An essential guide to Customer Data

Posted on June 30, 2020 by Paola Magni

Customer data is the key to understand customers beyond the confines of your own strategy, which makes you avoid dangerous assumptions to create relevant products and experiences.

Continuously data analysis will help you to come up with strategies that cover the market’s lacking points and elevate your marketing to a more meaningful approach.

We are witnessing a new customer era. Every company’s engines work daily to think, develop, and incorporate business and marketing strategies that put customers at the center of everything they do.

This new approach does not strike the market as a surprise. For the past years, with so much information in the palm of their hands, customers became more demanding and more willing to connect with brands that make proper use of their information to deliver more than just basic products and services.

If you have been paying attention, you already know customers value experiences more than anything else these days. This means true engagement will only be achieved by a remarkable customer experience that elevates your brand and creates a sense of connection with your audience. However, planning an exceptional customer experience takes a wide understanding and a sharp knowledge of how to solve consumers’ issues.

That is why customer data is definitely here to stay.

What is customer data and why does it matter?

Customer data is all the information a company gets from consumers whenever they interact with it. Whether it is personal, psychological, or demographic, customer data help companies clarify facts and avoid assumptions when thinking and refining business strategies related to customer experience.

The importance of customer data is related to the incessant need to build a strong customer understanding. Many organizations have already noticed that, by using data as a pillar, their operations draw near customer satisfaction and proper marketing approaches that return investments and reduces waste. On the other hand, without concise information about their customer base, companies fail to engage their audience and make sense of the many market opportunities datasets provide.

Customer experiences are tremendously affected by customer data, which means the right data extraction, validation and analysis are crucial to generate accurate outcomes that will enhance marketing and business plans. Customer data matters so many companies have embarked on customer data management (CDM) to correctly address data in their goals and daily work.

With trustworthy data at the palm of your hand, you will feel more confident in tactics to contact, acquire, and retain your customers, keeping their interest, and offering them exceptional engaging interactions. Customer data will also support your financial decisions, assisting you in where and when to allocate your budget.

How is customer data created?

As you read, a massive amount of data is being created. All around the world, people are navigating desktop and mobile devices. It doesn’t matter if they are shopping, replying to an online survey, or filling a lead form to get in touch with a software development company. Each of their digital interactions with brands creates data — which continuously provides the basis for algorithms to produce more data.

According to Deloitte in its Global Marketing Trends 2020 report, 90% of all global data were produced in the last two years, considering more than 26 billion smart devices circulating the globe.

Aware of data potential, the market has amended digital initiatives to maximize data collection, extraction, and validation methods. Big data analytics have been embedded to extract useful information from huge datasets, such as CRMs, that can’t be manually validated. Simultaneously, data scientists have been growing as popular as the need to adopt a data-driven culture.

These market signs alone are an extremely important indication that data is everywhere, and companies that don’t welcome it proactively will be in a tight spot.

Types of Customer Data

Customer data is separated into four main categories. In their own way, these categories will help you enhance the customer experience in different and empowering perspectives.

Personal data

Also known as identity and basic data, this type of information allows customers to be recognized by individual details and is divided into linked and linkable information.

Every information that can be used to identify a person without extra details is linked personal data — full names and emails, for example. Date of birth, physical address, and phone numbers are linked personal data too.

Now, linkable information doesn’t identify on its own. Still, when combined with other pieces of information, it is useful to draw a bigger picture. ZIP codes, age, gender, job titles, education level, marital status, and number of children are examples of linkable personal data.

Interaction data

If you ever wondered how your customers behave on your website, or how they interact with your emails and your social media accounts, interaction data will answer all of your questions.

Sometimes known as engagement data, interaction data brings a meaningful and solid viewpoint of how customers interact with your brand’s touchpoints.

Examples of interaction data are: Time spent on your website, page views, social media engagement, traffic sources, customer service feedback, and paid ad conversions.

Behavioral data

If you want to know how customers respond to experiences with your products and services, pay attention to behavioral data.

This type of data assists you to have a deeper understanding of behavior patterns your customers have throughout the purchase journey. This means interaction data may or not be considered behavioral data — it depends on the big picture and the goals you wish to achieve.

Some examples of behavioral information you can track are: Previous purchases, website heat-maps, customer loyalty program usage, repeated actions related to your products, and CTAs clicked.

Attitudinal data

The fourth and last type of customer data is related to how consumers perceive your brand. Unlike metrics you can easily measure, such as product purchases, click rates, website visits, and social network interactions, attitudinal data refers to emotions and individual opinions. It embraces feelings, which makes them highly subjective — that explains why this type of data is also referred to as qualitative data.

Continuously mining through attitudinal data will get you closer to proactively responding to consumers’ issues and anticipating trends they might be interested in. This is the perfect chance to get to know your consumers’ individual preferences and their point of view towards topics that interest you.

