Businesses today have become extremely proficient at collecting and gathering data. Afterall, it informs just about every business decision—from identifying gaps in the early stages of the buyer journey to uncovering the biggest pain points for high churn-risk customers. Whether through direct efforts, or as a byproduct of their ever-growing tech stack, there’s a wealth of operational and transactional data pouring into your business every second. The stream of data flowing through your business gives a clear picture of what your customers and prospects are doing, but leaves a giant gap in addressing the most important question needed to make informed business decisions—Why?
Extracting Greater Value From Data
Data is an important piece of the puzzle, but it is useless without context.
Contextualization is adding related information to data to make it more useful. Patterns, trends, and correlations don’t mean anything until given the appropriate context.
Marketing and customer experience leaders know (or at least they should) their customer journey maps like the back of their hand and have a clear feedback process laid out.
But what they lack is the ability to test, validate, and iterate UX decisions, product iterations, product features, marketing campaigns, marketing effectiveness, and more. They don't understand “why” customers are interacting with their brand, clicking certain ads, using specific features over others, or responding to one marketing campaign over another.
In order to make good use of the data flowing into your business, you need the ability to uncover customer preferences, habits, how they engage with the brand, and the “why” behind their actions so you can accurately determine “what’s next?” It’s time to stop collecting more data and focus on gathering the right data—data that leads to actionable insights that help you make better decisions.
You probably have multiple feedback programs all adding more and more to the rising pool of data, but how do you know what products to bring to market? Which marketing campaigns resonate with your target audience and which don’t? Which advertising partners make sense for your audience? While this may seem like a daunting undertaking, you can achieve this easily by starting small and working your way up to a holistic customer experience management (CXM) solution.
Be More Strategic With Surveys
Surveys have always been one of the cornerstones of a good insight engine or feedback program, but, like any tool, must be utilized correctly in order to achieve their intended function. How many times have you been asked a question from a company and the first thing that comes to mind is “shouldn’t you already know this information?”
Too many companies have over-pivoted with survey automation that they’re asking redundant questions that provide a bad experience for customers and reduce the effectiveness of the insights that come from the surveys. Surveys without context are simply not effective at identifying the root cause of CX issues, making it impossible to take meaningful actions from the results.
In order to increase the impact of your efforts, utilize surveys with progressive profiling to ensure you’re deploying timely surveys to the right people that ask the necessary questions to help you make sense of your existing data. Learn why specific features are used more than others, why a specific ad campaign didn’t resonate with customers, or why employee burnout continues to rise. The uses are endless.
Surveys will always be an important part of any successful insights engine, but you must be more strategic with how they’re deployed to ensure they’re helping you meet your goals, else you’re just adding to the noise.
Speed & Scalability
While the titans of industry can throw substantial resources towards making sense of all their data, smaller businesses—with finite budgets—need to focus on implementing programs that can get up to speed quickly and scale with their business.
Speed and scalability are two of the more important considerations for any investment or program. You need the ability to get started quickly, but grow your program with your business. If you’re collecting mounds and mounds of useless data, you’re throwing away crucial resources that could be better used. Worst of all, you'll double the work for yourself by having to comb through volumes of data when you attempt to analyze and determine next steps.
By ensuring you’re only collecting meaningful data—where context is clear—you can quickly feed actionable insights back into your product, marketing, sales, and CS team to improve the effectiveness of your innovation efforts without slowing down. Your customers know what they want, and are willing to tell you, you just need to make sure you’re listening.
Real Life Example
Sky Betting and Gaming competes in an increasingly saturated market with limited brand loyalty and changing regulatory conditions. On any given Saturday, betting customers come into contact with thousands of touchpoints calling them to action from different brands. The challenges of saturation are compounded by the inherently confrontational “win or lose” nature of the customer transactions. Differentiation, loyalty, and ongoing engagement is the holy grail that impacts everything from immediate tactical questions to broader long-term strategic initiatives. This puts the marketing and product innovation teams under incredible pressure to innovate, build brand affinity, and go to market as fast as possible. The complexity of this challenge is compounded by Sky Bet’s need to create and maintain loyalty across 40 different sports, four gaming brands, and four free-to-play products.
To support a strategy of deep customer understanding and create a foundation of their best-in-class customer insights program, they launched The Clubhouse made up of over 9,000 opted-in, richly profiled, and highly engaged players across multiple countries who provide rapid insight that goes beyond transactional data analytics.
Sky Bet overlays a comprehensive segmentation on top of their customer base. The segmentation is stored in their internal data warehouse and replicated in The Clubhouse so they can talk to specific customer sets quickly and effectively without having to repeat screening questions or run additional data analysis. The ability to repeatedly engage known customers and feed that insight back into their CRM, enables Sky Bet to develop product features, advertising, and promotions that set them apart from other brands in the industry.
Fueled by rapid, agile insight from carefully segmented customer groups and seamless integrations with their CRM, the company has the ability to successfully target the right customer base, responsibly acquire new customers, provide clear direction for future innovation, de-risk product decisions with extensive UX and iterative product testing, and pre-empt market shifts that would otherwise go undetected for long periods of time.
Insights from The Clubhouse contribute to the YOY uplift in key metrics such as loyalty, share of wallet, brand awareness, and attribution and volume of customers. Sky Bet is now the #1 online bookmaker in the UK in terms of customer numbers and #1 in terms of game players in Vegas. Key drivers behind these uplifts were created and validated through The Clubhouse.
What’s Next: Your Path to Innovation
We help companies innovate by helping them understand the "why" behind surveys and helping them determine what to do next. How do you go from data to insights to action that helps you continually innovate? That's the question that every CX and marketing leader needs to be asking themselves as they build their programs.
The goal of your efforts should be to help drive collaborative innovation and co-creation with customers. The only way to uncover the “why” behind the “what” is by engaging with customers directly to unlock actionable insights that drive innovation.
At Alida, we provide customers, like Sky Betting and Gaming, with the catalyst for innovation by helping them connect input to innovation so they can move from siloed customer, product, employee, and brand experiences into a holistic CXM program that drives innovation.
Find out more about the Alida Survey solution and take the next big step in your CX journey today.
