Improving customer experience

Businesses should always been looking to identify the customer's need at each touchpoint and finding the right solution, one which will maximise value for the customer as well as for the business.

So says David Cosgrave, customer intelligence lead at SAS, who will be presenting on 'Leveraging customer intelligence to improve customer experience' at the ITWeb Business Intelligence Summit, to be held at The Forum in Bryanston on 14 and 15 March.

He adds that customer intelligence revolves around making customer 'context', or in other words, the past, present and future relationship with the customer, available at every touchpoint with them.

"By embedding CRM data about the past, real-time context about the present, and predictive analytics which help predict the future, into each channel and customer touchpoint, the business can ensure that each touchpoint is optimised to identify the customer's need and move them to the next stage of their journey."

Speaking of how this will improve the customer experience, Cosgrave says customers want to feel that the business knows them intimately, and is doing the best it can to find ways to meet their needs.

However, he says customers often have a disjointed experience, based on the product-centric, functional, organisational or channel silos that exist within most businesses. "Centralising your decision-making and using analytics to predict the optimal outcome, can ensure that customers receive a consistent experience, no matter how they engage with the business."

In terms of what businesses are doing wrong in terms of customer experience, Cosgrave says many companies still think, or operate in silos. An example, he says, would be by treating digital channels as separate to traditional or offline channels, or by focusing on one objective to the detriment of others.

According to him, it is not easy to break down these silos, particularly in large or complex organisations. "Centralised data and analytics helps a business to look at the possible range of options across silos and find the optimal option for the customer. This is true customer-centric, as opposed to product-centric, thinking."

Delegates attending Cosgrave's presentation will learn about how to operationalise analytics, and make data and analytics a central part of decision-making when it comes to customer experience.

In addition, they will learn about how other retailers, banks, mobile operators and insurers around the globe are also generating significant incremental revenue from customer experience-focused initiatives, and the building blocks that they need in place to make this happen.