The Role of the Business Analysis Process in Successful Project Delivery

The Business Analysis Benchmark Report by PMI indicates that organisations with strong business analysis practices have higher levels of stakeholder satisfaction. This is attributed to the ability of business analysts to effectively engage stakeholders, elicit their needs, and ensure project deliverables align with their expectations. Business analysis plays a crucial role in project delivery by ensuring a clear understanding of requirements, effective engagement with stakeholders, and identification and mitigation of potential risks. Organisations that prioritise and invest in robust business analysis practices significantly enhance their chances of accomplishing successful project outcomes.

In project delivery, business analysis is vital and contributes significantly to successful project outcomes. It involves identifying, analysing, and communicating business needs and requirements to ensure that projects align with strategic aims and deliver value to stakeholders. In this article, Zelda Marais, a Delivery Manager at The CRM Team, sheds light on the significance of business analysis in project delivery and its contributions to achieving successful outcomes. Additionally, she emphasises the crucial role of Delivery Managers in facilitating the business analysis process along with skilled technical team members  throughout the entire project lifecycle.

The Role of a Delivery Manager in Project Delivery

The role of a Delivery Manager in facilitating the business analysis process along with skilled technical team members throughout the project lifecycle is paramount to ensure successful project outcomes. A Delivery Manager acts as a bridge between the business and technical teams, easing effective communication and aligning project goals.

Firstly, the Delivery Manager works closely with Business Analysts during the planning phase, understanding the project goals, scope, and requirements. They collaborate in defining clear project deliverables and timelines, ensuring that the business analysis process aligns with the overall project plan.

During the requirements gathering and envisioning phase, the Delivery Manager supports Business Analysts by supplying necessary resources and facilitating stakeholder engagement. They help prioritise requirements based on business impact and work towards resolving any conflicts or ambiguities that may arise.

Throughout the solution design and validation phase, the Delivery Manager collaborates with Business Analysts to ensure that the proposed solutions align with the business needs and technical feasibility. They facilitate discussions between the business and technical teams, resolving any conflicts and helping to make informed decisions.

As the project progresses to the solution implementation and evaluation phase, the Delivery Manager continues to support Business Analysts by coordinating with the development team and monitoring progress. They ensure that the solution is delivered according to the requirements and address any challenges that may arise during implementation.

Furthermore, the Delivery Manager acts as an advocate for the Business Analysts, ensuring that their expertise and contributions are recognised and valued within the project team. They provide guidance, mentorship, and support to Business Analysts, promoting their professional growth and development.

Importance of Business Analysis in Successful Project Delivery

Business analysis is the foundation of successful project delivery. “The key to successful business analysis is obtaining accurate information. Without conducting a proper analysis, you will not have a clear understanding of the specific process with which you are dealing. You will only have a vague idea of the requirements, making it difficult to know what exactly needs to be done. The business analysis adds more details and clarity to these requirements, giving you a more direct path to work with and ensuring successful outcomes.” Zelda explains.

“During the business analysis phase, it is essential to ask the right questions. When a client expresses a need or requirement, it is crucial to delve deeper to obtain the necessary information. For example, if they mention needing a notification, it is important to inquire about the frequency of notifications. Additionally, it is essential to ask about specific details such as the desired appearance and whether they require images or visuals, as clients may not initially consider mentioning these aspects. However, as a business analyst, it is important to gather all relevant information to ensure that the work can be effectively executed.” Zelda further explains.

Business analysis enables organisations to align their projects with strategic goals, identify potential risks, and make informed decisions. By conducting thorough requirements gathering and analysis, business analysts ensure that the project objectives are clearly defined and understood by all stakeholders. This, in turn, minimises the chances of scope creep and helps in delivering projects within the defined period and budget.

