There is no greater cause for losing customers than poor customer experience. Conversely, there is no better path to customer loyalty and repeat business than excellent customer service – and excellence is in the details. The details are in the data.
CX, or Customer Experience, as defined by Oracle.com is, “how a business engages with its customers at every point of their buying journey – from marketing to sales to customer service and everywhere in between. In large part, it’s the sum total of all interactions a customer has with your brand. [CX] is not just a set of actions. It also focuses on feelings… At every customer touchpoint, you can improve – or destroy – how your customers feel about you. So there are important decisions to make at each touchpoint, and those decisions influence how successful your business will be as a result."
This isn't a fluffy feel-good aspirational academic exercise. According to Forbes (full article here for a good read), "86% of Buyers Will Pay More for Great Customer Experience." It's also what Gartner says 66% of surveyed organizations (a.k.a. competition; set to increase beyond 80%) claim is where they compete either mostly or entirely. And all of this against an environment where clients and customers may do business with an organization across multiple channels (in person, online, by phone) with different internal individuals, potentially using various payment methods, and who may decline to provide contact or other identifiable information.
"There are important decisions to make at each touchpoint." The right answers to important decisions require good information. Data. Individualized, timely, and relevant to inform and personalize actions for each decision along the way.
Business Intelligence [BI], according to our partner Tableau, "combines business analytics, data mining, data visualization, data tools and infrastructure, and best practices to help organizations make more data-driven decisions." It is knowing which way to go not based on intuition, experience, or aggregated averages, but on insights pulled from house-generated data potentially combined with vast, easily accessible data in the cloud.
Data-driven customer experience management = #CXBI.