Data & AI Analytics Lead the Way To Growth

Data & AI Analytics Lead the Way to Growth

It’s Marketing 101: Investments in rewarding customer experiences deliver ROI in the form of growth.

Better CX drives brand differentiation. That differentiation is then amplified in a world of digital interconnections. Online reviews and social posts play their part, and so does word of mouth.

Studies show that acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 – 25 times more costly than using outstanding CX to build loyalty and retain an existing one.^[1] In turn, increased customer loyalty tends to drive revenue growth. Loyal customers buy more from you, have longer-lived subscriptions and are more likely to adopt any new products you offer.

For today’s customers, an essential part of great CX is enjoying a consistent experience at every brand touchpoint. Leading organizations should leverage AI-driven analytics to mine data across interactions, gaining the insights they need to:

• Remove hassles, reduce friction and drive delight

• Understand how those interactions impact both retention and churn

• Gain operational insights to improve customer experience scores

Moreover, marketing, sales and service leaders shouldn’t just be using these insights to improve their own functions. Rather, they should be shared across the enterprise with their counterparts in product, technology and supply chain.

Data-Driven Delight = CX-Driven Growth

Customers feel the value of data-driven insight. It makes for more delightful, memorable and brand-defining customer experiences. In many cases, it all starts with personalization.

The experiences customers value most are personalized to their needs, preferences, behaviors and history with the brand. The meaningful and actionable insights from your customer data make it possible to truly engage by connecting with every current or future customer as a unique human being.

Brands unearth the answers they seek to achieve CX personalization from actionable customer data streaming into advanced AI platforms to generate individualized profiles for each customer. It’s data-driven mass customization on a digital scale. Your data can translate into suggestions, observations and actual offers — uniquely crafted for each customer, no matter where or when they encounter your brand.

To tailor brand experiences for your customers, your organization must curate and organize the precious raw data in its CX data lake (fed by your customer care center and other digital touchpoints) and transform it into actionable insight. Not just once, but continuously — and in real-time.

Here, CX functions in a virtuous cycle of customer interactions, fueled by data and informed by well-trained AI, machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). It’s this everyday process that keeps your customers...well, customers.

So, how do we transform data to insight to achieve high levels of CX engagement and delight customers?

Step One: Who Are You?

Let’s start with a little refresher on CX basics. (This is also from the Marketing 101 playbook. But it’s too often overlooked, so it bears repeating.)

Data can tell your brand who you are — according to your customers. It can open up a window into how they think of you, what their experience with you is like — and what value they most want you to provide. Naturally, this kind of information can be endlessly valuable. And reliable: facts based on hard data don’t lie.

Now, this process is different from deciding upon your identity as a brand. Rather, it’s first understanding who you actually are (in the eyes of your customers). By doing so, you’re in a better position to determine who you wish to be moving forward — and then make the choices that will get you there.

What is your brand personality? What do you want to stand for in the eyes of customers? Each customer wants to know you as much as you want to know them.

It may be too much to expect to be their “friend.” But you can position your company as a trusted partner: someone they can depend on, someone who knows them, a team that delivers and delights. And you can use data to do it.

Step Two: Who Are They?

Chances are, you already know a lot about your customers. Now you need to meet them where they are. That starts with harnessing the data available from your customer service center, along with digital channels.

Why customer care? A recent survey found that less than 3% of interaction data from customer care centers is actually being analyzed for insight, leaving a whopping 97% unused...and untapped^[2].

From that metric alone, we can conclude that leveraging call data and AI to optimize CX inside and outside the contact center can be a huge competitive advantage.

Step Three: Apply Your CX Data to Train AI Algorithms

When you do, you’ll get...

Strategic Insights Across Your Enterprise

• You gain insights on key customer pain points, needs and wants across product, digital, marketing, sales and service

• You link improvement in customer experience with business outcomes such as the impact on lifetime value, repeat purchases, renewals and churn

Operational Insights at Your Customer Care Center

• You identify opportunities for digitization including call deflection using AI bots as well as knowledge management to assist self-service

• You get AI-driven quality monitoring and sentiment analytics of each call’s interaction to uncover opportunities for your consultants to improve CX daily

• You prioritize coaching based on not just how to decrease average handling time but also optimize outcome metrics such as first-call resolution and customer satisfaction using AI-based predictive scores for each interaction

And with all the data and AI improving your CX, the opportunities for loyalty-growing delight are limitless.

Next, Ignite Your Imagination

Imagine you’re a leading streaming service. With the help of advanced interaction analytics, you’ve learned that hassles associated with subscription upgrade and device capability are a major customer pain point. Advanced analytics has uncovered how this is impacting revenue growth and contributing to churn. This intelligence, in turn, opens the door for increased collaboration across enterprise functions like product management, marketing and customer service. And further CX research identifies improvements in the subscription upgrade process.

This is exactly the sort of insight and outcome Sutherland recently worked with a client to achieve.

Or picture this. You’re a wireless carrier CXO and your AI creates an offer that empowers a call-center service representative to tell a new customer they can visit any of your retail stores to claim a free piece of merchandise. When the new customer visits the store, the sales staff — who already know about the conversation — extend a warm welcome and provide any necessary assistance. By focusing on the right metrics and carefully analyzing data to make effective decisions, you improve overall customer experience — leading to brand differentiation.

Better CX Boosts the Bottom Line — But it All Starts With Better AI Analytics

The three key areas of focus for today’s CEOs are sales development, profit growth and stock price. Any program that doesn’t contribute to these priorities often gets cut, particularly in times of economic uncertainty. This means customer care leaders — and CX leaders in general — must be able to explicitly connect customer-focused projects to financial success to retain funding and attract support for new programs.

Investing in data analytics to power CX-driven growth is investing in the right priorities.

With more than 35 years of process transformation experience combined with advanced AI/NLP techniques, we at Sutherland bring together process excellence and advanced technology to help you drive successful customer programs.

For example, one way to ensure data-driven CX success is by using Sutherland CX360. It is an AI-powered interaction and outcomes platform that links all customer interactions across voice, email, chat and social. Monitoring a multi-channel scope of customer interactions, it’s used to predict customer behavior — including customer need and satisfaction, issue resolution and churn. Customer service leaders also use CX360 to analyze customer sentiment, identify sales opportunities and improve agent productivity.