How data can power your customer engagement strategy
You’ve probably done it at least once while shopping online – clicked on an item labeled “frequently bought together” before finally checking out. More than one-third of Amazon’s digital sales actually originate from this practice.
It works there and elsewhere because it’s part of a larger experience, one that’s sufficiently streamlined to make customers welcome the attempted cross-selling. In other words, how many of these opportunities an organization can convert hinges upon its abilities to improve customer experiences through data-driven engagement.
In the best cases, engagement is mutually beneficial for merchants and customers: The latter get a smooth journey regardless of channel and are engaged when and how they prefer, while the former create a key competitive differentiator, one that cultivates loyalty, reduces churn, and helps boost margins. Almost 86 percent of consumers have reported being willing to pay more for a better experience.
Engagement methodologies vary considerably in type and efficacy, though. Picking the wrong channel to engage in or making a useless recommendation, often because of a blind spot in a customer’s profile, can be costly. Two-thirds of customers cite a poor experience as a deterrent to using a platform or service.
To return to our opening example, imagine a company couldn’t easily pull a customer’s purchase history or correlate the buying trends of specific products. Its algorithms might recommend irrelevant items and demoralize shoppers by making them feel like the merchant didn’t really know their preferences.
Dark data: An obstacle to effective engagement
Flipping back the other side of this relationship, what could the company have done to avoid such pitfalls? Success here starts with shining a light on all of the dark data sitting unused in your databases and/or the cloud.
A lot of information, like previous orders from the same or other clients, is captured and stored as part of routine business operations, yet is never utilized to engage customers within omnichannel strategies. Such dark data exacts a huge opportunity cost in terms of customer outreach while also being a potential regulatory liability. Clarifying its contents is in everyone’s best interest. But doing so requires the proper tools and services to support what might be an ambitious overhaul of existing processes.
That means setting up the data integrations and middleware implementations to corral the overwhelmingly unstructured information that constitutes most firms’ dark data. Less than 1 percent of unstructured data is ever used at all, underscoring the enormous untapped potential that can be addressed with the right solutions.
By structuring it and placing it into cloud storage or a local EDW, this information can fuel improved engagement, since it paints a clearer picture of each customer and what that person is looking for. More specifically, it’s easier to draw upon a single version of the truth that can inform cross-selling opportunities, guide responses to customer service inquiries, and ensure that everyone sees the same data for a given account.