Effective business analysis enhances stakeholder engagement and fosters collaboration among different teams involved in the project. Research proves that, in the long term, effective stakeholder engagement is good for any business. Organisations with a greater awareness of stakeholder interests and higher stakeholder engagement patterns are more likely to avoid crisis, simply because they’re in a better position to leverage opportunities and anticipate risks. Several compelling studies across industries on the impact of good stakeholder relations demonstrate that, over time, organisations focusing on building stakeholder trust are more resilient across indicators of value such as financial resilience, sales, cost reduction, time to market and control of operating costs. By actively involving stakeholders throughout the analysis process, business analysts ensure that their perspectives are considered, and their requirements are addressed. This collaborative approach not only improves the quality of project deliverables but also increases stakeholder satisfaction.  

The Business Analysis Process

The business analysis process encompasses several crucial phases that enable a structured and thorough approach to project delivery. These phases begin with planning and scoping, where project objectives are defined, stakeholders are identified, and the analysis scope is established. Collaboration between business analysts, project managers, and stakeholders ensures a clear roadmap for the analysis process.

The next phase involves requirements gathering and analysis. Business analysts utilise various techniques such as interviews, workshops, and document analysis to collect information from stakeholders. They thoroughly analyse the gathered requirements, identify any gaps or inconsistencies, and prioritise them based on their impact on the project objectives.

Moving forward, the solution design and validation phase come into play. Here, business analysts collaborate with technical teams to devise and validate potential solutions. They create detailed functional and non-functional requirements, develop prototypes, and conduct user acceptance testing to ensure that the proposed solutions align with the business needs.

Lastly, in the solution implementation and evaluation phase, business analysts closely cooperate with the development team to ensure a successful implementation of the chosen solution. They monitor the implementation process, evaluate the solution’s performance, and make necessary adjustments or improvements to optimise its effectiveness.

These well-defined phases of the business analysis process ensure a systematic and comprehensive approach to project requirements gathering, analysis, solution design, and implementation, leading to successful project delivery.

As organisations continue to navigate complex and ever-changing business environments, the role of business analysis in project delivery will become even more critical. By leveraging the power of business analysis, organisations can ensure successful project outcomes, minimise risks, and maximise stakeholder satisfaction.

Business analysts, armed with the right skills, competencies, and tools, will play a crucial role in driving business transformation and innovation. Their ability to identify and understand stakeholder needs, analyse complex business processes, and recommend effective solutions will be instrumental in shaping the future of project delivery.

Get ready to revolutionise sales, marketing and CX with AI

There’s no holding back the tide of next-generation AI, and organisations need to start embracing it to stay ahead of the competition and meet consumer expectations.

This is according to Paul Mulder, a Senior Solution Sales Professional at The CRM Team, a leading Microsoft Solutions Partner.

He says new AI technologies such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Bard AI are fast approaching the peak of inflated expectations in the Gartner Hype Cycle and have heightened consumer expectations of what is possible using Generative AI. Mulder says: “The exposure and experience consumers are now having with Generative AI is making them accustomed to it, so when they go into a work environment or engage with a service provider, their frame of reference is built around consumer-based AI experience.”

Generative AI is offering consumers personalised, relevant content at the click of a button. While not all information presented by generative AI is 100% accurate, and legislation around copyright issues has yet to be formalised, consumers are now witnessing the speed and convenience AI can offer.

“At the peak of the Gartner Hype Cycle, people start demanding more and wanting a richer experience. Once over the top of the curve, a down trend starts, and leads to a point where we find place for AI within our lives.”

“Now the question arises – what can we do with AI? There are issues such as copyrighted materials – we need to determine who coaches the system to not return values which infringe on people’s copyright. Maturity, legislation and the concept of responsible AI are necessary, but in line with Moore’s Law, AI is developing faster than we can keep track of or legislate. The reason for this is that it’s consumer driven, it’s people on the street going to companies and saying ‘I have seen it, I want it’.”

Getting ready to reinvent CX

Mulder says organisations must now work to keep up with the evolution of change to deliver the level of engagement and immersive experiences consumers are demanding.

In the consumer world, the likes of Google AI-powered Search and Performance Max, Meta’s Advantage+ are already redefining our AI experience and in the business world Microsoft AI such as Copilot will help meet changing expectations and revolutionise how enterprises operate and engage with customers, he says. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot in Sales and Viva Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing brings Generative AI to every line of business.

