Differentiating your business from the competition has gotten a lot harder since the emergence of the Internet; competition is just a few clicks away most of the time.
One way that businesses are differentiating is through customer experience. Good customer service creates a relationship with customers, and this in turn builds loyalty that drives customers to choose one business over another.
Big data and proper data management strategies help businesses elevate the customer experience they can provide. Big data helps businesses understand their customers better, and this in turn helps them deliver on customer experience.
By taking advantage of customer data, businesses can better understand the quickly changing wants and needs of consumers and both develop better products for these customers and better service that is geared toward these wants and needs.
Most customer service agents are engaging with customers without much real knowledge of who they are talking with. But with big data, they can come armed with background the customer to tailor a better experience. This sense of being known, aside from any other benefit, can drive loyalty.
Big data can improve issue resolution and help agents upsell and suggest appropriate products, too, however. If an agent knows the previous purchases of the caller, the history of the customer with the business, and other demographic and psychographic data that the company has collected, it is far easier to give meaningful advice and assistance.
From this data, firms also can create a one-to-one, cross-channel experience that cuts across email, social media, telephone, in store and on desktops, mobiles and tablets.
At the end of the day, we all want to be treated as individuals. That starts with being understood, and big data enables customer service agents to understand their customers.
While competition won’t get easier any time soon, businesses that put a good data management strategy in place can rise above the rest by delivering on this most crucial aspect of the customer relationship.
Edited by Alisen Downey