(c)iStock.com/Rawpixel Ltd
Effective customer relationships are driven by familiarity and empathy. But brands will struggle to deliver either if employees don’t have the resources to make informed, timely and data-driven decisions about their customers.
With Gartner predicting that 89% of companies plan to compete primarily on the basis of customer experience this year, the modern business simply cannot afford to de-prioritise customer engagement.
Better customer experiences rely on robust business intelligence (BI) and analytics solutions that can give every employee who communicates with a customer the right information at the right time.
We’ve all received those cold calls at home by someone who wants to sell us a service we already have, or worse, one we will never need – it doesn’t leave a good impression of that company.
The challenge that organisations face, however, is that even those that have adopted some form of BI strategy have likely implemented tools that force users to leave their preferred business applications to conduct analysis. This not only leads to poor user adoption, but prevents end users from being able to quickly understand, explore and visualise customer data.
Considering customers today are more likely to share a bad customer service experience with others than a good one, organisations across a range of sectors—from retail and telecoms to healthcare and manufacturing—can’t afford to have their employees making customer service decisions in the dark.
So how can organisations make sure their users have the most up-to-date information, and more importantly, actually use it?
How does embedded analytics work?
Embedding BI and analytics inside software apps allows end users to work with governed data sanctioned by IT, in addition to quickly gaining insights and sharing findings with others.
These solutions can integrate with existing point-of-sale (POS) systems, driving operational transparency online, as well as brick-and-mortar environments with dashboards, reports and mobile apps.
Analytics can also be embedded into customer portals to enable them to answer questions on their own
The key to improving customer engagement is to give staff the ability to make informed decisions about their customers in a speedy timeframe.
By embedding analytics into an existing app, employees can quickly produce customer reports with access to real-time data without extensive programme knowledge or having to use numerous platforms.
This allows accessibility at all levels and helps customer issues to be resolved much quicker. Businesses can merge customer data across disparate sources, including web traffic and enterprise systems in order to optimise customer lifetime value.
Analysing data
Data from social networks can also be analysed for customer sentiment. When businesses are able to monitor service performance from a customer’s experience perspective, they can rapidly react to emerging issues thereby reducing the likelihood of churn.
Analytics can also be embedded into customer portals to enable them to answer questions on their own. For example, customers may appreciate the ability to access account status, invoices, delivery tracking, billing, and order history over the Web without having to contact customer support.
This also lessens the burden on customer service reps, allowing them to be more responsive,as they can focus on addressing customer issues rather than just providing general data and reports.
Research indicates that businesses across the world are recognising that embedded analytics is worth the investment. Two-thirds of application providers plan to invest in embedded analytics within the year, and increasing customer satisfaction is the top strategic benefit for internal IT application providers.
