We are in what Forrester Research calls “The Age of the Customer,” where customers, not companies, are driving business decisions. For this reason, it is more important than ever for companies to get to know their customers on a deeper level, and they are beginning to tap their Big Data for this.
In the era where online businesses must truly understand their customers’ experience and behavior in order to succeed (or even survive), it is imperative that they can easily tap into Big Data sources and leverage that data to gain critical insight. Most everyone knows that analytics are only as good as the data they are built upon, but organizational roadblocks and technology limitations have left many brands struggling to feed their analytics with quality data. They usually lack the step-by-step blueprint of the customer experience that can reveal critical behavioral insights. As a result, their analytics are often misleading, incomplete or inaccessible.
It’s time to assure you have the data needed to truly know and understand your customers’ experience and behavior. Below are 10 tips that companies can use when creating Big Data strategies to gain insights from customer interaction, improve customer loyalty, and ultimately gain a competitive advantage.
- Treat Your Network Traffic as a ‘Gold Mine’… and Mine that Gold! – Your network contains a wealth of Data in Motion that many companies don’t take advantage of. Harvesting this valuable information is the first step in truly understanding your customers’ experience.
- Don’t Always Assume You Know What Your Customer Wants or Needs – Embrace your customers for what they do, rather than what you think they’re doing. Stay objective and allow the data to provide insight.
- Capture Everything to Avoid Blind Spots – Blind spots can lead to missing critical information and a skewed overall picture of a customer’s experience. Make sure you truly capture everything that can influence the customer’s experience and behavior.
- Focus on Quality of Your Data Rather Than Quantity – After capturing everything, focus on feeding your analytics solution with the data that matters most.
- Be Agile – Customer needs and priorities are always changing. Technology must be agile and able to adjust as well. To ensure that your analysts don’t lag behind, you must be able to adjust the data you capture & process on the fly to meet continuously changing requirements.
- Your Business Operates in Real Time – So Should Your Analytics–The ability to gain insights into your customers’ experience and behavior in real time allows you to understand what’s happening as it’s happening and take appropriate action steps as needed to ensure optimal user experience and business results.
- Analytics Should Never Impose Risk on Your Production Systems – Nor should analytics have a negative impact on your customer’s experience. Capturing everything and avoiding blind spots should have no impact on your site performance.
- The Data is Yours, Use Every Bit of It – Aggregated data can hide critical insights. It is the granular information about your customers’ behavior and experience that will render the most valuable insights required to continuously improve your customers’ experience and business results.
- Look at the Full Picture – Capture the data whether your customers interact with your website/web application from a smart phone/tablet/computer. Enrich that data by correlating it with data that resides in different data stores to make sure you are able to “connect the dots.” Correlate the data as early as possible in your processing to gain complete, accurate and timely and effective insights.
- Be Platform-Neutral – Ensure that you can capture customers’ experience and behavior information from any type of device (laptop, desktop, smartphones, tablets, etc.).
In summary, by making sure the right data is available for effective analytics, companies can find new ways to truly understand their end users’ experience and optimize business results.
Mike Dickey is CEO of Cloudmeter.
