How Big Data Can Help You Improve Your Customers' Experience

Imagine you just walked into your favorite neighborhood diner. The moment your silhouette darkens the door, the waitress lets out a friendly yell to the cook, describing your desired meal in perfect detail, right down to hold the salt and dressing on the side. It’s a good thing, too, because you’ve had a hard day and it just seems like too much trouble to go through the whole ordeal about why you can’t have the salt and have to watch it with the salad dressing.

Now compare this experience to the last time you called your cable company or phone company or Internet service provider. You had to wait an extra 15 minutes and push 400 more buttons because you didn’t have your account number with you. You explained the reason for your call at least five times to as many people. In the end, you had to either fix the problem yourself or forget about it, because the only people you could get on the line knew nothing more than how to read a script provided by management.

Which experience do you want to provide to your customers? How can you do that? The answer is big data. If you collect pertinent data from all of the touchpoints across the organization (sales, billing, tech support, customer service, social media, etc.), analyze it, and make it available to everyone else, they can provide a powerfully improved customer experience. Not only does this improve your customer service, it also improves your productivity and profits.

Personalized Customer Service

Big data allows you to provide personalized customer service, just like the neighborhood diner, because it allows whoever answers the phone to immediately see who this customer is, what they like, how much they spend, and much more. The representative can then assist and guide the customer according to their preferences and needs.

Faster Service

Without each customer having to explain their situation from the beginning every time they contact your company, customer service goes much faster. This means you can handle more calls, emails, chat sessions, etc. with fewer workers, and that your customers spend less time on hold.

Empowering Your Employees

Since your representatives handling your customers can see everything they need to know about your customers, they can handle more responsibility. You don’t have to restrict them to a prewritten script. Your customer service no longer has to be a ‘one size fits all’ setup.

What does it take for a big data initiative to be successful in improving the customer experience?

• Include all customer data, information, and experiences from across the organization.

• Cleanse the data and update it as frequently as possible to assure it’s current, accurate, and relevant.

• Select a CRM or similar system that can help all departments leverage the data.

• Don’t allow data silos or political disagreements to limit data sharing among departments.

• Train workers across the organization to collect, correct, and make good use of the data that is available.

With a sound plan for collecting, storing, and sharing big data across the organization, your customer service rates will improve radically and quickly.