Big Data to Big Ops: How to Effectively Leverage Data to Drive Exceptional CX?

As a marketer, you already know the importance of data and how it can better improve a business’ growth curve. Today, given the implausible degree of interactions that happen every second, the data generated due to it is colossal.

For a marketer, this data holds the potential to work wonders. The fact that even the majority of the data is either fragmented, incomplete, or available in a form that’s gibberish for a marketer brings big data to the table.

Big data, simply put, is a collection of data sets available in larger volumes, greater varieties, and more velocity. These massive chunks of data sets, when fused with big ops, i.e., cutting-edge AI/ML algorithms, automation tools, analytics software, etc., foster insights which can boost most, if not all, business processes.

Today, in this article, we will focus on how big data & big ops can help marketers optimize their efforts to bring new customer experiences.

Firstly, let’s learn about the data types critical to upping the CX game before we lay down the perks of big data.

Let’s roll.

Types of Data to Proactively Collect and Exploit

Transactional Data

This data primarily comprises invoices, payment options & channels, payment timings, and other related data that reflects a customer’s transactional behavior with a product/service. These subtle insights help improve the financial aspects of your product/business so it appeals to your audience.

Behavioral Data

Better customer experiences can be highly attributed to the collection and utilization of behavioral data. How a prospect interacts with your brand across touchpoints, what they do post those interactions, and what triggers them to move a little closer to conversion—all these qualify as behavioral data.

All these insights, when fused with AI/ML and other cutting-edge technologies, help serve personalized experiences to leads, thus easing the way to conversion.

Social Media Data

As the name suggests, any insight collected from a person’s social media activity is social media data. Given the soaring use of social media, the data collected may be hard to analyze and draw insights from, so it becomes critical that you employ sophisticated analytics tools to cut through the chunks of data you gather and bring you the insights that lead to clear improvements in customer experience.

Customer Service Data

Customer service data is not just beneficial for your sales and customer success teams; your marketing team can leverage it, too.

How, you ask?

More often than not, customer service data is brimming with personal information such as email addresses, job profiles, addresses, mobile numbers, etc. All these valuable insights often remain in CRM, untouched by marketers. However, if marketers have this data, they can use it to drive CX to great extents.

First-party Data

First-party data is not something you acquire from only one particular interacting medium with your audience but rather qualifies as everything you collect from direct interactions. It may include behavioral data, transactional data, and other forms of data.

Quality is the most crucial part of first-party data that determines its usefulness to your marketing efforts. The quality of the data can be defined as its organization, free from silos and redundancies; the better the quality, the better would be your marketing efforts, and thus better CX levels.

How Big Data Helps Improve CX?

An Enterprise Data Center

The more the data, the more challenging it is to have a comprehensive, transparent view of your customers. To get past this hurdle and have an accurate idea of your customers, having a data hub or center that serves as the single source of truth for your entire organization is imperative.

Victor Cobo Ramirez, Director, Customer Portfolio and eCommerce Product Owner at Manulife, during the Global Virtual MarTech Summit - APAC, says, “Size of a business doesn’t matter when integrating big ops. Small companies with relatively smaller data assets need big ops to generate better CX and enhance business processes. What matters the most is how a company gathers, organizes, and integrates its data.”

A data center is a perfect answer to the above requirements. Not only it empowers your teams with real-time and accurate insights, but it also ensures you exploit staying within the boundaries of data regulations applicable to your business. So, your CX shoots up, your compliance is on point, and your brand hops by leaps and bounds.

The Fabulous Circle of Data

Once you start fueling your customer interactions with relevant audience data, you immediately forge a link with your prospects. From now on, what you collect from the further interactions with your audience is more relevant & specific insights, advancing your CX to new levels.

This creates an ongoing data circle and empowers you with the customer-centric mechanism. With the data hub we discussed, you exponentiate the power of this big data to unfathomable levels, creating a commanding force of personalization.

Spotting New Product Opportunities

While market research can provide you with insights needed to improve your product/service by unraveling the emotions behind customer decisions, it still struggles to bring you new product opportunities.

Big data, however, help you identify market gaps where you can push completely new products. Given the immense volume of big data and the predictive analytics capabilities of the big ops tools, businesses can very well unravel where their audience (and even the respective vertical) is heading, thus earning a competitive moat for themselves by creating a brand new product that thrives without any rivals in the immediate future.

Acing Omnichannel

Akanksha Rastogi, Head of Data & Insights at foodpanda, during the Global Virtual MarTech Summit - APAC, says, “Big ops can be integrated into applications and websites to drive personalization and enhance the CX levels. This helps increase the stickiness of platforms, acting as a subtle marketing move.”

Your target audience is scattered all over the web, so truly understanding the entire buyer journey is growing more complex by the day. To stitch all these little yet significant crumbs of data is a pre-requisite to creating an omnichannel experience and orchestrating each part of the journey.

Big data is the solution to this seemingly daunting task.

Big data captures the various interactions of your audience across the web, organizes them into a single place, pinpoints the touchpoints where you need to focus most of your efforts, and even the loopholes that make the customers ditch the journey.

All these intricate details reveal the true nature of a lead's journey and the hurdles that keep them from converting; now, you can create a fully integrated, data-driven omnichannel mechanism that eases the path from awareness to conversion.

Takeaway

To make the most of the overwhelming amount of data, you need to first equip your business with fitting applications, IT teams, and people who have a working knowledge of the data and apps they lay their hands on. Once all these requirements are in place, you can effectively utilize big data to gather customer-centric insights and leverage the same to deliver tailored, real-time customer experiences, forging a unique marketing move altogether.