Attitudinal data examples are: Customer lifestyle, motivations, pain points, sentiments, and desirability. Customer reviews are excellent to gauge this sort of information.

Collecting customer data

As we have already emphasized, digital transformation has made every channel a powerful source of customer data. If your customers are interacting with your marketing and shopping channels, you can easily extract customer data from them using Customer Data Platforms (CDP).

There are several ways to collect customer data from distinct data points, and they depend on your goals.

That being said, before jumping to conclusions on which channel is the best to collect data from, make sure you address your data goals first. Is it to accelerate revenue? Develop new products? Get a more precise understanding if you ought to invest in a new marketing campaign? Start with the why, and then move forward.

More than predicting upcoming trends, recall that customer data should be highly attached to things that happened in the past. Past customer sales, buying decision patterns, abandonment rates (and much more) can be extracted from customer data to develop better strategies that respond directly to what your consumers did and said months, weeks, and days ago.

We have compiled some collecting data options ahead.

1. Website Analytics

Web analytics reports are excellent to understand what is resonating with your audience and how they are talking back to you.

When investigating this type of report, remember behavioral data insights can be extracted from heat-maps, bounce rate, page views, and even the devices your target market uses the most.

2. Social media engagement

Social media-based data can tell you a lot of things. Shares, likes, and comments on social media are basic engaging metrics you can measure to understand what customers think about your brand and what type of message they enjoy. You will likely get a good amount of data from social media analytics to make sense of customers’ sentiment towards you.

We highly recommend you to go even further and run social listening while analyzing social media insights. This will guarantee you interpret your customers’ interactions more accurately.

3. Customer interviews and feedback surveys

Feedback is crucial. Whether customers love what you’re doing or criticize it, you need to be available to take their considerations and opinions into account.

When done right, customer interviews, and feedback surveys will gather your audience’s interests, opinions, preferences, and how you can improve your products and services to serve them better.

Another data collection suggestion is to investigate customer churn. This explains the reason why some customers buy from you for a while and then leave. What affected their experience so they felt like not coming back? Is there anything you can do to improve this experience and avoid other customers from turning their backs on you?

If you’re looking for ways to extract behavioral and attitudinal data, consider searching for customer feedback and combine this information with other data to get a bigger picture.

4. Contact information

Contact information is vital to customer data. If you wish to communicate with your consumers, you should know where to find them according to the stage of their journey.

From phones to physical addresses and social media, contact information is needed to build a good amount of personal data you can rely on.

5. Customer service

Customer service is related to feedback but contains high potential itself. It is critical to allow customers to reach out to customer service software enabled to bring useful data your way.

As a consequence, customers can quickly seek help for big and small issues and solve their problems more easily all while providing you with more information.

Validating customer data

As vital as it is, customer data is useful when you are ready to properly extract and validate it. This means you need to find actual helpful information from your data sources, and pull them out to understand how valuable they are. This is what we call data extraction — and it will prevent you from swimming in a random sea of data.

Data extraction uses the right tools to streamline data from customer experience to marketing, and makes sure the information provided is useful for your teams to make better decisions.

To avoid wasting all the money, time, and effort you put into collecting data, there are some essential considerations about customer data validation you should pay attention to:

Customer data must be a source of truth and facts about your audience: Above all things, remember customer data is supposed to assist you in using factual information to come up with fitting solutions. For this reason, the data you extract must be reliable and revolve around your clients. If the data you’re extracting isn’t customer-centric, you better reconsider why it is important.

Customer data must be goal-oriented: Exploring multi-channels to extract data from without a clear goal in mind might lead you to conclusions that don’t make much sense. Make sure you know what your goals are from the beginning and set milestones to measure your progress. This will help you visualize how much data is affecting your operations and what else can be done.

Customer data must be integrated: Thanks to technology, data can now be transferred from one channel to another in a matter of seconds — and that is essential to every company that needs fresh information to anticipate opportunities and maximize their potential. By using customer data integration (CDI) tools, you ensure information gets to the right people and set a pattern to collect, organize, unify, and visualize customer data wholesomely. Best of all, CDI automates these processes and cuts down routines that take time. This means your human resources will have more time to focus on what they’re good at: Finding perfect responses to all the data software and algorithms have extracted and assembled for you.

Customer data must be contextualized: In-house data, also known as first-party data, should be combined with external data to give the information you’re putting your hands in a more precise context. There are two types of external data you can blend with your in-house insights to ensure a broader understanding: second party data and third party data. The second party data is the information provided by another company towards the audience that interests you — this type of data is usually shared between partners. In the meantime, third party data is collected by companies that don’t have a link to customers and sell information to other organizations. These data types can enrich your first-party data and elevate your insights.

Customer Data Analysis

Customer data analysis is crucial to any customer data strategy. Wrong data analysis might cause disconnected and poor responses from brands to erupt and bother customers with interactions they don’t need nor asked for.

