Connecting Data to Make Customer Experience (CX) Easier

Effective business decision-making relies on getting CX right can be tricky given that the necessary data is often difficult to access across silos or exists in disparate and hard-to-reach places. A holistic understanding of a customer not only helps businesses know who they are selling to, but it also helps them craft a customer experience (CX) that delights customers and inspires their engagement with the business throughout their buyer journey. Effective business decision-making relies on fresh, in-the-moment data-driven insights. Without a way to connect, manage, and analyze data in real-time, data that sits idly on servers remains unused at a cost.

To make it simpler for data analysts to improve CX, businesses should take stock of a few questions. What tools are needed to create real-time snapshots of our customers? How might we use these snapshots to create more impactful experiences for them, and nurture them? When armed with the right set of tools that can integrate disparate data into a single pane view, data managers will be more equipped to learn and understand customers, observe where they navigate along their buying journey, and find new ways to nurture them. Such actions can help teams form a point of view to help them build stronger engagement, prospecting, and nurturing strategies.

Benefits for the Customer

Businesses must unify customer needs with their own business goals. By unifying those two things, CX teams can offer more timely responses to issues and generate stronger insights on personas and buying behavior.

Throughout the entire customer journey, CX is shaped by data and how easy it is to use and analyze. With simplified CX efforts, customer-centered teams need to create experiences that are highly tailored and relevant to customers.

Customers have the independence to shop and give their business to whomever they want. Customers have more choices than ever when deciding which business they want to engage with and give their loyalty to. This elevates the need for a simplified CX, and the need for creating experiences that continue to be relevant to them. For example, insights that stem from conversations between cross-functional roles such as marketing and sales – can inform tools and messaging that customers interact with. The more we communicate as teams, the more impactful CX is.

Better understanding of a customer’s unique needs through data is a critical practice that businesses can never do enough of. Creating personalized experiences not only can help improve engagement and build trust with the brand, but also helps them avoid potential dissatisfaction that causes churn in the sales funnel. Data alone is not valuable – but when used to assess who customers are, what they’re looking for, and what they care about – CX can establish the means for building trust and usefulness at each step of the buying journey.

When it comes to pricing and packaging, using available data on purchase patterns creates opportunities to experiment with different pricing strategies and marketing engagement campaigns. Should we test out our new pricing strategy? How might we package our capabilities and see how our customers react to it? These types of insights are critical to getting a complete 360-degree picture of customer behavior and for CX teams to tweak the experience on a customer-by-customer basis.

Benefits of CX for the Ambitious Business

Building memorable and high-impact customer experiences is a win-win for customers and businesses. By having clarity on their customers’ journey, businesses can develop targeted experiences, offers, and tailored campaigns from the awareness stage to the decision-making stage. In addition, businesses can use what they learn from this discovery journey to create new revenue streams. Businesses can also streamline the CX journey, increasing bandwidth to engage both new and existing customers.

Quick and easy access to trusted, real-time data lets businesses proactively engage in customer needs – not just responding to them reactively. Getting CX right can be a tricky task but can be simplified by focusing on connecting data to CX teams looking to boost experiences for customers.

At each stage of the customer journey, the CX footprint should be persistently present. Streaming, structured, and unstructured data processing, along with orchestration and automation enables customer experience professionals to do what they do best. Investing in efforts like building customer retention models and customer acquisition strategies helps yield measurable, impactful outcomes for businesses.

The Actian Data Platform serves as a single platform for integration, management and analytics that combines zero-, first-, second- and third-party data. This provides businesses with real-time insights and access to hundreds of data sources, without performance disruption.

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About Teresa Wingfield

Teresa Wingfield is Director of Product Marketing at Actian where she is responsible for communicating the unique value that the Actian Data Platform delivers, including proven data integration, data management and data analytics. She brings a 20-year track record of increasing revenue and awareness for analytics, security, and cloud solutions. Prior to Actian, Teresa managed product marketing at industry-leading companies such as Cisco, McAfee, and VMware.