Enhancing Customer Touchpoints with Data

Surveys can serve an important purpose. We should use them to fill holes in our understanding of the customer experience or build better models with the customer data we have. As surveys tell you what customers explicitly choose to share, you should not be using them to measure the experience. Surveys are also inherently reactive, surface level, and increasingly ignored by customers who are overwhelmed by feedback requests. This is fact. There’s a different way. Some CX leaders understand that the most critical insights come from sources customers don’t even realize they’re providing from the “exhaust” of every day life with your brand. Real-time digital behavior, social listening, conversational analytics, and predictive modeling deliver insights that surveys alone never will. Voice and sentiment analytics, for example, go beyond simply reading customer comments. They reveal how customers genuinely feel by analyzing tone, frustration, or intent embedded within interactions. Behavioral analytics, meanwhile, uncover friction points by tracking real customer actions across websites or apps, highlighting issues users might never explicitly complain about. Predictive analytics are also becoming essential for modern CX strategies. They anticipate customer needs, allowing businesses to proactively address potential churn, rather than merely reacting after the fact. The capability can also help you maximize revenue in the experiences you are delivering (a use case not discussed often enough). The most forward-looking CX teams today are blending traditional feedback with these deeper, proactive techniques, creating a comprehensive view of their customers. If you’re just beginning to move beyond a survey-only approach, prioritizing these more advanced methods will help ensure your insights are not only deeper but actionable in real time. Surveys aren’t dead (much to my chagrin), but relying solely on them means leaving crucial insights behind. While many enterprises have moved beyond surveys, the majority are still overly reliant on them. And when you get to mid-market or small businesses? The survey slapping gets exponentially worse. Now is the time to start looking beyond the questionnaire and your Likert scales. The email survey is slowly becoming digital dust. And the capabilities to get you there are readily available. How are you evolving your customer listening strategy beyond traditional surveys? #customerexperience #cxstrategy #customerinsights #surveys

Gain a data-driven understanding of your customer through Importance-Performance Maps. In today's competitive business world, differentiating your brand by understanding and delivering what truly matters to your customers is crucial. That’s where Importance-Performance Maps (I-P Maps) come in, providing a powerful visual tool to drive strategic decisions. What exactly is an I-P Map? It's a two-by-two grid that allows you to evaluate how well your brand performs in the areas that are important (as well as *not* important) to consumers. The vertical axis represents the importance of various attributes in consumers' eyes, while the horizontal axis shows your brand's performance in those areas. You can include other brands in your market, too, in order to see how your brand stacks up against the competition along those. When done correctly, every critical attribute of your offering -- whether it's product quality, customer service, or pricing -- is plotted on the I-P Map based on these two dimensions. Why does it matter? I-P Maps reveal your brand's strengths and areas where improvement is needed. Here's a breakdown of the quadrants: - Keep It Up (High Importance, High Performance): These are your strengths—attributes that are both highly important to customers and where your brand performs well. Maintain focus here to keep your competitive edge. - Concentrate Here (High Importance, Low Performance): These are critical areas where your brand is underperforming, despite their high importance to customers. Improving performance here can significantly boost customer satisfaction. - Low Priority (Low Importance, Low Performance): Attributes that are less important and where performance is lower. These areas may not require immediate attention but should be monitored for any shifts in customer priorities. - Possible Overkill (Low Importance, High Performance): Here, your brand may be over-delivering in areas that are not as important to customers. Resources invested here might be better allocated to areas of higher impact. How do I use I-P Maps? Use I-P Maps to make informed decisions backed by data that align with customer expectations. Fix those areas of underperformance that are important to consumers. Stop investing in attributes of your product or service that consumers just don't care about. Prioritize investment in product offerings, elevate aspects of customer service, or reallocate resources to close competitive gaps or strengthen your advantages. Use I-P Maps to make informed choices that improve your business performance in impactful and efficient ways. Art+Science Analytics Institute | University of Notre Dame | University of Notre Dame - Mendoza College of Business | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | University of Chicago | D'Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University | ELVTR | Grow with Google - Data Analytics #Analytics #DataStorytelling

Wondering how to design a Scaled Customer Success motion? Leverage your data and reverse engineer what your customers need. Take the customers that you already know are successful, and look at their data to identify what a successful customer journey looks like. We keep the customer at the center, and use the data we have available to better understand our customers en masse. As you look at the data, you might find information that surprises you. Doing a regression analysis across customer data will tell you surprising things around signals that indicate growth potential as well as risk. You might find that the feature you thought was most "sticky" isn't actually used all that much by your growing and successful customers. You might find that the data that correlates to successful business outcomes for customers isn't at all what you would have guessed. After you've looked at this data and put on your detective hat and asked it good questions, you're ready to begin mapping out how to achieve those results at Scale. Start with what channel you're going to use. You can decide what is best delivered via digital channels vs human channels so that customers can grow and better accomplish their goals. You can identify where your CSMs can best spend their time in strategic human intervention as risk mitigation or growth acceleration as they help customers achieve their desired outcomes. You keep customers at the center by listening to what they're telling you: both in what they say and what they DO. That's what data can help you understand: what it is that your customers are actually doing. And then as you build out this Scaled motion, constantly go back to the data and get a better understanding if what you're doing is accomplishing the goals you're looking for. Don't make assumptions, be willing to look at the data and see the results. Because the only thing worse than not having data you need, is ignoring the data you have because you're too comfortable with what you're already doing. #CustomerSuccess #SaaS #Data #DigitalCS