As complex as it might sound to gather validated data to be analyzed, some special technologies can help the process be smoother and more efficient. Data mining is one of them. By mixing machine learning, statistics, and artificial intelligence (AI), data mining can analyze loads of data using sharp techniques —and the greatest thing about it is that its analysis is automatic.

Analyzing quantitative data

When it comes to quantitative data, you might come across the need to categorize it according to some classifications and segmentations. Or, perhaps, you will notice it is necessary to relate different data points and comprehend how specific characteristics affect the customer experience. Luckily, data mining provides many programmatic settings that can be adjusted to return the insights you are looking for.

If you’re willing to fragment customers to create more dynamic and creative ads, customer data analysis will help you find segmentation opportunities. If your team needs to associate behavioral patterns to develop a new campaign, customer data analysis will gather helpful information to predict how people will respond to your strategy. The opportunities are countless.

Analyzing qualitative data

On the other side, when we talk about qualitative data, many companies face the challenge of making sense of subjective information, such as sentiment. People’s emotions and feelings vary individually, and being stuck in the middle of so many variations is an uncertain place for your company to be at. If you’re wondering how to absorb valuable insights from this context, we have good news for you: there are ways technology can track important keywords to translate qualitative data into actionable decisions.

When analyzing qualitative data, pay attention to patterns that might make the situation clearer. Are your customers using the same keywords when they give feedback? Are the stories they tell somehow similar? Are there common elements in the ideas they communicate that can help you create a further sense of how they feel about your brand?

Take advantage of what customers say to you in feedback interviews, surveys, and methods of the sort, to gather enough data and take action.

Benefits of Customer Data Analysis

Relying on customer data will benefit you in countless ways. To help you understand how, we’ve listed some benefits in-detail right ahead:

1. Segmentation

Segmenting your customers is a smart way to get a broader view of what their issues are and how you can reach out to them more effectively. Separating them by age, demographics, gender, job title, and more makes it easier to plan specific marketing campaigns that will straightforwardly attract them, whether your goal is to attract them, engage them or make them buy more.

2. Personalization

People no longer wish to be contacted with general messages that lack a personal touch. Customer experience is a synonym of personalization and, if you don’t use data-based strategies to customize interactions with your consumers, it is highly likely that they will get frustrated by irrelevant content and mass communication. In contrast, personalization increases service quality and customer satisfaction.

3. Deeper audience understanding

Data is becoming the centerpiece of companies that desire is to remain relevant in customers’ minds. This happens because, without a detailed and precise understanding of their audience, companies will hardly add value to their customer base.

Customer data is the key to understand customers beyond the confines of your own strategy, which makes you avoid dangerous assumptions to create relevant products and experiences. Continuously data analysis will help you to come up with solutions around creative, data, and media — the right combination to empower your marketing and business approaches.

4. Revenue

When used correctly, customer data helps you understand how to increase your consumers’ loyalty and lifetime value, reducing churn at the same time. It also gives you a better understanding of where to invest in valuable campaigns and trends that will bring you more ROI.

5. Humanization

Human connection isn’t just another trend. The fact customers need to embrace companies with a purpose is changing their relationships with brands. People don’t want to be treated as a transaction. On the contrary, they expect companies to act authentically and be transparent in what they believe in, treating them individually. Pulling the right customer data contributes to humanize your brand so it corresponds to these expectations. It also frees your team to have more time to focus on how to genuinely engage customers.

Data-base your decisions

Now that you’ve come to the end of this article, you know there isn’t space for assumptions to guide your brand’s decisions anymore. More than ever, new ideas and improvements need to connect with customers’ expectations. In this context, embracing the right technologies to collect, extract, validate, and analyze data is crucial.

To find out more advantages that the use of Customer Data can provide for your company, contact one of our consultants, and resolve any doubts on the subject.

9 reasons why you should start doing it

Posted on June 17, 2020 by Arena

Being all ears to your customers has amazing benefits. It increases customer acquisition and makes them brand loyal. It also improves branding strategies and gives you powerful insights about your industry, connecting you to new market opportunities.

If you don’t want to miss out on these benefits, you better start embracing social listening.

Reputation is critical to any company that is willing to increase customer loyalty and build confidence in the market. With the many digital channels that allow conversations between customers and brands, organizations from the B2C and B2B sectors work hard to be positively recognized by potential and current clients. One efficient way of generating awareness is to have a strong social media presence and reach out to customers with helpful and engaging interactions.

Still, these interactions can only be valuable if brands are ready to actively listen instead of guessing what people want.

When customers talk to you, whether they’re feeling good or bad about your brand, they expect you to talk back accurately. The last thing you want is to make them feel like you don’t care about what they have to say – or that you’re not making any effort to understand what they mean.

And that is why you should start using social listening.

What is social listening?

Social listening is the act of monitoring your brand’s social media accounts and channels to search for customer feedback and give appropriate responses.

