Enterprise analytics is essential for improving customer experiences across all marketing, selling and service channels. And it's never been more important to understand and enhance the customer experience.
Customers are the lifeblood of your company–and they have high expectations. While they don’t expect you to read their palms or predict their futures, they do anticipate that you’ll meet them where they are and when they want it. That means you need to create experiences that are timely, targeted, and tailored to their specific needs.
The problem is that those experiences aren’t being met. In fact, while 80% of CEOs believe they’re already delivering great customer experiences, only 8% of customers agree.
The good news? Businesses can differentiate themselves to consistently exceed expectations using enterprise analytics to become data-driven and help their business associates create experiences that exceed expectations. It’s not a crystal ball, but it’s pretty darn close.
What is Enterprise Analytics?
Enterprise analytics has many names–you might know it as big data analytics or business analytics software. However you want to call it, enterprise analytics is a means of providing organizations with the ability to collect, analyze, and process analytical data in all or most functions of the business.
Businesses generate a vast amount of data, every day. From their customers and employees, in various forms and from multiple sources. For any business, collecting and managing all that data from across several departments is a tremendous task.
This approach helps you understand everything you need to know about your business. From your teams, to your customers, and all your lines of business, you see everything you need to get the whole picture, like how your bottom line is doing or how you’re projected to do in the new quarter. As well, you can leverage predictive technology to foresee trends and outcomes for the year.
Simply put, it’s a way to get a complete picture of your entire organization. So, where does the customer experience come in?
Customer Experience and the Role of Enterprise Analytics
Think of all the ways customers interact with the typical sales and service processes. There are so many touchpoints across the journey. Customers are looking for a seamless and consistent experience. And businesses need a streamlined approach to capturing and analyzing data to understand their customer and their sales.
An enterprise analytics strategy helps you streamline that process.
Broken systems create broken experiences
Companies aspire to use data efficiently but often can’t if they’re using standalone marketing, sales, and service solutions that aren’t connected to one another.
Disparate systems mean data silos, and that has an impact on efficiency, sales, and morale across the entire business.
Sales Managers: Without insight into the whole organization, sales leaders only get half the picture for how their efforts are impacting other areas, like delivery, adoption, profitability, and customer feedback.
Sales Associate (teams): Without a 360-degree view of their customer, sales associates (teams) have no context when interacting with a customer, and that impacts the overall experience and could risk losing the sale.
Chief Revenue Officer: Disconnected solutions means the CRO is unable to compare historic revenue trends to the pipeline in the current and future quarters.
Remove the guesswork and start using data
Sales and customer service requires a holistic approach to ensure representatives feel empowered. And these days, that looks like a single cloud solution that connects your people, data, and ideas from multiple sources.
Having one single place allows your teams to:
- Compare sales pipeline with marketing campaigns
- Determine if the current inventories and the supply chain support expected orders
- Uncover insights from sales that help identify customer service challenges to improve service processes
- Combine sales, marketing, transactions, and experience data to get a deeper insight into customers
Successful companies have found that customer experience belongs to more than just one department. If a company is so siloed that it distracts from the service that customers are receiving, more often than not, customers will take their business to a place where they feel valued and respected.
Benefits of a Single Solution for Customer Experience
The flow of data is constant and having the ability to understand it provides businesses with visibility bordering on clairvoyance.
Here’s what you can do with an enterprise analytics strategy for customer experience:
Everyone is on the same page with one single source of truth throughout the whole organization. This enables teams to get insight faster which drives better decisions. It also breaks down silos by integrating previously disconnected information.
See the future with predictive analytics. Using predictive power can help you better anticipate customer needs and interests which enhances personalization. This enables marketing and sales to foster a stronger relationship with your customers, resulting in improved retention.
Keep track of marketing and sales spend. Improve profitability by understanding which customers and which products are your top performers. This could even be done with voice commands or simple requests through natural language processing. Imagine how this immediate insight will transform your business decision process.
Transform territory planning from reactive pipeline review to proactive opportunity identification. Seeing your data in real time lets you act in the moment, rather than waiting for outdated metrics. You can also detect future trends using predictive forecasts that are automatically updated as new information becomes available.
What to Look for in an Enterprise Analytics Solution for Customer Experience
1. All-in-one
Ideally, the enterprise analytics solution you go with will do all the above from one place. You want to make sure that it can easily integrate with your other systems and that it empowers you with automated business intelligence, planning, and predictive capabilities.
2. Predictive and Smart Features
Predictive features allow you to simulate and identify (or analyze) customer trends. You can do this using existing marketing and sales data by connecting to your relevant data sources. When looking for your solution, make sure you have basic capabilities. These include: as automated forecasting, or more advanced features like predicting future outcomes to identify the probability of future outcomes. Additionally, you can gain quick insights via natural language processing to easily ask questions and surface immediate results.
3. Increased Collaboration
It can’t be said enough: collaboration is key to any successful team – and business! The right enterprise analytics solution increases collaboration across customer experience teams. This is a difference maker for your organization because it increases productivity. This looks like asking colleagues about specific data points or assigning and completing tasks that make the project move forward in a timely manner. You'll also need to share private versions of the data to get input from key stakeholders.
4.Empowered Decision Making
Your employees should feel empowered in all areas, from marketing, sales and customer success. This helps them make confident decisions for about their prospects and customer strategy based on up-to-date relevant data. By using the right solution, everyone can have access to analytics and insights, empowering strategic decision-making across the entire organization.
The Future of Customer Experiences: Stop Guessing, Start Knowing
It’s often said that data is the backbone of today’s business. But data does not provide value until rationalized and harmonized to provide insight. Data is only half of the story.
To get the full story, and make informed decisions, businesses need a way to quickly extract meaning from that data. And that’s what an enterprise analytics strategy is. It’s the backbone for businesses. It acts as the foundation, fuel, and a crystal ball that simultaneously unifies and powers businesses to ensure unrivalled agility and speed.
A holistic approach ensures all teams are set up for success and feel empowered. Learn more about what it takes to implement a comprehensive strategy in The Ultimate Guide to Enterprise Analytics.
- SAP Managed Tags:
