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How Bad Data Impact Customer Experience

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Bad Data Is Bad For Business

Customer data is used to create customer profiles, which can then be used to drive advertising, marketing, growth initiatives – even store locations, and in customer initiatives, to improve customer service or the overall customer experience. Customer data is gathered internally, or purchased from third-party providers. If bad data is used in the algorithm, insights generated are unreliable, and any actions taken based on that data can negatively impact the customer experience.

Data needs to be consistent, relevant, and have both accuracy and integrity. Data that fails on any of these measures can be considered bad data, and impact the methods by which enterprises create customer profiles – making those profiles at best, skewed and at worst, completely invalid.

Bad data impacts customer experience with brand interactions, including:

  1. Poor Customer Service:

Bad data used for customer service may result in frustrating experiences for both the customer, who may be asked to provide information more than once and the customer service representative that is attempting to provide an individualized, responsive customer experience. It is unlikely that the customer will be satisfied at the end if they have to constantly correct the erroneous demographic, personal, or prior purchase information in the course of a customer service interaction.

  1. Ineffective Marketing:

A recent survey of marketers showed that 21% of their budget was wasted on insights generated from bad data. This affects the customer experience, as brand interactions that are deemed irrelevant, or just plain wrong, erode the consumer-brand relationship. Personalized customer service, when accurate and timely, can boost sales, engagement, and customer retention. Inaccurate personalization can negate those results just as easily.

 

How to ensure data quality

To ensure that data used in analytics is of good quality – and therefore the customer insights drawn from it are good as well – a company should dedicate resources, including employee time and equipment, to ensure that data is accurate before being used in analytics.

Purchase Clean Data

To ensure that the data purchased from an outside party is high-quality, you should know the following:

  • Data methodology: How was the data collected?
  • Data source(s): Where did it come from?
  • Data scale: How large is the raw data set?
  • Data parameters: What are the guidelines for data verification and accuracy?
  • Data freshness: What is the lag time between occurrence and reporting?
  • Data type: Is it factual, or inferred?
  • Data privacy and security: Does the provider follow strict guidelines for protecting the security and privacy of personal information?

When this consumer data is inaccurate, inconsistent, or lacks integrity across data sets, the insights that are drawn from the data will be inaccurate as well.  This negatively impacts business outcomes, including providing a positive, unified customer experience. To optimize the customer experience and ensure customer satisfaction, and strong brand relationships, consumer data must be high-quality, accurate, and cleansed.

Conclusion

With 9 out of 10 businesses competing mainly on customer experience, it’s the organizations that take customer experience seriously that will stand out from the noise and win loyal customers over.

One thing is for sure, to deliver a positive experience, you have to know your customers better than ever before. This means creating complete customer profiles that help you understand and measure your customers’ behaviour at every touchpoint, and across multiple channels. Once you know your customers well enough, you can use that knowledge to personalize every interaction. Customers these days have more power and choices than ever before. Thus, you are responsible for understanding and acknowledging their needs.

If you make sure their interaction with your company is smooth, pleasant and continuously improving, you will drive brand loyalty. If not, you’ll give your competitors the best gift you can – your customers.

talking to a customer

HOW TO SELL TO A CUSTOMER

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on the phone with a customer

on the phone with a customer

Selling today is far different from those old days when the customer could only find out about a company’s products or services by being presented to by a slick salesperson, with a toothy grin and sharp intakes of breath!

Today’s salesmanship is identified by a professional approach, highly intelligent about their products, their market, their customers and their industry, and a keen desire to find out about their prospects’ business before presenting solutions.

So, how should you sell a product to a customer today?

One simple answer is ‘don’t try to sell’!

Yes, that seems contrary to everything we learned in sales, doesn’t it? Well, most salespeople still sell as if buyers were needing to know information. But most people will do a lot of research before contacting a salesperson to finalise their decision.

Many surveys show that the buyer is more than 70% along the buying process before they contact a company. What does this mean for a salesperson? How should we sell our product today, to a well-researched and highly knowledgeable prospect?

Here are some tips:

Approach the sale with an attitude of curiosity

Instead of approaching a prospect with the thought of telling them everything they need to know about your product, see it as a ‘knowledge extraction process.

You need to sell your products by not selling them first!

Imagine you’re a doctor. What would the doctor say to you when you went into his surgery?  Would he just give you a prescription straight away? No of course not. He would make enquiries as to what was wrong and ask you some deep questions to ascertain exactly which direction he should take the conversation.

See yourself as a doctor to your buyer being your patient. You need to ask a series of questions to determine the situation that your prospect is in.  Only after you have gained information and built up some kind of knowledge concerning their situation can you officially say you are in a position to make some kind of recommendations.

Confirm your understanding of the customer’s situation

You need to clarify your understanding so that the prospect appreciates you understand and have a clear picture of the situation that they are in. Only after you have done this have you earned the right to even contemplate what products or services might be right for their current situation.