In order to social listen, you firstly need to track your brand’s mentions and discussions, which can be done by social media monitoring tools. Only then, you’ll manage to do its core task: analyze conversations’ context to make better and more proactive communication decisions.

Think about an ordinary conversation. When someone talks to you, you listen before replying, right? You do that because you know dialogues and interactions won’t make sense unless you assimilate what’s being stated. When it comes to brands and consumers communicating with each other, the line of thought is the same.

By being an active social listener, you’ll be able to reply to some very important questions: Why are people talking about you? Where and how are they doing it? What do they truly want? How can you connect with them?

These questions can lead to a powerful understanding of how to improve content for your customers, create better relationships with your followers, and increase consumer satisfaction.

We separate social listening into four important actions: find, listen, understand, and take action.

By finding, you monitor and track the right places and discussions that gravitate around your brand.
By listening, you pay attention to what is being said.
By understanding, you address issues that are being presented and collect important feedback.
By taking action, you work on solutions that will remedy the situation and make your customers happier.

Practice makes perfect, so make sure you find, listen, understand, and take action continuously.

Why is social listening important?

When customers talk, they’re doing an amazing job for you. Their feedback lets you know what you should keep and what you should change in your business. If you listen clearly to consumers and give them what they need in return, they will remember you for solving their problems. Now, try ignoring customers to see how bad it can get. An unresponsive customer service approach will cost you a high number of consumers that will never do business with your brand again.

A bad brand reputation can be a way to downfall, and we are not exaggerating. Remember what happened to Kodak? It once led the photographic film market but failed to understand people were growing more and more fond of digital photography and went bankrupt.

We have to emphasize that customer-centric cultures have never been so popular. By putting customers at the center of everything they do, these cultures put efforts into anticipating consumers’ needs and creating proactive strategies to give them what they want: new products, services, loyalty programs, and much more.

Information is everywhere and anywhere and it’s vital to track your brand’s social media to try and be wary of what people are saying about and to you. And that is the very least.

9 reasons why you should use social listening

Ahead, we give you detailed reasons why you should embrace social listening to proactively respond to your followers and consumers.

1. Customers expect you to speak out accordingly

Responsiveness is very important, as your audience expects you to speak out when relevant discussions and events take place. In 2018, a survey made by Clutch discovered that 76% of people expect brands to reply on social media. When we talk about millennials, 80% of takers expect brands to reply and 90% want to get an answer on the same day.

However, recall that an inappropriate response will only frustrate your customers, no matter how fast you’re able to reply.

If you want to make your clients brand loyal and boost customer retention, you better start replying accordingly to what they say — and, by accordingly, we mean you have to thoughtfully understand your customers’ issues to shape valuable responses. Keep this in mind: replying is good, but replying accordingly is what social listening is all about.

2. Have a better understanding of your audience

One of the many reasons organizations keep clear interactions with consumers is to generate and gather high-perspective data that maps their concerns and issues. Social listening will guide you to big pictures that exemplify your consumers’ concerns and how you can act on them.

Combined with the need to have a better audience understanding, social listening offers fresh data to get audience insights related to the public perception of your brand, from competitive analysis — whether in brand or product level — to how marketing campaigns resonate.

By social listening, you can identify demographics, preferences, and customer behaviors as much as the general sentiment about your brand. Once you have tangible reports, you can analyze qualitative data and leverage it to grow your brand strategy and take action.

We will sound obvious, but it’s true: your social listening data will only be valuable if you know what to do with it. For this reason, it is essential to set up a frequency to investigate the information you’re getting and think about how you’ll keep track of the results from time to time.

3. Monitor new industry opportunities

Is there anything that’s trending in your industry that you should know? Any social issue related to your brand that needs to be addressed? Any gap in your sector that people are talking about? Any questions from customers that you can answer better than your competitors? Social listening can help you find the answers to these questions.

By tracking industry buzzwords and trends, social listening will bring you precious insights about your area of expertise and shed light on discussions that can be amazing opportunities for your brand. That is an efficient way to keep a hear out for market trends, discover what’s lacking in your industry and what you can do to innovate and attract more customers.

4. Keep track of your brand’s health

Social listening is an effective way of developing better elements that shape your brand in customers’ minds. As soon as you continuously keep track of what people say on the internet, you’re able to make sense of what and how users would like your brand to communicate. Attentively listening to consumers’ feedback is essential to come up with interesting brand strategies.

Social listening is also an excellent way of providing constant investigation towards bad reviews and comments that can affect your brand negatively. Never forget that anything can go viral on social media. Unhappy customers and displeased staff members know they can freely express themselves on online networks and be heard. Social channels empower their voices and reach people who might be going through the same issues. With that in mind, it is completely possible that a single complaint could be reinforced by others and create unwanted attention.

Being ready to address brand disasters and manage a crisis isn’t overreacting in this fast-paced environment we call the internet — and, trust us, you’ll be glad to have the right tools and tactics to deal with harmful posts and remedy the damage.

