customer analytics – 🔴 Red Button Data

ACTIAN customer analytics Customer Experience Data Management

Nov 28 2023

The Power of Data in Overcoming Customer Churn

Retaining customers is a high priority and a constant challenge for businesses. Today’s customers expect frictionless and consistent experiences across all channels. They also expect you to anticipate and meet their needs. If you don’t, they are likely to switch to a competitor. Likewise, if you miss market trends, which can change incredibly fast, or don’t provide the benefits, features, and services customers want, you run the risk of losing them. Just a single bad experience may be all it takes for a customer to leave. If poor experiences pile up, your risk of customer churn increases. Delivering the right experiences to build customer loyalty requires you to truly know your customers. How do you do that? By analyzing data and building a real-time view of customers.

Take a Data-Driven Approach to Customer Retention

The first step in overcoming customer churn is to integrate customer data and perform analytics. You need to bring together all relevant data, including social media data, on a single platform to gain a complete customer view. Building 360-degree profiles can reveal the insights needed to understand customer behaviors, preferences, buying habits, and other critical information. Analytics can then identify customers at risk of churn based on customer journeys and other information.

Getting accurate, granular information allows you to determine if there are issues with customer service, customer experiences, product design, or another area that is negatively impacting customers. This critical step alerts you to any major issue that’s turning away customers, so you can address it and mitigate churn. Customer churn analysis lets you predict which customers are at risk. Data analytics looks for factors that can signal customers may be likely to leave, such as:

Long periods of inactivity, including no longer using a service, not opening emails from the organization, and not visiting the company’s website. A sudden and prolonged drop in interaction is a red flag.
Negative feedback and complaints from customers. This can include direct feedback to call centers or from surveys, or indirect feedback in social media posts. Unhappy customers are likely to leave.
Subscription services are reaching their expiration date. This is the critical time when customers decide if they want to recommit to your service. It’s an opportune time to engage them and nurture the next phase of their customer journey.
Cancellations or non-renewals of subscriptions, memberships, or contracts. You can reach out to these customers, and maybe offer a discount or other exclusive incentive, to entice them back as a customer.

Creating a retention strategy allows your organization to have an established process for identifying customers likely to churn, and offering a course of action.

Engage At-Risk Customers Early

Once you’ve identified customers who are likely to churn, the next step is to quickly engage them with timely, personalized, and relevant offers. In some cases, the right offer at the right time delivers the experience needed to rebuild customer loyalty. Data can reveal what motivates customers to take action, such as making a purchasing decision or visiting a particular page on a website. These insights can help you craft the right message to connect with at-risk customers. Going forward, you will need to establish the right cadence of engagement for each customer. This can be a delicate balance—too much and you could turn away the customer, while too little can result in missed opportunities. Using data to understand behavior patterns, such as the frequency at which a customer visits your site or opens your emails, can help inform how often you communicate with each individual.

Make Data Easy-to-Use to Inform Customer Retention Strategies

Some churn is to be expected, especially if you have an extremely large customer base with varying needs. At the same time, minimizing churn is less expensive than acquiring and onboarding new ones, and can also boost revenue. Bringing all data together on a single platform helps you better understand customers and what can lead to churn. You can learn from historic customer behaviors and patterns, customer surveys and feedback, and other data points that tell a story about what motivates customers to churn. Building customer profiles and analyzing large volumes of customer data requires a scalable platform, like the Actian Data Platform. It can help reduce customer churn by offering a complete and accurate picture of each customer to understand their wants, needs, and preferences—and predict what they’ll want next.

These views can identify high-risk customers and your highest-value customers, as well as all customers in between, so you can deliver the best offer to guide the next phase of their journey. This allows you, for example, to connect with those most likely to leave in order to retain them as customers, and also deliver tailored offers to the customers most likely to increase sales and grow revenue. The Actian platform makes it easy for everyone across the business, including marketing, sales, and other departments to access, share, and analyze data to mitigate customer churn and improve experiences. Try the Actian platform for free for 30 days to see how it can drive outcomes for your business.

Related resources you may find useful:

6 Predictive Analytics Steps to Reduce Customer Churn

Prioritizing a Customer Experience (CX) Strategy to Drive Business Growth

Actian Makes It Easy for Insurance Providers to Know Their Customers Better

The post The Power of Data in Overcoming Customer Churn appeared first on Actian.

How to Optimize Customer Analytics to Improve the Post-Purchase Customer Experience

In a recent Martechcube survey, only 18% of retail leaders believe that they could significantly improve the post-purchase customer experience. In contrast, a whopping 80% of consumers feel otherwise. Providing a poor post-purchase customer experience can prevent you from building customer loyalty. Customer analytics can provide valuable insights and data-driven strategies to help you get to know your customers, personalize customer experiences, and improve customer satisfaction.

Over-Reliance on Customer Segmentation

One of the biggest culprits underlying a poor post-purchase customer experience is segmentation. Analytics allows you to segment your customers into similar groups with similar characteristics such as income, gender, age, etc., or behaviors such as purchases, path-to-purchase, and promotional responses.

Marketers use segmentation to help them tailor their campaigns, promotions, and communication to each segment, hoping that these will resonate with customers in the same segment. But do they? Not always. People falling within a segment often have different needs, values, and motivations, and, even if they have the same behaviors, their reasons or motivations for that behavior can be very different.

