Features alone are no longer enough to win in today’s markets. In the past, the bells and whistles of a product or service could lure interest. It may even grab the headlines of trade newspapers and magazines.

Not in today’s customer-centric, online and hyper-competitive market. It may pique interest, but ultimately it is the customer experience that seals the deal. A lousy experience can not only drive customers away; it can impact pipelines, reduce bottom lines and tarnish reputations.

But customer experience is not just about customer service—it is more than that. You need to understand your customers holistically, learn about their needs and wants with available information, understand their behavior at all customer touchpoints, gain immediate and accurate insights and identify key triggers that will help the customer make the decisions.

Essentially, it is about designing the right customer journey.

Journey challenges for every marketer

Admittedly, designing customer journey is never simple. Marketers face three main challenges when building one:

1. Creating consistent brand experiences across channels
Customers may accept different service levels in different channels, but they expect your brand value proposition to remain consistent. Channel proliferation makes achieving this difficult.

2. Integrating channel and brand experiences
We all want an integrated channel experience, but it is never easy. Technology, legacy processes, and organizational territorialism can all pose significant hurdles that marketers need to overcome.

3. Consolidating data for a single view of the customer
Having a single view of the customer across interactions, channels, products and time creates consistent communications. In reality, however, departmental silos, fragmented data, and inconsistent processes make it difficult to achieve.

Answers lie in data analytics

It was a situation that a global telecommunications company, a customer of SAS, faced. In his recent blog, Adrian Carr, principal business solutions manager at SAS, noted the company wanted to know how it can make relevant data plan offers in real time for their customers to drive them to top up their data allowance.

Traditional approaches were not appropriate. By the time the customers reached a certain percentage of their data allowances, the firm had needed time to analyze the data. It was too late to receive this information and send an offer. So, it resorted to analyzing the customer data overnight to offer the right offers to those customers who will respond.

SAS suggested combining both approaches. The telecommunications company created models based on the real-time customer data. SAS Event Stream Processing identified when customers were running out of data and trigger an action. SAS Real-Time Decision Manager ran the models in real time to decide the most appropriate offer for the customer.

The result: An approximate 400% increase in response rate, increased customer satisfaction, reduced costs as fewer messages were sent to customers and increased profits as customers were more likely to accept the offer.

This real-time approach applies to all industries. Imagine how retail, financial service providers, especially those offering loans, managing insurance premiums or monitoring credit limits, and even healthcare providers, can benefit with real-time analysis.

Next-step: Personalize

Real-time data analysis is only the first step. The real value lies in personalization. Often seen as the Holy Grail of marketing, it allows you to speak directly to the needs and desires of the customers at an optimal time. It also improves conversion.

To do this, you need context—not just customer data. You also need the right data management regime to enrich the current data. By adding context, you can deliver relevant, insightful offers, recommendations, advice and service actions when the customer is most receptive.

It is also a double-edged sword. Done incorrectly, you will risk alienating the customer. But done well, you can drive brand loyalty to new heights—and even turn that customer into your avid ambassador. In today’s customer-driven world, that is gold!

src: enterpriseinnovation.net