Search for:
Nov 28 2023
Using Data to Nurture Long-Term Customer Relationships

By now, all marketers know that they need data to successfully engage customers over the course of their entire customer journey. But, with customers sometimes having needs and expectations that are very different from others—and even very different from their own previous wants and needs—nurturing each long-term relationship can be difficult. Yet, with the right data and strategy, it can be done.

Building and sustaining relationships requires an in-depth understanding of each customer at an individual level. This includes knowing their past behaviors, what motivates them to take action, and also having the ability to predict what they will do next. Predicting and meeting changing needs and preferences are instrumental to creating customers for life.

Here are some key, data-driven approaches that can help you engage customers and sustain long-term relationships that improve sales and build loyalty.

Integrate All Relevant Data to Build Customer Profiles

Any customer initiative will entail using all relevant data to create comprehensive profiles, which is commonly known as building 360-degree customer views. This critical step involves integrating data on a single platform, then making it easily accessible to everyone who needs it. Profiles typically include transactional, demographic, web visits, social media, and behavioral data, as well as data from a myriad of other sources. Gathering this information may require you to build data pipelines to new sources.

Profiles allow you to truly know your customer, such as their buying habits, preferred shopping and delivery channels, and interests. The profiles ultimately give you the insights needed to engage each person with relevant, targeted offers, based on their behaviors and preferences to ensure effective campaigns and deepen customer relationships.

Keeping profiles current and accurate is essential to identify, predict, and meet customer expectations. Preferences and habits can change quickly and without warning, which is why continually integrating data is essential to understanding customers’ current and future needs, and ensuring their profiles are up-to-date. Having insights into what customers want next—and being able to deliver that product or service—is the key to successfully nurturing customers.

Using Predictive Analytics to Anticipate Changing Needs

Predictive analytics is one of your most important capabilities to gain an understanding of how customer needs are changing. This type of analytics can help you make informed decisions about delivering the next best offer to customers, enabling you to be proactive rather than reactive when meeting and exceeding customer expectations.

A proactive approach allows you to guide customers on their journeys and improve customer retention. It also helps you nudge, or motivate, customers who are not progressing on their journeys in order to reengage them and reduce the risk of churn.

The analysis looks at past behaviors to predict future actions. In addition to helping you identify shifting customer preferences, the analytics can help you uncover any emerging industry or consumer trends that could impact business or marketing decisions.

Another benefit of predicting actions is improving customer satisfaction by understanding their ongoing needs, which supports customer-for-life strategies. Likewise, performing predictive analytics on customer data can help you identify the most opportune moments to reach out to customers with a relevant offer—and determine what that offer should be.

Deliver Engaging and Hyper-Personalized Communications

Nurturing customers requires you to create a perfectly tailored experience for every single engagement. Today’s customers expect businesses to know and understand their individual needs, and then meet those needs with personalized offers. Customers are accustomed to companies providing targeted communications and recommendations based on their habits and preferences, which is why personalization is now tables stakes for interacting with customers.

Going beyond personalized offers to hyper-personalized or ultra-personalized experiences lets you separate yourself from competitors. Hyper-personalization involves more than using the customer’s first name in communications and lumping the person into a customer segment.

Hyper-personalization involves delivering highly customized offers, products, or services that are relevant and timely to the customer. With the right data platform, you can analyze large data volumes to truly know your customer and deliver the right offer at the right time. You can even personalize offers to small customer segments—even curating unique offers to a customer segment of just one person.

Have Complete Confidence in Your Customer Data

Turning leads into customers is a great success. The next goal is to continually stay ahead of customer needs to sustain long-term relationships. Some churn is inevitable, but using data can improve customer retention and drive higher sales.

To build trust with your customers and nurture relationships, you must be able to gather, analyze, and trust your data. The Actian Data Platform makes it easy for everyone across your organization to access, share, and trust data with complete confidence. This allows you to take a truly data-driven approach to customer engagement, to help you better understand each customer, and make predictions with a high degree of accuracy.

The Actian platform can help you transform your customer relationships and accelerate your marketing goals. Take a free trial and experience the platform for yourself.

Related resources you may find useful:

The post Using Data to Nurture Long-Term Customer Relationships appeared first on Actian.


Read More
Author: Becky Staker

Red Button 0 Comments
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.


