and it goes viral. While the social engagement and customer service teams each scramble into action, the marketing team is targeting that customer with ads and emails about the very same product, risking that the brand appears tone deaf and disconnected.

Now, imagine that kind of disconnect across multiple teams and geographies, and products. Despite the brand’s best intentions to listen to customer feedback, countless data points are left sitting in silos or fragmented ad hoc reports, creating a disjointed and inconsistent view of the customer across the entire business.

Turning insights into action

Coordinating your strategy using a unified customer experience platform is the key to successfully democratizing your omni-channel listening data and AI-driven insights across your organization. This ranges from reporting and presentations to real-time dashboarding, displays, and in-the-moment AI-powered smart alerts. Brands will also benchmark insights against past performance internally or competitive actions externally.

Regardless of the format, it’s critical that insights are delivered at the point where they will have the most beneficial impact on the customer, including your care teams who are on the front lines. Modern customers expect a timely, frictionless experience. Waiting to take action based on a summative report may mean missing opportunities to surprise, delight, and serve your customers.

Here are just a few examples of ways that you can empower your teams to act on customer insights, whether it’s to grow your business, reduce brand risk, or improve the customer experience.

Benchmarking

Industry leaders like McDonald’s use benchmarking to track and measure the performance of competitors and other leading brands. Giving context to your competitive intelligence helps you share insights quickly across departments and up and down your teams from practitioners to executives. These contextual insights let you manage your brand’s performance across verticals and geographies to spot competitive opportunities to engage with customers when and where other brands are falling short. Did a customer have a bad experience with another brand? Show them how your product is different.

Smart alerts

When negative sentiment about your brand goes viral, it can damage your reputation, put your teams in instant fire-fighting mode, and give competitors an unwelcome advantage. Worst of all, it means you have disappointed customers and need to address the concerns quickly. Leveraging AI to recognize patterns in message volume and sentiment and flag abnormalities can give you a crucial early warning system for a brewing crisis. But it’s not all about bad news. These alerts can also help you understand what brand messages are resonating with your audience to help you know when it’s time to turn the dial-up or down on your content.

Displays and dashboards

Unlike static, manual reports, custom dashboards and displays can help your teams — and even your customers — visualize data in real-time so that they can easily spot trends and anomalies. With dashboards, you can use broad or specific queries to capture the data you want to focus on that can help teams drill down into certain topics, verticals, or geographies. You can also quickly share information across teams so that everyone is benefiting from and acting on the same insights. Display technology brings your data to life in a compelling way to showcase how you’re engaging digital in the areas that are most meaningful for your brand.

The customer experience, reimagined

As you think about your own customer experience strategy, here are some final takeaways to keep in mind if you want your brand to stand out among the competition:

• Your customers want an experience that is personal, real-time, and on their preferred channels
• You must have an omni-channel listening strategy for vast amounts of unstructured digital data
• AI and automation are essential to turn data into actionable insights
• Data must be democratized to mitigate risk, spot trends, and provide proactive customer engagement

To learn more, download the 3 Steps to Transform Your Customer Experience with AI-Driven Insights eBook now.

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