“Organisations need to get ready to take AI to the next level of detail to deliver generative experiences able to provide the right advertising and engagement to the consumer, at the right time,” Mulder says.

“In enterprise systems this is playing out through several interfaces. For example, in sales, marketing and customer experience, Copilot is a technology sitting across those domains, gathering information in the back end and assimilating it, to provide very relevant information to the person engaging with the content. So, if you are a salesperson, you want to know the person you are engaging with previously purchased x, as well as their demographic, how they engaged with the company in the past, and how they engaged on social media, you could write a natural language query to Copilot which would return a natural language synopsis of what you had asked. Copilot brings it together and says: ‘This customer insured a household appliance with us last month, but his structural coverage isn’t with us, so we could bring that into our portfolio too’. Copilot will build an appropriate quote for you or structure highly relevant messaging and content for you to incubate or engage in a more immersive way with that customer.”

He notes that early efforts to gain a 360-degree view of the customer were too slow and required multiple engagements with the customer to bring it all together. With Generative AI, organisations can redefine the customer experience by instantly bringing together customer information and understanding the situational context of the conversation sales is having with a customer. AI gives salespeople the opportunity to immerse themselves in the customer’s journey to purchase, not only to influence it, but to actually participate in it…real time.  

The immersion into the customer journey starts from our very first interaction, “In marketing, Copilot could pull a person’s behaviour within the framework of privacy, across social media, emails they opened, and rich information on their online behaviour, Copilot assimilates this information and then guides the marketer to help consumers make their next best purchase decision. It offers intelligent segmentation of people with common attributes beyond their demographic – such as hobbies and sports they are interested in. Copilot suggests to marketers more relevant ways of engaging with the customer.”

To support sales, Generative AI will help form the necessary human connections. “As marketing organisations, we have always known that relationships between people are fundamental, and word of mouth is powerful. LinkedIn Sales Navigator will look at networks of connections, offering the ability to say ‘I want to connect with a certain person, what key areas of interest allow me to do so? Who in their network can connect me to them and enable us to exploit that?’. Generative AI also supports a better employee experience, empowering employees and helping organisations to become employers of choice.”

He notes that while consumer Generative AI may make mistakes, enterprise grade AI is less likely to. “There’s a distinction between AI in the public domain and within a business. Within a business, these AI tools only have access to controlled areas using qualified data. The benefits far outweigh the downsides and are more controllable in a corporate environment. However, there is still a responsibility on companies to take the suggestions made by a machine and validate that they are true,” he says.

Mulder believes those organisations that will get ahead in future and live up to consumer expectations are those that embrace next-generation AI now. Machines are starting to mimic humans, “it’s coming, and you can’t hold back the tide,” he says.

Paul Mulder

Paul is a Senior Solutions Sales Professional at The CRM Team, where he brings his wealth of experience, passion for technology, and commitment to making a positive impact to the team. With his expertise in sales and his forward-thinking mindset, Paul is well-equipped to help clients navigate the ever-changing digital transformation landscape and drive meaningful results. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI):
6 trends to watch for in 2023

In 2023, some fascinating artificial intelligence trends may be able to show tangible growth, according to artificial intelligence trendsetters.

IoT and AI will lead to more advanced devices

2022 was a year of tremendous interest in the subject. There will be no difference in 2023; the world will be more reliant on smart devices.

While artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) appear to be separate topics, combined, they can significantly enhance business outcomes. Technology experts consider both technologies an opportunity for innovation, product improvement, and competitive advantage.

An Insight into 2023’s AI Technology Transformations

AI technology trends in 2023 will leave both industry and consumers intrigued. One thing is certain: artificial intelligence has limitless potential. According to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet (Google), “AI will have a greater impact on humanity than fire, electricity, and the internet.” The possibilities are endless, from personalized marketing to remote documentation.

In the midst of the technological revolution, industries worldwide are undergoing digital transformations. According to International Data Corporation (IDC) research, artificial intelligence spending will surpass $500 billion globally by 2023. Every sector and the world at large will be reshaped by AI’s widespread applications.