Read More
Author: Becky Staker

Red Button 0 Comments
Nov 27 2023
Winning in the Automotive Industry with CX

Modern automotive customers expect engaged and superb user experiences. Automotive companies can collect, store, and analyze data across a spectrum of assets. By architecting better customer experiences (CX), automotive companies will reduce customer churn and increase new vehicle sales.

Intelligent Vehicles

Connected cars, beginning with the GM OnStar service, provided the world an early glimpse into the future of automotive innovation. The GM OnStar service relied primarily on CDMA phone technology. Cellular providers and technology added support to transmit data, and this ushered in the era of GPS vehicle connectivity.

Fast forward twenty years and the connected car is no longer sufficient. Modern automotive consumers require not only connected but also intelligent vehicles that provide a host of Customer Experience services. Modern-day intelligent vehicle services can include hands-free driving, navigating traffic, fastest route navigation, weather and road condition navigation, and accident prevention. Additional complimentary services can include vehicle health reports, preventative maintenance, automatic parking, automatic vehicle system updates, remote vehicle start and stop, in-car hotspots, in-vehicle entertainment systems, stolen vehicle tracking, and mobile application support. And with the replacement of mechanical parts and combustion engines with electronic ones, intelligent vehicle capabilities further increase.

The CX services and features mentioned above have the inherited requirement to collect and analyze data both in real-time and in historical batches. The modern intelligent vehicle must be able to access, query, analyze, and predict data and model scores in real time. Modern intelligent vehicles will need to easily transmit and receive ever-increasing volumes of data to provide this portfolio of customer experiences. This combination of macro events (i.e. weather, quickest route) coupled with micro-events (i.e. tire pressure, road conditions, driverless) lays the foundation for quickly moving and processing data across a variety of cloud and in-vehicle environments. In effect, the modern intelligent vehicle is becoming a mobile data generator and processing unit.

The Future of Intelligent Vehicles

Data processing and model scoring tasks will need to be done in vehicle progressively more into the future as vehicles continue to get smarter with regard to their immediate surroundings. Customers will expect all the above-mentioned experiences and services with a new vehicle purchase. Automotive manufacturers will continue to invest in edge and hybrid cloud data processing architectures for product development.

The Actian Platform & Portfolio

Actian provides a hybrid cloud data platform and data portfolio that includes edge data processing technologies. Customers can easily process and store data on the edge while easily moving data up and across a variety of cloud data processing environments. Our hybrid cloud data platform includes built-in features to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO). This makes common tasks such as data integration, management, and analytics easy with compelling price performance. The demands of modern intelligent vehicles have arrived and Actian is here to help. Take the next and start a free trial today!

The post Winning in the Automotive Industry with CX appeared first on Actian.


Read More
Author: Derek Comingore

Red Button 0 Comments
Sep 26 2023
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.


Read More
Author: Teresa Wingfield

Red Button 0 Comments
Sep 21 2023
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.


Read More
Author: Teresa Wingfield

Red Button 0 Comments
Jun 27 2023
13 Churn Prevention Strategies to Improve CX

Happy customers can be advocates for your brand, make repeat purchases, and influence others to buy from your business. This type of success is the result of using data to holistically understand each customer and developing a customer-centric business strategy that engages and rewards each individual when they interact with your company.

Elevating the customer experience (CX) is a proven way to connect with customers and prevent churn. It also helps with profitability, as it’s much more expensive to acquire new customers than to keep existing ones.

How to Retain Customers and Enhance CX

1. Simplify customer onboarding.

Ensuring a fast and painless onboarding experience is essential since it’s often your first opportunity to make an impression on the customer—and first impressions shape CX. An intuitive and positive first experience sets the tone for the customer journey. Whether onboarding entails filling out an online form, activating a new product, or hands-on training on a product, delivering an engaging experience gives customers the confidence that they’re making a good decision by working with your business.

2. Deliver timely, truly meaningful CX.

One of the best ways to prevent churn is to continually provide relevant and authentic customer experiences. These experiences nurture customers by delivering the next best action at the most opportune time. With the right cloud data platform and analytics, you can accurately predict what customers want and when they want it, then delight them with the right offer at the right time and at the right price point. This is where a comprehensive CX strategy that optimizes customer data delivers ongoing value.

