Data Integration for a More Detailed View of Your Customer

The mystery of your customer is being solved in pieces.
It’s time to put those pieces together.

Data Divided

Because businesses are divided into departments, so is business data. Although more and more companies are figuring out how to use analytics technology to understand their data, they continue to do it in silos. One team analyzes customer experience data, another team analyzes transactional data, and yet another analyzes operational data.

The Silhouette Method

This is like having each department cast their own light on your customer and learn from the shadow it produces. The basic shape and size of the customer can be obtained from this “silhouette” method, and these individual dimensions can be useful for providing direction to decision makers. Simple, department-specific insights are a good start, but adding more dimensions to your customer view is critical to future success.

For example, using customer survey data alone, your company can build out a strong plan for improving customer service and increasing customer satisfaction. The benefits of department-specific plans like this are real and important, and each department can do something similar.

This helps companies progress via smaller, department-specific strides.

Adding Dimensions

To perform like a top brand—and to gain every advantage you can—departments must stretch beyond their own data. Customer experience leaders shouldn’t just be able to measure and improve the customer experience within survey results—they should be able to quantify the experience-related impact on multiple facets of the business.
Some quick examples:

Reduced Operational Costs

• Storefront/Retail: Integrate payroll, real estate, transactional, and VoC data to identify whether the extra staffing you are throwing at a particular store—or store type—is, in fact, translating into a better customer experience or better sales.
• Contact Center: Integrate service levels, hold times, and VoC data to identify whether or not there is a positive impact from staffing up to meeting stricter service levels. If there is no incremental improvement in the customer experience, you are wasting money.

Revenue Generation

Integrate customer segmentation, product, and VoC data to better understand the experiences of your different customer segments. If you find that particular segments are responding better than others to certain services or products, take that data to your marketing partners and launch a more targeted campaign to increase the penetration of those services/products within the most receptive customer segments.

These examples illustrate very simple, but powerful, relationships between multiple data sets. When combined, they can drive improved customer experiences, along with strong business results.
Lead your business out of the shadows and step into the 3D world. Modern display optics have changed. Technology has moved beyond shining a light and casting a shadow, and the same needs to happen with customer experience–related insights and analytics. Today’s most advanced displays rely on a series of lasers and lenses to produce a highly detailed holographic image. That’s essentially what broader data integration does for your company.
By focusing the light of each department and combining compartmentalized data into a common analytics with holistic data visualizations, you will begin to see a more lifelike image of your customer.

Opportunity for Advantage

Today, very few companies are analyzing their data holistically and simultaneously. The opportunity and true potential of analytics technology lies in the integration of multiple streams—customer feedback data, operational data, segmentation, transactional data, etc.—to gain deeper operational insights, incremental gains in ROI, as well as more predictive measurements from the perspective of both action and inaction.

Action, This Day!

The quality of analysis and insights available to companies is not limited by technology. It is limited by data. If you can bring the data together, the insights are yours to use. So do it. This blog post is a call to action. Better yet, this is a flat-out plea to businesses out there in Business Land that are limiting their competitive advantage by maintaining siloed data and analytics.

Step up and start using your data the way it can—and should—be used. Mindshare’s Analytics Team is here to help.