Below are some major trends in 2023 that will have a lasting impact:

Customer Engagement Trends

Brands are built on the success of their customer service. Instead of it being a responsive measure to deal with complaints, companies are learning to take personalised, empathetic customer care right to the heart of everything they do. This comes at the right time because customer expectations for hyper-personalised service from businesses continue to increase.

Winning the trust and loyalty of customers depends on how well businesses across every industry utilise their customer data and empower their teams to make every digital and physical engagement matter.

We are here to help you explore the art of customer service and engagement. We understand the importance of creating a more unified, intelligent data ecosystem to spark innovation across customer service teams. As your customers’ needs evolve, we can partner with you to turn every customer interaction into an opportunity to delight.

Create outstanding experiences in the moments that matter

Gaining a customer for life happens when organisations make every interaction matter. Whether that is reacting efficiently to a customer query, complaint, or need, or proactively taking steps to offer a new product or service. The key is to personalise the experience. Better understand your customers to create personalised journeys and lasting brand loyalty.

Demand for this bespoke treatment has increased. Today’s expectations are for hyper-personalisation across all channels of engagement between the customer and organisation. This move towards an omnichannel model has increased the scope in which companies can reach customers in new ways.

Where should a business start in this vast landscape of customer touchpoints to craft a personalisation strategy that leads to customer delight and long-term loyalty? Let us examine this now.

Understand your customers

It takes 12 positive customer experiences to negate the poor impression left behind from a single unpleasant experience. There is no margin for error when it comes to delivering customer care. A crowded marketplace of competitors, coupled with the number of digital channels open to consumers to voice their opinions and experiences with brands (both positive and negative) means that a single missed opportunity to delight a customer can have a significant impact on your brand reputation.

Employees use data to personalise the experience of the customer. The goal is to make every customer feel that the service they are receiving is 100 percent customised to them. However, this is not always achievable due to time and budget constraints.

Instead, a crucial step is to analyse your own data estate. From your customer relationship management (CRM) system to social channels and customer engagement (CE) platforms. Integrating this data for analysis with a Customer Data Platform (CDP) can help to surface rich insight by creating a single customer view that generates individualised personas.

Predicting customer behaviours using these data-driven personas can allow businesses to segment their customers more effectively in order to better align customer treatment strategies.

Embrace omnichannel experiences

The ways that customers engage with your business continue to expand. This offers a huge opportunity to benefit from the increased customer data flowing into your business.

Unifying this data into a consolidated customer profile that can carry across any customer touchpoint is fundamental to business personalisation efforts. As a result, conversations are more targeted and relevant. Additionally, customer service agents gain a greater understanding of the events leading up to a customer interaction if this unified omnichannel profile is accessible and properly collated.

Make the most of innovation to personalise

AI adoption for customer service has been widespread. However, its full potential to drive personalisation lies beyond the simple Q&A functionality that has become a popular standard.

Conversational AI’s ability to learn about customer interests and preferences, and then re-engage with personalised product recommendations at key stages of the buying process has become a key personalisation capability for companies to adopt.

The more simplistic virtual assistant functionality also has its place. For example, where customers need to action more simple tasks, such as getting an update on an order status. These systems complement the more complex analytical use cases. AI should be thought of as augmenting existing processes that extend the consistency of your company identity.

Personalise – but do not overdo it

It can be a fine line to tread between providing a customer with bespoke service and appearing to be compromising their privacy. Location-based personalisation techniques such as offers/greetings sent to apps on consumers’ phones when they pass by a store can come off as invasive.

At the same time, be as transparent as possible when it comes to informing consumers about how and why their data is used. Regulations like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) have helped created industry standards for this. However, companies can always look to bolster trust with their own in-house messaging and policy statements.

Do not lose the human touch

The capabilities of AI and data analytics are crucial to developing the insights necessary for understanding customers, building profiles, and offering bespoke offers and interactions.

However, businesses should not over-rely on these automated capabilities. The moments that matter are often those of one-on-one human connection. Take time to establish a comprehensive culture of communication that is agile to change. This is essential to empower your customer service agents with the empathetic skills they need to help find resolutions for customers that are personal and valued.