Insufficient Personalization

By analyzing a customer’s purchase history, browsing behavior, demographics, and other customer activities, you can deliver targeted content, product recommendations, and offers that are more likely to resonate with the customers. More savvy retailers are bringing zero-party data into the personalization mix. Zero-party data is information from customers that they voluntarily and deliberately share with you. The use of zero-party data has risen in popularity after Google announced its intended phase-out of support for third-party tracking cookies in Chrome back in early 2020. Since this time, marketers have realized that zero-party data is more than a replacement strategy for cookie data and now understand that one of the best ways to know what a customer really wants is to simply ask the customer.

Predictive Analytics Can’t Always Forecast Churn

There’s no doubt that predictive analytics is a valuable tool that can help you predict customer behavior, such as their likelihood of churning or making a repeat purchase. Insights can assist you in proactively addressing issues and engaging at-risk customers.

On the downside, there are tons of factors that cause predictive analytics to fail to predict customer churn. Insufficient or poor-quality data will impact the accuracy of results for any type of modeling. Predictive models base their predictions on trends in historical data. As such, they might fail to predict that a customer has decided to churn abruptly due to a recent negative experience. This is a big shortfall for predictive accuracy because 76% of shoppers will stop doing business with a company after just one negative experience. In addition, the competitive landscape is constantly evolving, and historical data may not reveal this.

These shortcomings have several implications for users of predictive analytics. It’s important to regularly update predictive analytics models, validate results, and incorporate a variety of data sources, both internal and external. Also, predictive analytics needs to be part of a comprehensive data analytics approach that includes adaptive analytics strategies. For example, analyzing current data from customer support interactions, including call logs, chat transcripts, and email can quickly identify if a customer is experiencing an issue. And keeping track of new social media mentions and conversations can help you spot unhappy customers faster.

Let’s Make CX Easy Together

Customer analytics provide valuable insights to help you know your customers better to help you deliver a more engaging customer experience. But more is needed than traditional segmentation. You’re going to need to focus more on individual customers and engage with them directly to understand their needs. Advanced analytics such as predictive modeling are useful for understanding future customer behavior, but you’ll still need adaptive analytics to identify sudden changes in the customer experience or market dynamics.

According to a recent GigaOm TPC-H Benchmark Test, the Actian platform’s operational data warehouse is 9x faster and 16x cheaper than alternatives. The Actian Data Platform makes it easy to track, manage, and analyze customer analytics to better identify areas that need improvement and help improve business outcomes. Contact us to start your journey to improving CX.

The post How to Optimize Customer Analytics to Improve the Post-Purchase Customer Experience appeared first on Actian.

Map Customer Journeys to Create Great Customer Experiences

Customer journey analytics interprets data from various touchpoints and interactions that a prospect or customer has with a company from end-to-end. Insights into the customer experience, behavior, and points of friction in sales and service help optimize the customer journey to improve customer satisfaction and drive better business outcomes. However, to derive these benefits you’re going to need a tool to give you a holistic understanding of customer engagement: the customer journey map.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of stages, touchpoints, actions, and experiences that a customer goes through while engaging with a company’s products, services, or brand.

Stages of the Journey

The customer journey map reveals the stages that a customer progresses through as they engage with a company both before and after becoming a customer. Common stages include:

Awareness: The customer recognizes a need
Consideration: The customer compares options to meet the need
Decision: The customer chooses the best solution
Retention: A company’s ongoing marketing, service, sales, and communications with a customer post-purchase to promote loyalty and encourage additional purchases
Advocacy: A satisfied customer becomes a vocal supporter of the brand.

Touchpoints: Touchpoints are the interactions or points of contact that a customer has with the company, from start to finish. These can include advertising, website visits, social media interactions, customer service calls, virtual and in-person events, emails, texts, physical store visits, and more.

Customer Actions and Experiences: Alongside each touchpoint, the customer journey map highlights the actions a customer takes and customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction during each interaction.

What Insight Does a Customer Journey Map Provide?

Analyzing data from the customer journey map helps uncover patterns, trends, and correlations within the customer journey that may otherwise be overlooked. You’ll get a better understanding of how customers behave, where they engage and convert, why they might leave, and what’s next on their wish list. This data-driven approach helps you make informed decisions that optimize the customer journey.

Know Your Customers Better: By understanding customer behavior, preferences, and the factors that influence their decisions, businesses can craft more effective messages and marketing and sales campaigns.

Assess Touchpoint Effectiveness: Identifying which touchpoints are most influential in driving conversions, engagement, and customer satisfaction can lower customer acquisition costs, optimize revenue, and increase customer loyalty.

Prevent Customer Churn: With knowledge of customers who have had poor experiences, a company can identify customers who might leave and take proactive measures to retain them. The company can also take steps to ensure that customer-facing processes work better in the future.

Anticipate Future Needs: Businesses can apply predictive analytics to their customer journey data so they can anticipate what their customers might need in the future and create proactive solutions or strategies to meet those needs.

Getting Started on Your Customer Analytics Journey

The Actian Data Platform can help you get started on your customer analytics journey. It provides everything you need to unify data across customer interaction touchpoints, bringing together data from call center and website logs, social media interactions, customer relationship management, customer service applications, third-party data, and more. Using the Actian platform, you’ll have greater confidence in the data you use to inform your customer journey.

Watch our webinar for more pointers on how to build a 360-degree view of customers to provide more meaningful experiences throughout the customer journey.

The post Map Customer Journeys to Create Great Customer Experiences appeared first on Actian.

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