Customer Analytics for Better Business Efficiency and Profit

Customer analytics has gained an astonishing popularity in recent years. It is a smart and new process to making winning strategies for businesses. Customer analytics is a process in which customer data is collected and analyzed to learn about the customer’s lifestyle and behavior and preferences. This tactic is used to make strategic decisions by the giant brands. This system also form automated and tailored purchasing recommendations.

Organizations use customer analytics to evaluate how their businesses are performing.

With high-speed internet facilities, the tech-savvy customers of today can access to information anytime, anywhere. They are well-informed about the online stores and how to purchase things online. This makes it crucial for the brands to follow the visions of the customers dealing with the brand, so they can offer the perfect option or solution to the customer.

According to recent statistics by McKinsey, the companies that widely use the brilliant approach of customer analytics are reporting 115% higher ROI and the profits are 93% higher.

Ways to Collect and Store Customer Analytics Data

There are different ways to collect the customer’s data and store for future strategic analysis. Some of that are mentioned below:

Data collection

There is a diverse range of marketing tools that businesses can use for collect data and online behavior of the target audience. HubSpot, Google Analytics, Mailchimp are some of the most popular and easy-to-use tools that help in tracking the behavior and collecting the data related to the website visitors.

Data sorting

The next step is to sort the collected data and forward it to the right place for analysis. Customer data platforms (CDP), such as Segment can be used for this process. CDPs work like a traffic director of the collected data.

These platforms are designed in such a way that it can connect multiple tools together. They also help ensuring the collected data is standardized across the organization. Standardized data is way easier to sort and scrutinize if controlled by a tracking plan, in comparison to the unstructured data.

Storing the Data

The next step is to store the data sorted out by the CDP. The standardized data is then send to data warehouses, which are also equally essential to customer analytics. Data warehouses collect and store data from sources such as app, website, email, and cloud-based platforms. Currently, the most popular data warehouse is Redshift followed by Postgres and BigQuery.

Data analysis

This is the last step of the customer analytics process. For analyzing the customer data, businesses rely on business intelligence tools such as Tableau, Mode Analytics, and Looker. However, such applications require technical expertise to operate. 

Leveraging Benefits from Customer analytics

Customer analytics tools are extensively being integrated by the businesses because of its unparalleled benefits in growth.

Short-term benefits of customer analytics include:

• Getting insights into the customer journeys and behavior
• Categorizing customers on the basis of similar patterns of behavior patterns
• Growing rates of conversion

Customer analytics system has mid-term benefits too. They are:

• Decreasing the marketing campaigns expenses
• Starting targeted and personalized communication with the consumer
• Predicting sales.

Long-term benefits of the process integration include:

• Building more personalized and on-time marketing promotions.
• Developing customer gratification
• Growing loyalty and retention of the customer
• Optimizing product portfolio to suit the changing needs of consumer

Most businesses are focusing on leveraging benefits of the integrated customer analytics by collecting different types of customer’s data with the help of multiple social media and online channels.

In the retail industry, businesses access and analyze their customer’s data in order to reorganize retail management which often occurs in worker evaluations and vibrant scheduling procedures. These retail companies evaluate their workers by comparing daily sales to daily traffic in a store with the help of customer analytics.

Impact of COVID-19 on the Industry

The coronavirus outbreak has changed the way of living. People have become used to the new normal of online shopping and work from home culture. The high-speed internet and comfort of online purchasing has impacted the global customer analytics market in a positive way.

Because of the lockdown and other restrictions and precautions to fight the novel virus has drastically impacted the retail industry. According to a data published by Amperity, one of the significant market players in the retail and consumer analytics segment, the demand for 100 retail brands in the U.S. has decreased by an estimated 90.0% during the lockdown. On the other hand, the demand for online shopping has increased during this period which has benefitted the customer analytics market.

About the Author(s)

Princy A. J

Princy holds a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the prestigious Tamil Nadu Dr. M.G.R. University at Chennai, India. After a successful academic record, she pursued her passion for writing. A thorough professional and enthusiastic writer, she enjoys writing on various categories and advancements in the global industries. She plays an instrumental role in writing about current updates, news, blogs, and trends.