Personalise your customer’s experiences

The ways that personalisation will be felt across customer service will continue to evolve. Either from ongoing trends of increasing digital touchpoints or unexpected factors. Being agile to change is key.

We work with customers across industries to implement modular solutions that fit into existing customer service ecosystems to unlock new personalisation capabilities.

Why use Dynamics 365?

Align sales and marketing

Sales and marketing components can work together to help you better understand a customer’s needs and address those needs through the right marketing channels. Some of the ways these two functions can work together to help you are:

• Connecting with buyers at the right time and through their preferred channels
• Determining what types of messages to send to customers and when to deliver them.
• Prioritising and nurturing the right leads, ensuring a smooth hand-off from marketing to sales.

Increase sales productivity

The right CRM software allows your sales team to find, prioritise the right leads, and deliver insights on when and where your sales teams engage with customers. These systems can work together to:

• Predict future sales and budgets so you can plan accordingly.
• Help your agents streamline the sales process—from initial contact to closing the deal.
• Have client data centralised so that agents have access to real-time information and can deliver solutions quicker.
• Offer your sales staff mobility options that work across browsers and devices.

Build better customer relationships

Bringing customer service and sales together helps you determine and predict your customers’ preferences and makes it easier for your buyers to interact and trust doing business with you. When these two solutions combine, they can help you:

• Get insights into your customers’ journey so you can meet their expectations.
• Provide mobile applications for your clients and staff no matter what device they are using.
• Offer customers an easy-to-use, self-service portal so they can be in control of their data and quickly find answers to their questions.

Get an end-to-end view of your customers

Turn data into insights to keep your current customers happy or connect with new prospects. Other benefits include the ability to:

• Track past customer sales and purchase history.
• Offer benefits to loyal customers.
• Identify future leads.

Use a common platform

CRM takes disparate customer relationship software functions and brings them all together for seamless management. Other common platform benefits are:

• Customisable dashboards that offer up-to-date business intelligence.
• Centralised customer data, whether it is on-premises or in the cloud.
• Options that enable growth into other global markets.
• Easy integration with other software solutions.

Get visibility into customers

The more you know your customer’s preferences, the more likely you are to gain their trust and, eventually, their loyalty. Giving your team visibility into what makes customers tick will give you the inside edge over the competition. Put the customer at the centre of your business with CRM software that helps you:

• Create customised messages for customers according to their needs.
• Set up prompts so agents (in the office and field) know how often a customer has been contacted and what information they have received.
• Learn about how customers prefer to be contacted: social, email, text, or phone.

Offer customer portals

Online self-service portals put customers in control of their data, help them learn about product information, and let them track account activity. Companies have grown to realise that as vital as it is to provide their staff with an online company portal, offering it to clients makes it easier to engage with them as well. Here are three other reasons why customer portals for clients make sense:

• Clients can create and review requests. Whether it is a request for support or order information, you can set up your client portal, so your customers get quick and easy answers. It also cuts down on the number of times that they have to reach out to you to troubleshoot issues.
• Your customers take charge of their data. Put your customers in charge of updating their own information. Not only will their data be more accurate, but you will also be able to take client data management off your staff’s to-do list.
• Automated contact. Contact form information used to be dumped into a database, waiting to be accessed by staff when they needed it. You can now automate contact forms for quick customer response, and to kick off nurture campaigns and workflows, too.

Marketing: Improve your customers’ journey

Generate multichannel marketing campaigns, nurture sales-ready leads, and align your sales and marketing teams with planning and tracking tools that integrate with your existing apps and services.

Our vision for the
Microsoft customer data platform

Realizing the Largest Benefits of Using Customer Data Platforms

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are a modern solution to a modern problem: disconnected customer data. We’re currently living in a world full of data, but data is useless unless you have the tools to interpret it. This is the value that a CDP can bring to your organization. This guide will explain the benefits of CDPs to everyone in your business, with examples from Microsoft Dynamics 365, so you can get ahead with understanding your customer data.

