The obvious aspects of the customer experience are customer-facing processes and interactions. But myriad internal processes impact the customers experience, as well. That’s where business intelligence (BI) comes in.
Customer experience leaders can use business intelligence reporting to surface opportunities and issues with critical business operations. The aim is to use BI to generate actionable information about internal operations that specifically relate to customer experience management (CEM). To increase the impact of any changes you’ll make based on your findings, segment the insights by account type (e.g. tiers one, two, and three) and contact type (e.g. decision maker, influencer). This will help prioritize any changes you’ll want to make to drive customer loyalty overall—but, first, among the highest-value customers.
Some key BI report types that focus on CEM include Balanced Scorecard, delta analysis, key-driver analysis, Net Promoter Score, and vulnerability index.
Taking a data-driven approach to CEM by continually analyzing business performance not only will help surface issues that need to be resolved, but also will allow you to explore new ways of gaining a competitive advantage. Business analytics makes it possible to combine customer satisfaction and operational data to gain deep insight into purchase behavioral overall, as well as by customer type and job role.
One especially valuable approach to using business intelligence is benchmarking. It allows customer experience leaders to see how their organization compares on various dimensions—most important, measurements related to CEM. You can, for example, compare your organization’s customer service ratings against best-in-class businesses or compare your NPS against other companies in your industry.
Benchmarking is an invaluable reality check that reveals how you stack up against competitors and category leaders across industries. The first step, of course, it to select the metrics and values you want to compare. Popular comparisons include overall best-in-class companies, top industry-specific performers, and head-to-head competitive analysis. Our NorthFace ScoreBoard Award recipients are another excellent source of comparison for CEM performance. These award winners have demonstrated that they provide world-class customer service; rated by their own customers as consistently exceeding their expectations for service quality.
Business intelligence, analytics, and benchmarking are three of the elements that comprise the CEMDNA Playbook Strategy.