In the past, analyzing customers to improve satisfaction and service was not terribly complex. In a digital free world, face-to-face transactions allowed business owners to get to know buyers in their places of business personally. This made it easy to identify algorithms in customer wants, needs, problems and purchasing trends. With complexity and competition in business rising at a relentless pace, it’s important to be able to analyze customers in greater detail with the least amount of manpower.
Business intelligence solutions for customer service can be tailored to your specific industry and business model to keep pace with the trending current events of your customers’ buying habits and experiences. How can we use technology to bridge the gap between face-to-face small-town transactions of the past and innovative forward-thinking products and big business of our present and future? Here, we discuss some of the ways business intelligence solutions help you gain more customers and create a deeper satisfaction in their buying experience.
BI solutions help you analyze your customer’s current experience by gathering data on your selling process and follow-up. For example, are there places where your customer is experiencing a long wait time that can be shortened? For a retailer, this could be long lines at checkout. This could be resolved with more cash registers available at peak hours. Other examples include the customer’s understanding of the product they are buying and a personalized walk-through of the product. Perhaps, the data shows that you need a different type of customer follow-up to retain a client’s loyalty. Tracking every single customer’s satisfaction level to improve purchasing experiences going forward is an impossible feat for a department of people. However, with a business intelligence model, you can easily track trends in your current processes to make the most effective changes.
Knowing where to put your marketing dollars is a huge first step in the development of any company. No one wants to spend money on a demographic that does not match up with the product or service you are offering. Market research is a vital step when starting a business, but don’t let the research stop there. Creating ongoing business intelligence solutions to track the changing consumer market can keep you from losing touch with your consumer base. Are there changing trends emerging as you dig deeper? Not anticipating the changing needs of buyers can leave you in a dire situation when purchasing suddenly decreases. Are there tweaks that could have been made with a little bit of forethought? Wouldn’t you rather keep pace with your customers, or slightly ahead of them rather than having to run faster and work harder to catch up?
It’s not that every customer complaint is not valid, but let’s face it, one person’s experience may not be indicative of everyone else’s experience. It’s just not feasible or possible to make changes based on individual experiences, especially since feedback will conflict. Just read reviews of any restaurant. Some love the chicken, some hate the chicken. BI solutions help you analyze this customer feedback and bring to light any trends that are emerging so that you can make changes. For instance, the customer service line you provide might be hard to navigate, or there might be a common problem with assembling your product. BI solutions help you understand these trends and address them with a company issued work around. Customers like to feel like they have a voice on their negative (or positive) experience with your company. It’s your job to take all of the feedback and decide when something is a common issue across many customers or a one-time bad experience in the buying process.
Business intelligence customer service solutions have become a critical part of running a large business. Adding the manpower to your payroll can be an expensive endeavor and still won’t be able to accomplish what a well-tailored computer model for gathering your customer’s data can. This will free you and your employees up to fine tune your product or service and make critical changes that most affect your customers for the positive and thereby increase your profits and customer loyalty.