It’s true that you won’t be able to control everything people say about your brand, but you can control how you react to it and mitigate the negative impact. Learn with your previous experiences and prepare not to just reply to undesirable controversy, but to avoid it before it happens. For example, if your launch sales were affected because your website was down, you better start looking for infrastructure tests that will strengthen your website and avoid outages.

5. Increase customer acquisition

Another reason you should embrace social listening is that data provided by it will lead you to create content people care about. When you start shaping your content to followers’ preferences, chances are you’ll attract more users that connect with you and have a genuine interest in what you have to say.

You already know it — expressing your brand message in social media through responses, hashtags, live streaming, and more, calls the attention of content viewers and make it easier for you to convert them into leads. This works better than driving traffic through ads to people who have never heard of you before.

Pay attention to what audiences are looking for and what type of content they enjoy viewing and sharing. Photos, videos, mentions, polls… All of these are instruments you can use to increase customer acquisition smartly and more humanly.

Quick example: Netflix is one of the top-references for brands that want to stand out on social media and attract public attention. With unique humor, Netflix memes its own shows, retweets Netflix-related posts made by followers, and replies with a tone its audience can positively connect with.

6. Keep old customers engaged

It is quite simple to understand how social listening can help you maintain old customers engaged and retained. If you ignore what consumers say when they reach out to you, it shows you don’t care about their experiences. By neglecting them, you’re paving the way for your customers to switch for competitors that are ready to offer valuable interactions.

Recall that many consumers’ stories are being told on social media, especially those where customers need your support. It isn’t unusual for clients to reach out to brands on Twitter or Instagram to get an issue addressed. Actually, they message and mention your brand on those channels because they expect you to reply and solve their problems quickly. No one has the time and patience it takes to hang on the line anymore. The good news is that social listening can absolutely help you to excel at fast, assertive support, and keep old customers engaged.

Engaged customers are more likely to be brand loyal, especially when you can keep meaningful interactions going on and offer them what quench their thirst for information, interactivity, and good customer experience.

7. Address common issues

If the same questions are made by your customers over and over, how can you make it easier for them to find the answer? If a considerable number of buyers are complaining about the same products, how can you give them a detailed, honest assessment of the problem? These are more questions you can wisely reply to by social listening.

If the big picture tells you your customers have the same common issues, maybe it is time to find out how to solve those issues and respond effectively to them.

Monitoring social media accounts to find these types of problems can make you arrive earlier in the game to prevent more consumers from being affected and provide the right solution to solve the issues of those who have already reached out for support.

8. Get quick feedback

From knowing how you can improve your products to where your audience is willing to communicate with you, feedback can give you constructive criticism about mostly anything.

Launched a new product? Want to know how your brand positioning is doing? Have doubts if the last live event you promoted is matching your followers’ expectations? What people post on social media will certainly help you get a clear idea about those, and more.

Plus, if customers are talking about something that’s not working, you should be the first to know. Make sure to take their considerations into account and acknowledge their feedback, then start working on what will fix the problem. A new feature? A new product? A new campaign? Getting feedback — and, most importantly, fast feedback — will help you find your consumers’ pain points and understand how to solve them.

Quick example: Starbucks recently released an open letter based on a user’s negative feedback regarding the Black Lives Matter movement. After social listening to the critique, Starbucks used a respectful tone and gave an immediate solution to what the customer was talking about, showing how its employees can now support the movements while working.

Don’t forget that positive feedback is important too. If customers love a campaign or the tone you’re using to reply to them, make sure you get it to generate more content that will match their preferences.

9. Identify influencers and user-generated content

You won’t be surprised by the fact social networks are full of potential influencers that can help you promote your brand — or threat it. Remember that even people who only had good experiences with your brand can be influenced if someone important they follow feels bad about you (and good about your competitors).

Another social listening advantage is that it allows you to track user-generated content to keep your followers updated. Being continuously connected to monitor what digital influencers say and do will lead you to understand who you can partner with. Search for hashtags, keywords, accounts, and more to keep your brand aware of what’s going on in real-time. You can also start mapping people who your audience connects with and listen to what they say so you don’t miss out on collaboration opportunities.

The role of social listening on live streaming

It’s no secret to you that people love when you go live and cover news and events as they happen. Live streaming has become extremely popular in the last years and it is a gold mine for brands that want to keep relevant by connecting with customers in real-time. The spectator customer profile is being replaced by the active customer, who wants to join brands in emotional and thrilling experiences.

But how do live events and streaming connect with social listening? Well, social listening is a powerful tool when it comes to combining the right strategies to go live.

From sports games to elections, live streams are effective event coverage mechanisms that allow customers to participate in what’s going on even if they’re far away. Meanwhile, social listening uses social streams to monitor and interpret the viewers’ behavior and comments to get insights.

