データを分類する: Organize data into meaningful categories that you can easily analyze. This can entail grouping data by demographic, behavior, or other meaningful categories.
Look for patterns and actionable takeaways
Numbers alone are unlikely to give you the whole picture, so you must accompany metrics with a narrative that explains what’s going on. Use your CDP to analyze customer data and identify patterns. CDPs utilize machine learning to sort through data and surface trends for you.
While looking for takeaways, be careful when assuming cause and effect based on correlations. Apply a lens of curiosity instead of trying to tell the most compelling story. There are many ways to interpret the same data, so comparing quantitative data points with qualitative data is beneficial in building a broader, more accurate picture.
After analyzing your data, share the findings with your team or the appropriate department. Data visualization mediums like graphs and bar charts can make the information easier to digest and help you tell a story, as opposed to a robotic delivery of facts and figures.
What you can do with the results of customer data analytics
Once you perform your customer data analysis, the next step is to put the insights to work for your company. The benefits of customer analytics apply to sales, marketing, and customer service teams. Here are some ways it can improve performance:
Improve customer retention: Predictive analytics can use past trends to forecast future behavior. If the data show that a customer is at risk of leaving, your customer service team can work proactively to retain them.
Reduce operating costs: Consumer analytics help the business identify trends that provide insight to inform operational improvements, such as automations, channel strategy, ticket deflection strategy, and marketing strategy. For example, consumer insights can enable marketing teams to understand customer behaviors and preferences, enabling them to build effective campaigns. The marketing team can then focus resources on the areas where they’ll have the greatest impact and maximize the return on investment.
Improve revenue generating activities: After you identify buying patterns among your audience, you can send targeted offers that are helpful for the customer and drive upsells and cross-sells.
Examples of customer data analytics
The application of customer data analytics can take many forms depending on your industry and company goals. Look to these examples for how to incorporate analytics into your processes and increase customer engagement, retention, and more.
HotDoc: Tapping into data
HotDoc is an online medical services company that helps patients connect with medical providers. The company’s customer service team saw an uptick in activity in the wake of COVID-19, and the basic data reporting tool they were using couldn’t keep up and failed to provide useful insights.
The company switched to Zendesk for its analytics needs and was quickly able to diagnose and resolve issues. HotDoc uses dashboards to generate monthly reports and measure performance, helping a team of 15 people efficiently field over 4,000 tickets per month.
“By setting up dashboards on Zendesk Explore, we’re actually able to hone in on why they are contacting us and the parts that need the most focus. It was such a powerful lever in getting things moving—a great way for us to show our stakeholders, ‘this is the problem, this is what needs to be fixed.’”
–Kasun Kanangama, CX support team leader at HotDoc
Northmill Bank: Tearing down silos
Northmill Bank uses advancements in tech to bring personalization and transparency to the financial sector. Even though users praised the bank’s customer support, agents struggled to keep up. There was no unified view of customer data, and communication got stretched across four separate email inboxes.
Northmill Bank switched from Freshdesk to Zendesk because it gave the company a connected platform where team members could collaborate and gain a 360-degree view of the customer. The new data insights produced greater team efficiency, helping the bank maintain a 90 percent CSAT score without having to hire more agents.
Kevin Boyer is a senior marketing executive at Zendesk, where he leads the global product marketing team for Zendesk Contact Center, Platform and WEM—all powered by AI. He’s known for bringing an entrepreneurial mindset and a knack for data-driven strategy to every project, working closely with teams across the company to support product growth and customer satisfaction. Kevin specializes in workforce management, quality assurance, SaaS platforms, and AI in customer experience.