Why You Need A CDP

With so many brands, products and services on the market, and millions of new businesses opening each year, customers can become overwhelmed with choice. When multiple organizations offer high-quality products or services, customers begin to pay more attention to how brands interact with them. Customers want to feel recognized, valued, and understood by the brands they interact with and the only way for you to create this feeling is to have data about them. Lots of data.

It would take a long time to manually collect data for each of your existing and potential customers across all platforms, not to mention how resource-intensive it would be. AI-powered CDPs have the capability to collect masses of data, including behavioral data from customer interaction, demographic data, and transactional data. Not only this, but the AI in a CDP can analyze this data for you, creating a unified customer database that can be used to personalize customer touchpoints and increase engagement.

There are three main ways CDPs can help you understand your customers better:

1. Centralize customer data, creating a single view of a customer using data from each step of the buyer’s journey.
2. Analyze data to provide insights and recommendations.
3. Empower businesses to deliver personalized experiences, which are now expected by customers, in response to customer desires and needs.

Benefits of CDPs

Implementing the use of a CDP in your businesses can benefit all departments but especially the marketing, sales and customer service teams. Marketing teams benefit from the ability to deliver targeted marketing across channels, using content they know is relevant to a specific audience to stand a better chance of a conversion. This in turn raises the company’s marketing ROI.

Sales teams benefit from personalized information on customers such as their loyalty, buying frequency, spending and recent purchases. Sellers can use data like this to optimize sales opportunities by delivering personalized sales engagements.

Meanwhile, customer service reps can view complete profiles for each customer, allowing them to provide proactive support to customers in a way that makes them feel understood.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

One example of a powerful customer data platform is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights provides a single view of customers by connecting data from a full range of sources. In addition, Microsoft’s CDP ensures all data is managed securely and in compliance with GDPR regulations. Its capabilities can be split into Audience Insights and Engagement Insights.

Audience Insights

Microsoft Dynamics 365 combines both B2C and B2B data to generate real-time AI-powered insights that marketing, sales and customer service teams can all use to make informed decisions about customers.

Predict Customer Desires and Needs

Built-in AI and analytics help to predict customer lifetime value and transactional and subscription churn. The same models the CDP uses for these predictions can also identify opportunities for cross-selling and upselling with recommendations of products and services, increasing the value that each customer may bring. The AI makes recommendations for dividing your audience into demographic segments you can target separately, though you can also define your own audience divisions.

AI-powered Insights Deliver Meaning

Marketing, sales and customer service teams benefit from real-time customer data collecting from Dynamics 365 Marketing, Sales and Customer Service. This comprehensive data allows them to deliver personalized journeys to clients across marketing, advertising and engagement platforms.

Deliver Personalization for Your B2B Clients

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 system allows the sales team to shorten sales cycles with unified account profiles, complete with client activities and insights. On top of this, third-party integration means data from other sources can be used to increase the accuracy and quality of leads, while AI models will identify at-risk accounts so you can respond with a proactive retention strategy.

Build Customer Trust

Data itself is a sensitive topic. Customers want to know they can trust brands to keep their information safe. With Microsoft’s customer experience platform, customers are linked to their consent preferences, which refresh automatically so you can honor them easily. It also has tools to easily secure customer data so you can achieve your marketing goals while complying with GDPR and CCPA.

Engagement Insights

The other side of the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps businesses understand customer behavior with cross-channel analytics.

Optimizing the Sales Funnel

Built-in features allow marketing, sales and customer service teams to view how many and what type of customers are moving through each step of the customer journey so that you can optimize your website and mobile app for conversion. These insights can be even more specific with the ability to carry out funnel analysis on different customer segments.

Understand Customer Behaviour

AI-driven insights from your website and mobile help marketing teams understand customer engagement. The system tracks customer behavioral data and creates real-time reports so teams can easily identify patterns and make informed decisions to increase engagement and conversion rates.

Set Up Customer Insights Today

With such a comprehensive view of each and every one of your customers, you almost can’t go wrong when it comes to delivering great customer experiences that will keep customers coming back to your brand. Contact us to help optimize Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights today.

