The Future Of Customer Experience Insights
Customer experience (CX) continues to be a key differentiator for many organizations. At the same time, the practice of CX is becoming more quantitative, analytical, and predictive. Data and analytics professionals have a crucial role in evolving the practice of CX. This evolution will require better data, analytics, and collaboration. Few CX teams have the data and analytics capabilities to execute advanced insights strategies alone. Effective partnership with their organization’s data and analytics professionals creates cooperation that helps benefit the entire business by improving customer understanding and providing high-value use cases for advanced data and analytics solutions.
The Missing Linkages To Predict Customer Behavior
Organizations need more actionable insights to improve CX. They must leverage more diverse data and advanced analytics to produce these insights. Unfortunately, most organizations I work with lack the data infrastructure and analytics resources they need to develop effective customer insights. Individual business units tend to focus on generating insights from the domain-specific data they measure directly: operational insights in ops, sales and revenue insights in sales and marketing, and financial data siloed in finance. This includes customer experience programs focused on generating insights based solely on the feedback they collect from customers. These data disconnects impede the organization’s progress toward understanding customer behavior. These organizations must combine data from business functions with customer perception data and financial outcome data to produce predictive models of customer behavior.
How To Integrate Experience Data For More Predictive Analytics
To overcome the challenges of disconnected customer data and build a foundation for advanced, predictive CX analytics and insights, data professionals need to partner with their customer experience teams to produce holistic customer insights models.
At Forrester’s upcoming Data Strategy & Insights event, September 13–14 in Austin, Texas, I will present a four-step process that data and insights professionals can leverage to lead the charge in creating advanced customer insights models. These steps include:
- Step 1 — Combine perceptions, interactions, and outcomes. What customers think and feel about their experiences is combined with what happens to the customers during their interactions with the business and what they ultimately do because of their experiences.
- Step 2 — Data exploration and modeling. Combined customer datasets are statistically tested, refined for fit, and modeled to triangulate the cause and impact of changes in experiences.
Want to learn more about the future of customer experience insights? Join us in Austin or virtually online to learn about the next two steps and how customer experience and data professionals can work more closely to ensure that they collectively provide the analytics and insights their organizations need to improve experiences. Data professionals will learn how modeling customer perceptions, interactions, and outcomes can produce predictive insights that can tie customer experience improvements to improved financial performance for the business.