When done right, social listening can be unbeatable in content creation. The reason why is that live streaming gives you engaging methods, such as live discussions and Q&As, that will transform into data — and, as you know, social listening will turn data into action.

At Arena, we recognize the power of social listening in social streams and event monitoring.

Our social monitoring stream tool publishes content from different sources automatically or manually and provides results coming in real-time. You can adapt filters and search parameters to improve results and post the freshest content to engage your audience. Besides, our social stream feature easily integrates your search stream with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and more personalized RSS feeds.

[Real case example]

Grow your brand by social listening

We’re a bit biased, it’s true, but Arena is ready to empower companies to grow their audience in their websites by creating meaningful live experiences.

So, if you’re considering having a social monitoring stream and finding interactive ways to get in touch with your followers, we recommend you keep an eye on ongoing discussions related to your brand and make your own website the go-to place for relevant, instantaneous content.

It’s easier to be an authority in your field when you’re able to mix different sources and formats automatically into your website, all while providing your customer with an exclusive space for debating and chatting. Fortunately, we have the perfect tool that will do that for you.

A live blog will give your brand the chance to use a smart variety of tools to cover a particular event and engage users that are watching remotely.

By using it, you can publish news to your website as they happen, all while adding users’ reactions from social media and witnessing in-progress-discussions on live chats. Our tool is highly customizable and handles in-feed comments, connects with your video platform, creates polls, and posts social content that engages and keeps your followers updated.

Join us and be able to:

Increase time spent on your website
Let users engage with your posts
Automate content distribution
Cover field events that matter to your customers

From bloggers to large enterprises, from Oscars to Super Bowl, Arena is ideal to manage any type of live experience and to help you grow your brand by social listening.

Want to capture audience attention and feed your followers with fresh content at all times? Learn more about the subject in our Live Blog article!

Listen to your audience – and take back its ownership

When talking to your spectators and customers, you assume they’ll talk back to you. This dialog and communication are what, for the most part, define audience engagement.

In general, the question “what is audience engagement” has many different answers, but all of them will lead to the same essence. Keep reading to learn our Ultimate Guide to Audience Engagement.

Complete guide to Customer Experience

Posted on June 15, 2020 by Paola Magni

Customer experience is one of the new frontiers of marketing. Customers, in the market powered by industry 4.0, are more interested in the experience than in the product itself. In fact, according to a research held by Momentum Worldwide in 2019, 76% of the participants declared to prefer experiences over things.

This is closer to our own lives than you might think. Have you ever felt so well treated by a company that you eventually became their client for life? Or that a salesperson seemed to know your needs so well that you made an impulse purchase right on the spot?

On the other hand, have you ever found it so hard to navigate a website that you couldn’t find or buy what you wanted? Or had to wait so long for technical support on a product or service you bought that you never used that company again, nor recommended it to anyone?

All of those situations have to do with the same business aspect: Customer Experience. Miles away from that simple and old idea of mere customer service, it is one of the biggest marketing trends today. And it involves reconfiguring your whole business around the idea of providing a customer with what he wants and needs, before he or she even knows they might need it.

Want to know more of how that works? Don’t worry, we got a simple and complete guide to help you improve your “CX” in no time.

What is Customer Experience and why is it important?

Customer Experience, also known as CX, is the summary of every physical or virtual interaction a customer has with your business. It is the sum of what defines his or her perception of your brand, starting from the very first contact up to their level of satisfaction at the end of their experience.

Simply put, CX is one of the most fundamental parts of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) because it is what will decide if any individual that comes in contact with your business will become a repeat and loyal customer.

From your website usability to how your employee treated them, and how satisfied they were with your product, every piece of the puzzle will define how happy your brand made them – and, most importantly, if they are willing to come back.

In addition, a happy customer is not only a loyal one. Oracle conducted a global study in which 74% of senior executives stated a good experience will make customers become advocates for your business.

Not only will they come back, but they will talk about you with their friends, family, coworkers. They will recommend you, defend you, and bring you new business. They will become your marketing tool.

The importance of CX can be summed up in a simple idea: without customers, you don’t have a business. And an American Express research found that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience. This is why your main focus should be on investing in that experience, so you retain the ones you have, while also attracting new ones.

Why should your business focus on CX?

In an ever more scattered and competitive market, Customer Experience is set to be the defining factor that makes someone opt for your brand, and not another. A third of customers will quit buying from a business after their first bad experience. On the other hand, half of them are likely to splurge on an impulse purchase if they receive a personalized treatment from an employee, or even an online interface.

And if a customer rates your company 10/10 on a satisfaction level, he or she will probably spend more than twice as much on your brand. Their loyalty may last for over five years. When you are happy with a product or a service, you don’t quit them.

Talking in money figures, according to a study by the Temkin Group, businesses that make US$1 billion a year can increase that number by US$ 700 million in three years, simply by investing in CX. The reason is, by doing that, they attain higher customer satisfaction rates, reduced customer churn and, consequently, increased revenues.

