How do you know your company meets or even exceeds customer expectations? Numerous ways exist, though data generated in the course of business (including website analytics) is a key tool. Read on to learn how to use customer data to understand your customers and deliver ever-improving customer experience
The Role of Data in Customer Insight
Your business gathers vast amounts of quantitative and qualitative data from daily business activities, including information about your website’s effectiveness. Who’s clicking on which website pages, and what feedback are they giving? What’s your bounce rate, and how many conversions are you getting? How will you understand and interpret this data in order to improve customer experience? Customer (or consumer) insights come from understanding and interpreting customer feedback to reach conclusions about what your customers want and need. These conclusions can in turn drive actions that improve development of products and/or services as well as customer support. Using the data customers supply and interpreting it to improve service, shows customers that their voice is heard and acted upon.
Gathering the data is easy; it happens as a matter of course. But how do you extract insights you can use? Technology can certainly help, with tools such as artificial intelligence and website analytics tools that can analyze data automatically and even offer suggestions. Quantitative and qualitative tools are useful, though customer trust in the ways your company uses their data is vital.
Building Trust and Value with Data
An article from the Harvard Business Review spotlights privileged insights, derived from unique and relevant data from customers, data that only your company has access to. Data contributing to privileged insights include information about real needs and desires and their experience with your company. Website analytics, which can give information on bounce rates, unique and repeat visitors, and conversions, can also be part of this data.
Keeping Website Data Secure
Considering the wealth of data that analytics tools collect, personal customer data like addresses and even payment card details are part of that data. If your company is working with a third-party analytics provider, be sure to find out what their security posture is; a breach there could be devastating for your business. To keep your own website secure, you can use tools like secure socket layer (SSL) and Web application firewall (WAF).
Using privileged insights requires not just collecting data, or using it for your own company’s benefit, but leveraging it in ways that build trust and value directly. Providing value can mean creating robust, positive customer experiences based on observations of customer behavior, and trust involves using the data in ways that foster trust and openness. This trust and openness can lead to stronger engagement with your company (brand), and hence more insights to help add value.
How do you ensure that your use of data positively impacts customers? To start with, have clear principles and practices about what data you gather, its purpose, how long you keep it and who has access to it. Offering explicit and informed consent as well as opt-in (or opt-out) policies shows transparency in data handling. Making data anonymous for processing purposes, or aggregating it, will help avoid exposing confidential data. On the technology side, strong encryption of data and monitoring of security systems will help to protect customers’ data and will help customers know their data is protected.
By creating trust and adding value in the way you use customer data, you can keep customers coming back. For help with data and its use in marketing, contact ClikCloud today.