Present your solution based on exactly what will solve their concerns

People don’t buy your products. Instead, they will buy whatever will solve the current situation that they are in. So, when you present your solution, make sure that you are talking about the results that they will get rather than the features and benefits of your product.

Gain commitment by ensuring your customer knows what the product will do for them or their business

Your prospect will only decide to go with you when they understand the short and long-term results that your product or service will bring to their business or themselves. By doing this you make it very clear to them how they will benefit from your products. Remember that the product itself is not as important as the short, medium and long-term results that they will achieve after using your product.

So, how do you sell a product to a customer today? By discussing their needs, gaining knowledge of their business, putting yourself in their position and proving that your products and services are going to provide a better future for them than anything else they currently experience.

Credit: MTD Sales Training

5 REASONS WHY CUSTOMER DATA IS IMPORTANT

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Introduction

Customer experience (CX) has fast become a top priority for businesses and 2021 will be no different. Customers no longer base their loyalty on price or product. Instead, they stay loyal to companies due to the experience they receive. If you cannot keep up with their increasing demands, your customers will leave you.

Customer experience is your customers’ perception of how your company treats them. These perceptions affect their behaviours and build memories and feelings to drive their loyalty. In other words – if they like you and continue to like you, they are going to do business with you for a long time and recommend you to others.

Improving Customer Experience through Customer Data

For your customers to like you, you need to get to know them. You need to invest in the long-term relationship (also known as relationship marketing) because you can deliver a personalized experience across the entire customer journey when you understand who they are. Gaining this in-depth knowledge about customers isn’t something that just happens. You need to collect customer data and bring out valuable insights from that data with speed and precision.

Using both active and passive data to better gauge your customer and their journey is imperative to creating the optimal customer experience (CX) experience. Companies must collect, analyse, understand — and most importantly use — customer data to learn how to make CX better.

customer data

customer data

Why customer data is important

  1. It Allows You to Get Personal:

Customers today don’t just want to spend money. They want personalized service, an interaction that is personalized to save them time, recognizes their interests or preferences, and one that does those things seamlessly, without them even realizing it.

  1. It Shows You What’s Working — And What’s Not:

From the customer data collected, you can easily identify what your customers want, how your products and services are performing in the market, who your largest customers are, and where they come from. This can inform any strategic business decision you have to make.

Read more about what your customers deserve: https://csmng.org/customer-service-experience/

  1. It Helps You Respond Faster:

Today’s market is moving faster than ever, and your customers are using their voices faster, as well. Within moments of a negative experience, they can hop onto social media and spread the news. The only way to arm yourself in such a market is to use analytics to speed up your response time, and proactively fix CX issues before they start.

  1. It Helps You Succeed — But Only If You Use It:

Today’s biggest pitfall is to get so focused on collecting data that you never actually use it. The beauty of data is not just in what it tells you, it’s in what decisions you make based on those insights. Successful companies will focus more on the end-game than on the data acquisition.

  1. Customer-Centric Data Analytics Helps Brands Prioritize & Act on Issues Based on Revenue Impact:

companies often overspend on efforts to attract or delight customers, which typically cost more than say, improving retention rates or taking advantage of upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Big data allows organizations to connect what customers say to what they do, analyse the most significant performance of satisfied, neutral, and dissatisfied customers to identify what factors into a good or bad experience.

If you want to succeed in today’s market, 1) embrace data and 2) follow where it leads you. Remember: your customers are on the journey right along with you.

HOW TO IDENTIFY A BAD CUSTOMER

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a customer shouting at the call centre agent

how to identify a bad customer

Customers are always right until they are wrong! So, how do you identify a bad customer?

Are you confused? You have heard that all customers are kings and that customers are always right, but if you have worked in customer service for long enough you know as well as I do that no human is always right. Some customers are confused, some are bossy and rude. Some customers are unbelievably selfish, and some just like to throw tantrums unnecessarily. Some people are just unfair and are looking to exploit your services. Therefore, to keep your service team effective, you should know how to recognize these people.

How to identify a bad customer

One important aspect of customer service is the ability to identify who really needs your service in order to maintain efficiency. More so, the truth is that you can actually improve your service by timely identifying this group of ‘bad’ customers and taking action. If a customer contacts you with a frequency far above the average, devouring too much of your team’s time, he might not be worth keeping. Of course, this doesn’t mean that anyone reaching out with requests is potentially a bad customer.

But if you have someone who constantly reaches out to you with questions that could have been answered by simply going through your website or knowledge base, if a customer is obviously too lazy to think for himself, he deserves the label of a potential ‘bad customer’. If a customer is constantly rude to your employees and is deliberately being difficult, they might not be worth keeping. Your employees are also a top priority, and their mental state would make or mar your business. A satisfied employee can help retain more customers, therefore politely let the rude customer go.

In the next blog post, we will be exposing more bad customers that you do not want in your business.
Stay tuned. Share your opinion with us. Thank you