Customer satisfaction can make or break your business. So, are you collecting and using relevant data to drive meaningful change for your customers’ interactions with your business? We wanted to find out how companies are using—and maximizing—their data to yield value, so we commissioned 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, to survey 1,100 IT and data professionals from diverse global regions. Those finding have just been released in a new report, Profitable Outcomes Linked to Data-Driven Maturity.
Supporting the customer experience is becoming a key focus in the contemporary use of enterprise data, and strong data practices are integral to delivering a Transcendent Customer Experience, one of the tenets of the Autonomous Digital Enterprise, that meets customers where, when, and how they want to be met, providing customer engagement and satisfaction that lead to long-term business profitability.
Fifty-five percent of survey respondents are focused on improving their customer satisfaction levels through the effective use of data. In an increasingly, pervasively online world, the report asserts that failing to capture and understand the context of data derived from customer interactions via digital channels and data-driven mediums “is akin to leaving money on the table.” Over the next 24 months, one-fifth of survey respondents expect customer satisfaction to be the single area of most significant improvement in their data strategy evolution.
The types of data gathered from and about customers can be used to inform and influence different aspects of their overall experience, empowering businesses to:
- Personalize offerings tailored to specific customer profiles, preferences, and previous purchases
- Identify and correct service issues through customer surveys and self-service solutions
- Forecast and respond to trends, adjusting supply chains to meet customer demand
- Incentivize customers with loyalty and rewards programs based on engagement and purchases
Seventy percent of those surveyed said they were highly effective or mostly effective at leveraging data-driven insights for customer-facing processes such as onboarding and signups, while 74 percent said they were highly effective or mostly effective using those insights to help ensure customer service (finding products, placing orders, providing delivery status, etc.).
To make data useful to the business, organizations must be able to have a unified view of their data, as well as automated tools and processes to better manage and organize it; verify its quality; analyze its usefulness; and ensure that it flows to the right place at the right time for faster decision making. The right mix of people, processes, and technology is essential to ensure a democratized data culture and develop true data maturity.
To do this, organizations must take a holistic, enterprise-wide view of their data assets and activity, implementing a DataOps methodology that applies agile and automated approaches to data management to support data-driven business outcomes and leverages appropriate supporting technology to optimize business processes and people. DataOps represents a culture and technology shift. Among organizations with a more mature DataOps strategy, 77 percent indicated that their organization’s use of data has had a most significant impact to date on customer satisfaction, versus 65 percent among total respondents.
To learn more about how DataOps and data maturity can help organizations deliver a Transcendent Customer Experience and tangible benefits of data maturity across the business, visit bmc.com/valueofdata.