Businesses can no longer just offer the best product or service at the best price and be done with it. Consumers are now choosing to spend their money with companies that provide the best Customer Experience. It is possible that by investing and implementing Customer Experience programs and strategies, you could potentially double your revenue in three years.

More than two-thirds (around 86%) of buyers will spend more on a product or service if it means that they are receiving an excellent and memorable Customer Experience. More than that, nearly half of people have made impulse buys because they received a personalised experience from a brand.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience is sometimes simply referred to as CX. In an eCommerce setting, this could be referred to as User Experience or (IX).

In general, Customer Experience is how your customers think you are treating them. The reality is: if customers feel like ‘just a number’ to your business, your business will likely be ‘just a business’ to them. Offering tailored and personalised experiences mean customers link interactions with your brand or company with pleasant emotions and memories. This, in turn, drives their loyalty, which could generate repeat sales and lead to new acquisitions as these happy customers spread the word.

How data can be used to enhance your Customer’s Experience.

In the past, many companies used surveys to gather data on their customers’ experiences. A survey conducted by McKinsey & Company in collaboration with AlphaSights and Gerson Lehrman Group in 2019 and 2020 found that nearly all of their respondents (93%) used survey-based data to track their customer’s experience. However, only 15% thought that surveys were the best way to measure their customer’s experience. Very few (6%) believed that using surveys provides them with the data they need to make informed decisions.

Today companies have access to vast amounts of customer data. This data can be ethically sourced and combined with a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to improve your Customer Experience.

The data that is sourced and used by a Customer Data Platform is usually first party data. That means the information is gathered directly from individuals who interact with your company, business, or brand. Gathering data directly from persons who have interacted with your company means the data closely reflect your target demographic.

By harnessing this data, you can make informed decisions to improve your customers’ experience in general. More than that, a customer data platform creates profiles of individual people who have engaged with your brand. That means you can tailor marketing messages and experiences to speak directly to each specific customer. These tailored experiences make each interaction with an individual and unique customer an opportunity to provide them with a personalised and custom Customer Experience.

Customers want to be important to you. They do not want to be just another order number. So much so that they are willing to give you permission to gather their data in order to make their interactions with your brand more personalised.

What kind of data can be used to better understand your customers?

When you use data to better understand customers, it is generally referred to as Customer Analytics. This involves everything from gathering to storing, analyzing, and then making decisions from what you’ve learned from the data gathered on your customers.

When you collect information on your customers, you are primarily interested in how they interact with your different marketing channels and how they interact with your products or services. Bear in mind that every interaction with your company or brand that does not directly relate to an interaction with your product or service is a marketing interaction.

Everything from a like on Facebook to reading an article on your blog or searching the location of your brick-and-mortar store are steps along the customer journey. A journey that would potentially and hopefully end with them making a purchase from you.

Suppose you know how your target audience (or, better yet, any specific customer) prefers to interact with your company. In that case, you can generate highly targeted marketing messaging specifically aimed at that group or individual.

More than knowing how customers interact with your brand, you need to know which products or services are the most and least popular. Even then, you cannot stop there; you need to know why this is the case.

This is because products or services that are selling well could potentially do better if marketing efforts for these products or services are tweaked according to customer feedback (both directly and indirectly).

Products or services that sell less well may need to be dropped from inventory. On the other hand, harnessing your customer data and improving your Customer Experience could see these products or services selling better as they are strategically marketed to particular individuals.

In today’s marketplace, it is vital to gather and harness not only digital data but also real-life information on your customers. Real-life data could include information about their trips to your brick-and-mortar store, what they purchased, and the overall experience of their visit. It could even be as specific as what they thought of your window dressing, their interaction with your sales staff, or whether they tried any samples while at your store.

Businesses often have multiple platforms and databases where they gather information on their customers. That means they often have vast amounts of data to store, process, and analyse before they can use it in a logical and strategic way. In many cases, the data is so much that businesses only use a fraction of the data available to influence their customer’s experiences.

Using a customer data platform allows you to integrate all the first party (and sometimes second and third party) data that you gather on your customers or even potential customers. You can then use this to cultivate highly unique and personalised Customer Experiences and give your customers exactly what they want or need, when they want and need it.