If you want to make that kind of money, that means you cannot ignore your customer needs, their emails, feedback, queries, and expectations. You have to listen, understand, and act based on what they tell you.

That is why a Bloomberg Businessweek survey revealed that great customer experience is a top strategic objective right now for any kind of company. It is the most effective way to beat your competitors, and get your customer to not only come back and spend more, but to become your marketing tool, through word-of-mouth, positive online reviews, and recommendations to their friends and acquaintances.

Is customer experience the same thing as customer service?

Absolutely not! Customer service is when a potential client interacts with one of your employees, in a store, online, or on the phone, for example. And that is just one part of the customer experience.

If you go to a restaurant, and your order is served quickly, and tastes delicious, that is good customer service. But if you become a regular at that particular restaurant, the chef knows that you are allergic to onions, and does not use them in your food without you even having to ask, that is great customer service.

Because that is the heart, the central element, of CX: seeing and treating your customer as a human, an individual, and not a simple source of money. Customer experience is all about providing a human and authentic connection, one that does not feel run-of-the-mill, nor a script from a production line. It feels unique and personal.

Technology today, such as a CRM software, has made it possible for that individual experience to be executed in many different ways. Predicting future purchases and needs based on the customer’s history, or delivering targeted email marketing campaigns are good examples. However, it is still about seeing each one of them as an individual, listening to them, and anticipating their expectations and needs.

That does not mean customer service is not important. On the contrary. Providing assistance, answering every email, complaint, or question – and quickly – is more imperative than ever. But that is only one part of your customer experience, that has to start positively from the homepage of your website and last long after a purchase is made.

What makes for a good customer experience?

Exactly because good CX must feel personal and unique, there are no automatic formulas or guaranteed recipes. The one key element that is at the beginning of every good customer experience is: listen.

Know how to listen

Listening to what your customers are saying to your business, and about your business, must be your top priority. Every feedback, email, technical support call, or online review must not only be dealt with quickly, but also used as raw material to create a strategy in reducing friction and providing better and more personalized service for your customers.

Have a good system

In order to do that, a system that puts all that feedback and information together, and analyzes it, is essential. The logic is simple: create channels that make it possible for your customer to tell you what he/she wants, likes, or does not like, acknowledge and understand their demands; then act on them.

If you are not doing that, the alternative result is quite clear. Your complaint and purchase lines are clogged, and your customer is frustrated with long waiting times – which is the number one cause of bad customer experience.

The dialogue does not flow organically because your employee does not understand what your customer needs – which may make your employee’s frustration come off as rude or angry. Consequently, your client support is left with many unresolved issues and complaints. And your customer is dissatisfied with automated responses, and the lack of a personal, human, component. Those are all the roots of bad, or terrible, CX.

Mock up your typical consumer

Know, though, that it’s not easy. Most companies still don’t provide good or excellent customer service. In order to change that, your CX policy must come from the top of the chain, expressed in clear and public guidelines, available and known by everyone in your business.

For example, create personas, so your employees know whom they will be dealing with. Provide training for those same workers. And listen to their feedback, too. They are the ones on the frontline, so they are in an ideal position to see and feel what your company might be doing right or wrong – and how to improve it.

Always ask questions

Finally, never hesitate to ask questions. Use your chat platforms to better know your customers and their current experience with your brand. Follow those conversations up with emails. If necessary, outbound calls are not off the table.

And remember: it’s all about empathy. Emotions play a huge part in customer experience. It is precisely the emotions that will determine if your customer wants to remain in business with you or not.

But how do I measure if all of this is working?

Measuring and analyzing is one of the most challenging parts of customer experience. That is why a number of different metrics and tools were created to assess the quality level of CX in a particular company.

With them, it is possible to evaluate the effectiveness of specific strategies, as well as how they improve or not the customer’s perception of, and relationship with, your brand. The four CX measuring tools that are most used in the market today are listed in the following topics.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

It measures how easy, or difficult, a consumer’s experience with one of your products or services was. Here’s how it works: a customer made a purchase on your website, for example, and you wish to know how easy it was for him or her to navigate the e-commerce platform.

So you send a CES survey after they are finished, asking questions like “How easy was it to complete your online purchase”, or “to navigate our website”, with a rating scale from ‘1: very difficult’ to ‘7: very easy’. Pretty straightforward.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

We all have answered a Net Promoter Score survey before. It measures a customer’s loyalty score, by asking a variation of the “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?” question.

In addition to being very simple and straightforward, that numerical score is a quite good assessment of customer experience. That is why the metric, created by Rob Markey and Fred Reichheld at Bain and Company, is favored by many boards and executive committees, being one of the most used by businesses in the world today.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

While Net Promoter Score evaluates the satisfaction with the whole brand, CSAT surveys the customer’s experience with a specific product or service. The metric system, though, is pretty much the same, usually providing a scale from 1 to 5 or 7 – where 1 is very unsatisfied, and 5/7 is very satisfied. A yes or no answer may also be used, however.