3. Personalize all interactions.

Personalized CX is now table stakes for companies. According to McKinsey & Company, 71% of consumers expect organizations to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% are frustrated when this doesn’t happen. Personalization improves customer outcomes—and drives more revenue. Product and service offers must be customized, too. Once you’ve built 360-degree profiles, you can segment customers for special offers. You can even personalize offers to a single customer for a truly customized experience.

4. Engage customers at all touchpoints.

CX is an ongoing journey that requires support and nurturing at every step. Customers typically have several interactions with a company before making a purchase. Understanding each touchpoint and ensuring a positive experience is essential—or the customer could abruptly end the journey. These touchpoints, such as website visits, downloading an app, or social media views, shape the way customers view your brand, company, and offerings. This is why each touchpoint is an opportunity to impress customers and guide their journey.

5. Respond promptly to complaints or concerns.

Customer journeys are not always smooth or linear. Shipping delays, product glitches, and user errors all impact CX. Unhappy customers have a higher likelihood of churn, which brings the challenges of identifying these customers and addressing their concerns. This is especially important when it’s a high-value customer. Sometimes feedback is direct, such as a call or email to a customer service desk or sales rep. Other times, you need to identify negative sentiment indirectly, like through social media. And sometimes customers won’t proactively share at all, which is where surveys and post-sales follow-up provide value. Simply connecting with a customer is sometimes enough to make a difference and make them feel valued.

6. Reward loyalty.

Loyalty programs are a great way to know and recognize your best customers. You can use the programs to gather information about customers, then reward loyalty with special offers, like free merchandise, a discount, or a chance to buy a product before it goes on sale to the public. While these programs improve CX, they also encourage customers to engage with the brand more often to accumulate points. Another benefit is loyalty programs, which can turn customers into authentic advocates for your brand. In addition, studies have shown that consumers are more likely to spend—and spend more—with companies offering a loyalty program. Gartner predicts that one in three businesses without a loyalty program today will establish one by 2027.

7. Build excitement.

When you can build customer excitement, then you know your CX strategy is excelling. This excitement can organically inspire conversations, posts, and comments on social media about your brand. Effective ways to build this excitement include giving loyal customers a sneak peek at upcoming product releases, offering “behind the scenes” content, and creating customer contests on social media that award prizes.

8. Foster trust.

People want to do business with companies they trust and that share their values. Meeting or exceeding customer expectations and resolving problems before they occur builds trust. So does making an emotional connection with customers through your content. Other ways to foster trust include demonstrating that you protect their data, showing concern for the environment through sustainable business practices, and delivering products and services when and how the customer expects.

9. Listen to customers.

Your customers have a lot to say, even if they don’t tell you directly. They might be sharing their thoughts on social media or through their browsing history. Integrating customer data from all relevant sources allows you to understand each customer. You can then listen based on their behaviors and feedback before, during, and after a sale. This can help you determine which features and price points are most effective. Also, addressing any changes in behaviors and responding to complaints quickly can help mitigate churn.

10. Find out why customers are leaving.

Understanding why customers are ending subscriptions, switching to a competitor, or no longer purchasing from your company allows you to identify churn patterns. This can help you evaluate if you’re experiencing a level of churn the business is comfortable with—some amount of churn is to be expected—or if there’s a sudden spike or ongoing problem. Churn analysis offers insights into why customers are leaving, such as products that don’t meet expectations, prices that are higher than competitors, poor customer service, or other reasons.

11. Be proactive.

It’s important to identify customers at risk of churning, then engage them before they leave. Measuring customer sentiment helps to determine areas needing improvement and creates a consistent channel for feedback. Proactively addressing customers’ concerns before they spiral into full-blown problems can encourage them to stay. Being proactive requires a robust customer retention strategy and the ability to perform granular customer analytics for insights into the early stages of churn.

12. Know what your competitors are doing.

Knowing your business and your customers is not enough. You must also know what your competitors are doing. This allows you to better understand the competitive landscape and have insights into potential market changes—or major market disruptions. A competitive analysis can help you understand key differences between your products and competitors’ offerings. This can help you update your product design and marketing strategy, and even be an opportunity to poach customers.

13. Stay relevant.

Growing the business and staying relevant are ongoing challenges. It requires continually delivering innovative products and services, regularly connecting with customers, staying ahead of changing customer preferences, and updating the brand as needed. You also need to evaluate if you have gaps in your product or service offerings, and if so, plan how to address them. As customer wants and needs change, your brand also needs to change in ways that are relevant to your customers.

