In the majority of contact centres, spreadsheets run rife, conversations about the ‘real’ number happen daily, and decisions are made on tiny samples of data and without an embedded data strategy. All of this leads to inconsistent customer experiences (CX) with additional costs accrued through manual workarounds. Ultimately the customer pays the price.

Of course, some organisations are getting it right, and leading the way in using their data to improve their CX strategy. But what exactly are they doing to make this happen? And how do you know if your organisation is getting it right?

Answer these four simple questions to understand if you’re doing everything you could be to leverage your data to drive memorable and effective CX.

1) Do you have a clear data strategy?

Maximising the value of your data doesn’t happen by accident. It’s a clear and conscious decision to become . A data strategy should cover everything from identifying and understanding your sources all the way through to business requirements, visualisations, and governance models. The data strategy shouldn’t simply be a task for the IT or Management Information (MI) teams to define but rather an all-encompassing responsibility to understand how our insights inform operational actions. Put simply, if you’re not clear on all of the above, it’s extremely likely that you could be extracting more value from your data.

2) Do you really know what your customer wants?

Once upon a time we could only understand our customer needs through ‘5 bar gates’, speaking to our teams for the latest trend or asking the Quality Department to feed back on the 1% of contacts they review. Over the last five years, there have been huge improvements in technology which can enable you to mine 100% of interactions and make informed decisions. These systems used to be the preserve of 1000+ seat contact centres, but developments in technology (e.g. cloud hosting) have opened this up to a much wider market. If you have 100+ contact centre seats but no Interaction Analytics technology in place, there is a business case for you!

3) How easy is it to understand your performance?

Do you receive a daily email with yesterday’s stats in Excel? Do you have to request extracts from the MI team to analyse your performance? Do people have a different understanding of how to turn a report into action? In most contact centres, the answer to all the questions above will be ‘yes’. Those organisations which lead the way here understand the value delivered when it comes to the effective design of reports, definition of KPIs and setting targets. Simply removing the reporting, which is never the end of the value chain, as a barrier to deliver improved CX.

4) Do you have a single view of the customer?

Finally, truly understanding your customer involves how they interact with you (or don’t) across all touchpoints. Having a unified view of ‘a customer’ may sound simple but it’s one of the great challenges facing organisations today. The most common issues our practitioners see are:

– Technology solutions deployed in isolation to fix a particular problem
– No centralised data storage to combine the disparate data sets
– No clear definition of what a ‘customer’ actually is

It’s time for a more holistic approach.

We’ve helped organisations like Vitality, Direct Line Group, Sainsburys, RSA, and Manulife to take action and improve their data strategy and create meaningful reporting with analytics. If you could benefit from understanding your data and improving business performance and CX strategy through analytics-led insights, get a free consultation from one of our experts..