Four Major Data Challenges & the Solutions for Business Impact
Key Takeaways
Become truly customer centric to maximize the impact of data. How?
- Engage with customers to understand the “why” behind their customer experience problems. Use the cutting-edge software tools that automate data collection and processing.
- Use tools that allow for sharing of data across the organization, to ensure alignment and use resources efficiently.
- Use the right data format such as video visualizations to humanize the data and tell an effective story.
Executive Summary
Data insights serve as a powerful tool to understand the customer experience. Empathetic understanding of customers creates lasting value and reduction in customer churn. This is why analytic teams spend vast resources and precious time finding, capturing, and formatting data.
Yet most data insights projects fail to materialize. Instead of gaining wealth from data, extensive resources are lost spent trying to turn data and insights into value. With such promise, why does data fail to create value? Below we discuss the four most common pitfalls that cause customer experience data and insight programs to fail, and what to do about them.
Use human insights to understand the why of the customer experience
The first problem is that the recommendable “action” to a solution addressing customer issues is missing because the problem has not properly been identified. Businesses rely on operational data (quantitative metrics and KPIs) that describes what is happening but not why it is happening.
A company needs to understand why in order to define the problem and address customer issues. Without understanding why, companies struggle to turn business challenges into solvable problems.
Companies must deeply connect with and emphasize with their customers to understand their needs and wants. Engaging with customers in a human way is crucial to finding innovative solutions that impact the bottom line. Organizations should use metrics that focus on the customer to drive decision-making. An example would be metrics that explain why a customer is feeling a certain way about the product. Only by using data that describes why can you empathize with customer issues and pains.
Source insights fast and efficiently to create impact
Decisions need to be quick and well-informed. A regular bottleneck for truly agile organizations is that the existing way of sourcing customer experience data is too slow. If the time-to-insight is slow, the quality of decision-making will lack. The decision will either have to be made without the insight, surrendering important knowledge, or the project must be delayed, missing out on crucial time and resources.
Data needs to be quickly prepared, integrated, and transformed. To efficiently prepare data and make time for analytical insights, organizations should use software tools and platforms that do much of the work for them. These tools permit users to curate data to fit specific needs and situations, allowing faster time-to-insight. Technology that allows for faster time-to-insights will make all the difference for well-informed and prompt decision-making. Cut down on time-to-market and reduce development time and costs.
Democratize insights to empower all in the organization
Organizations that get the most from their data embed analytics into their core businesses. They democratize insights. Other businesses make the mistake of isolating their analytical insights either through a centralized or decentralized model. In a centralized model the customer insights team acts as a gatekeeper, risking shallow expertise and slow response time.
Decentralized customer insights threaten a comprehensive data strategy and alignment. The challenge is to ensure that the insights are shared across the organization. If insights are not spread throughout the organization, the insights will not end up in the hands of those that have the relevant expertise to make the most use of them. In this case, the insights end up wasting resources.
With the right tools, it becomes possible to connect and share data throughout the entire organization, all from a single place. Break down the barriers to access and understanding, and allow all in the organization to use their expertise to get the most from the data and insights. In other words, democratize insights.
Insight democratization creates an ability to instantly access and understand data insights, enabling faster decision-making and a more agile organization. By seamlessly integrating customer perspectives into decision-making across the organization, the company will gain a critical advantage over those still using old-fashioned and slow data strategies.
Humanize data to tell an effective story
To make the data actionable and valuable, data must be presented in the right format and share the right information. All too often, full reports containing copious slides are shared across the organization that lack focus on what information is being shared and who the receiver is. This makes it easy to overwhelm the receiver with too much data.
Creating insights in the right format is necessary to effectively share the story you want to tell, and to create a call-to-action from the data and insights being shared. Formats such as video visualizations and customer showreels effectively depict emotion, communicate empathy, and activate all senses experienced during the customer experience. These formats make the information easy to understand and transform data into actionable insights that you can implement right away. Telling stories with easy-to-understand data formats leads to better decision-making within the organization and drives customer conversion by clearly understanding customer wants.
Conclusion
For a company to innovate and create great product experiences, it must be customer-centric. Organizations should adopt the cutting-edge software tools that support genuine customer centricity and understanding. These tools allow for empathetic customer engagement, fast and efficient decision-making, and let you democratize and share insights to empower the entire organization. Implementing these solutions are critical to making better business decisions, reducing time to market, and creating a winning customer experience.
If you are interested in learning more about insight tools, feel free to reach out to us and book a demo today!
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