How to Increase Loyalty and Brand Sentiment Through Data

A great customer experience (CX) can lead to more customers choosing you over your competitors. However, getting CX right can be a tricky task, especially as buyer personas and behaviors rapidly evolved because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Consumers have pivoted the way they shop, and, given the uptick in digital selling options businesses are offering, there’s more consumer choice than ever. It’s about assessing how you use data in your systems to prevent customer churn and to prioritize a superior CX.

To realize these benefits, invest in building churn prevention strategies, such as nurturing stronger long-term relationships with customers and improving forecasts. Analyze root causes behind churn and deploy surveys such as customer satisfaction (CSAT) or net promoter score (NPS). These can provide a real-time sense check on how new CX initiatives are playing out, as well as how they’ve impacted customer sentiment.

Overcome The Churn Challenge

To prevent churn, it’s helpful to understand what churn is, where it comes from, and how to measure it to better inform CX.

Customer churn is a one-time customer not coming back to a business as a repeat buyer. Unfortunately, for most businesses, some level of customer churn is going to be inevitable. Often, customers who have churned are the ones not engaging regularly with the business. Disengagement can be a direct indicator that a customer is about to hop over to a competitor.

People will also churn out of the sales funnel if products or services they’ve purchased are buggy, when there’s no adequate support, or if the customer experience was poorly executed. Additionally, customer needs constantly pivot alongside market changes and technological innovation, and customers are often eager to take their business elsewhere to try something new.

The cost of acquiring new customers is significantly higher than the cost of maintaining relationships with current customers. By not paying attention to what keeps customers happy during their lifecycle, you run the risk of having to constantly acquire new customers because you can’t hold onto the ones you have. You also risk diluting your brand in the market and weakening the sense of customer trust that you once captured.

This is why the notion of nurturing is so important for businesses to keep their customers happy and brand loyal. Taking a data-driven approach that leverages segment analysis and predictive analytics will do the trick.

Use Data to Up-Level CX

Stop guessing when making investments in customer marketing and instead tap into the wealth of data you have to build accurate profiles. Without using data that already exists on audience segments for analysis, marketing dollars can end up spent on campaigns based on old or irrelevant data.

Data sets such as previous customer touchpoints and inquiries, purchase histories, and prior service logs are all important to build a better CX. Given the importance of these data sets work to aggregate and connect them.

Traditional data analysis capabilities are limited by the volume and types of data that they can analyze, which can lead to irrelevant or inaccurate results. Data sets that inform churn prediction, such as the ones listed above, must be combined to develop a true understanding of where customers sit.

Aggregated customer profile data can also help you uncover new classifications and segments. You can use data to build churn scores that clearly indicate which customers are most vital to maintain, and how to better reach them. Businesses can also use data to develop more relevant and customized experiences for customers, as well as to offer them better support if they run into an issue.

Additionally, predictive analytics tools are instrumental to help identify customer behavioral trends and market changes early on. This gives CX teams a jump start when creating experiences that are relevant to customers, right at the needed moment in time, during their lifecycle and buying journey.

The Actian Data Platform makes data easy so that businesses can connect, manage, and analyze their data to make the most informed, meaningful decisions. The Actian Data Platform is trusted, flexible, and easy to use. One solution for data integration, data management and data analytics lowers risk, cost, and complexity, while allowing easy sharing and reuse across loyalty and brand initiatives.  Creating a superior CX through team collaboration helps drive greater loyalty and create customers for life.

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.