Let’s Get Started

Your ability to tackle customer attrition while enhancing customer experiences starts with data. You need the right data, and you need the ability to integrate it using a single, scalable platform for analytics. The Avalanche Cloud Data Platform can help you transform your churn and CX strategies by bringing together all of the customer data you need on an easy-to-use platform. Our advanced capabilities for data integration, data management, and analytics give you the insights and confidence needed to retain and engage customers.

Related Resources:

The post 13 Churn Prevention Strategies to Improve CX appeared first on Actian.


Read More
Author: Brett Martin

Red Button 0 Comments
Jun 22 2023
Using Customer Analytics to Create Lifetime Value

Moving clients from being one-time customers to doing business with them for life is the ultimate goal for organizations. It’s what ensures ongoing success and profitability. Your products, services, and business priorities can change over time, but one constant is the need for loyal customers.

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a measure of how valuable a customer is to your business over the course of your entire relationship. CLV provides an expectation of what a customer is predicted to spend on your brand if you deliver the right experiences.

The process of successfully building lifetime customers starts with analyzing data at every step along the customer journey. You’re probably already using a data-driven approach to engage, reward, and retain customers. Here are ways to build on what you’re already doing to support a customer-for-life strategy:

Know Everything About Your Customer

All customer strategies—reducing churn, using targeted selling, creating customers for life—require you to know everything you can about the customer. This entails creating a single view of your customer by integrating all relevant customer data from all available sources for a complete 360-degree profile. From there, you can uncover deep insights into customer behaviors and buying patterns, then predict what customers want next so you can meet their emerging needs.

The ability to accurately identify customer wants and needs is essential to creating customers for life. It represents a significant shift in traditional customer-centric strategic visions. That’s because it takes a forward-looking view to understand what customers want before they tell you, instead of a rearview mirror approach that explains what has already happened. While past behaviors are important and help predict future actions, performing analytics across all relevant customer data is needed to forecast how customer preferences are changing.

Staying ahead of customer wants, needs, and challenges will inspire customers to trust your brand. But don’t expect to “find” customers for life. It’s up to you to nurture and reward current customers, then cultivate successful relationships that ensure loyalty. In other words, you have to “create” customers for life.

Engage and Delight Customers at Every Touchpoint

Creating customers for life is an ongoing process that requires consistently gathering and analyzing data to ensure current insights. Customer behaviors and needs can change incredibly fast and with little warning, which makes real-time data essential.

Your organization must have the ability to integrate, manage, and analyze all required data, including data from new and emerging sources. This helps you spot early indicators of changing trends or behaviors, allowing you to shift your customer experience strategy, serve up timely offers that meet customers’ current needs, and build long-lasting customer relationships.

Once someone makes a purchase from your company, you have an opportunity to entice that customer with the next best action—whether it’s a limited-time discount, exclusive access to a product or content, or another special offer—to drive a second sale. A repeat purchase puts them on the path to being a customer for life.

Have Full Confidence in Your Customer Data

Data needs to be trustworthy and easy to use to deliver the insights needed to understand your customers and guide their purchasing decisions. This includes customer data such as transactional details of when, where, and what products a customer has already purchased from your business. You also need the ability to integrate other relevant data, such as demographic information to help with segmentation, and behavior data, which offers insights into how customers responded to previous marketing campaigns and their past buying behaviors.

Analyzing the data can reveal which customers have the highest potential lifetime value so you can focus on ensuring they remain customers—you do not want to let these customers switch to a competitor. The analytics process must start by bringing together data for a single, current, and accurate view of each customer, including their purchase history across all channels—in-person, online, and via third-party resellers—to understand their habits and preferences. These insights are key to providing a personalized, nurturing experience with targeted offerings that lead to life-long customers.

The Actian Data Platform can offer the data and analytics capabilities needed to create customers for life. It integrates seamlessly, performs reliably, and delivers at industry-leading speeds to drive your customer strategy and maximize customers’ lifetime value.

Related resources you may find useful:

Connecting Data to Make Customer Experience (CX) Easier

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

Boost Your Customer Data Analytics

The post Using Customer Analytics to Create Lifetime Value appeared first on Actian.


Read More
Author: Brett Martin

Red Button 0 Comments
RSS
Facebook
fb-share-icon
X (Twitter)
Tweet
YouTube
LinkedIn
Share