Due to its specificity, and for how it makes possible to analyze each different point in the customer experience chain separately, most CX leaders in the world choose CSAT as their top metric.

Time to resolution (TTR)

One of the main sources of customer frustration, and bad experience, is waiting a long time to get a response. For that reason, TTR is a very important metric. It measures, in average, how long it takes for a customer’s issue or ticket to be solved by a company’s brand after it’s been open.

The result may be provided in days or business hours, being the product of the whole sum of time spent in resolution divided by how many tickets and issues were solved. The logic here is pretty obvious: shorten your TTR as much as possible, if you want to increase the likability of having return business from a customer.

CX trends

Good Customer Experience results all over the world have come from companies who have been following a certain set of practices. The first one is that they are customer-centric, instead of profit-centric.

That means their top priority is providing an outstanding experience, focusing more on retaining and satisfying their current customers than on attracting new ones at any cost. Second is that good CX usually comes from old school methods. Yes, again: human interaction.

Companies that privilege one-on-one personal conversations over chatbots, market research (such as customer calls) over predictive analytics and social media, as well as investing in talent on board, often present the best customer experience results. It is not about being state of the art, or overtly technological, but about the willingness to provide good, satisfying service.

Number 3 is something we have already said, but can never overstate: these companies are listening. The base for their CX strategies is the feedback from their customers. Not only they collect it, but they have put systems in place to properly analyze it, and turn the conclusions into action.

Next, they acknowledged the importance of their employees in implementing good customer experience. Not only did they provide specific and individual training, based on different departments’ and workers’ needs, but they also got all their workforce involved in their CX strategy effort.

Finally, no matter how well they are doing, Customer Experience leaders in the globe keep increasing their investment on CX initiatives.

So, how do I Improve my CX strategy?

A good CX strategy consists of guidelines and actions that start from the very top and involve the whole company. It must be assimilated by every employee because to a greater or lesser extent, they will all eventually play a role in the customer’s experience of your brand.

These guidelines and actions must come from a very simple customer-centric principle: make your employees understand they should treat a customer the same way they would like to be treated by any business.

In order to do that, make your customer feedback – that same one you already collected and properly analyzed – available for everyone in your team. Let them see and know how they can improve those experiences you have surveyed.

And that is ever more effective the sooner it starts. Your workers should be informed of your customer policy as soon as they are hired. And through training and support, they must be updated and refreshed on those practices as often as possible.

There are two powerful tools that you can incorporate to your strategy and will make your brand step up its game regarding customer experience. We are talking about live blogs and live chats.

Live chats

Most companies use live chats as a customer service channel. But did you know it is also possible to use this tool to generate an experience for our consumer?

Some platforms, such as Arena, allow you to create live group chats. This means your audience will be able to comment on your event, exchange impressions and also very valuable information.

Depending on the profile of your audience, you can promote this space as a powerful networking opportunity for them to connect with people who have similar interests and valuable contributions for them both personally and professionally.

On the other hand, you, as a brand, will receive immediate feedback from your customers. This will allow you to know exactly what they like and dislike, which gives you the opportunity to redefine your course of action immediately. As a consequence, you will offer an even better experience to your audience, making them loyal to your brand and the content you produce.

This is customer experience to its core, generating true value for your public and allowing your brand to be a vector for meaningful relationships.

Live blogging

Live blogging is a new approach to content marketing. As the name suggests, these are platforms that allow you to create content as a particular event or set of events unfold. It gives your audience (or public, as you might want to call) a chance to have access to things they otherwise wouldn’t.

There are basically two ways in which you can use live blogging. The first one is to provide a full coverage of an event. This means that people who haven’t been able to attend feel like they are actually participating. Big tech events make full use of this technology for this kind of use.

The second way in which you can benefit from live blogging is to broaden your user’s experience. Let’s say, for example, your company is promoting a big event with celebrities and big names of the area.

In this situation, you can use a live blogging strategy to grant access to the backstage or to have specialists commenting on the theme of the event. You can also directly interact with your audience by publishing trivias and reposting what they have been saying about the event online.

Live blogging is a fine way to deliver a greater customer experience to your public. By adopting this technology, you are giving them the opportunity to have access to exclusive content, personalised interaction and relevant content.

Lastly, because it all comes down to this, and you have to remind yourself of that every day, all the time: in order to provide a great customer experience, listen to your customer and their feedback.

Create channels so they can speak to you. Listen to what they want, need, like, and don’t like. Use that in your favor. Engage in the conversation, ask questions, try to understand them better.

In short: see them as human, as an individual, as your business partner. Speak their language, with them, not to them. And be quick. Don’t make them wait. Nobody likes to wait.

If you want to start testing some of the tools that will allow your brand to offer an even better customer experience, here’s what you can do: create an account at Arena and implement our freemium version of the live blog and live chat!