GUIDES
What is a customer insights platform?
Customer Insights Platform
What is a customer insights platform?
In many kinds of customer-facing industries, especially the retail industry, the importance of data collection can be extremely high. Retailers can collect and analyze customer data through the utilization of software and other tools in order to better understand their customers. This can become an overtly challenging task as a business grows; the volume and sources of data increases and there’s more to interpret.
Due to these reasons and others, having some kind of customer insights platform or consumer insights platform to extract customer data could potentially be critical to the retail business industry. These types of platforms (backed by sophisticated software) can play a major role in acquiring consumer insights and analytics, which can contribute to one’s overall understanding of their customers and how they interact with them. Beyond simply understanding customers, retailers could use this software to guide their decision-making process, make predictions, and so on.
Lexer, which is a Customer Data Platform, makes use of data from a variety of customer touchpoints. This data can be collected across platforms and channels, which can then be pieced together to create a holistic, single view of the customer. A customer data platform can play a large role in integrating your existing data in such a way where you can gain access or view a more complete representation of the customer experience.
A platform for customer insights can also be helpful when it comes to organizing and cleansing data by removing duplicated or inconsistent information. Once the data has been aggregated and standardized, it could further assist with identifying not only details about customer profiles, but which details are missing from them. As data pours into the system over time, these details or gaps can be filled to improve the customer profile and, in turn, potentially make predictions more accurate and precise.
Consumer insights examples
There seems to be an endless number of ways in which data can be interpreted and contribute to knowledge about one’s retail audience. Some interesting consumer insights examples concerning what can be derived from such data are often oriented for the future. With artificial intelligence and other metrics, retailers could make much more accurate predictions about consumers and their behavior.
When it comes to customer insights, AI can play a major role. This kind of sophisticated technology can contribute to analyzing the data, identifying patterns, and learning about consumers enough to gain insight into consumer behavior. For example, for a company or business like Microsoft, customer insights could have great influence over the direction of product development, developing services, and so on. For retailers who maintain great dedication to customers and their needs, consumer insights generated through platforms for customer data could be not only extremely beneficial, but potentially crucial for success.
With a customer data platform like Lexer’s, retailers can simplify the collection and analysis of consumer behavior data and more. By integrating every channel, omnichannel analysis could be much more effective. Also, when all of the data is consolidated in one place, customer data can be accessed and activated from any platform.
To put it simply, by using a platform for harvesting consumer data, business owners can become masters of their data and turn it into an enriched single customer view, which is also kept up-to-date. Such a platform has the potential to become an all-in-one hub for insight-driven marketing, sales, and service. This kind of wealth of information can further contribute to more effectively.
Based on these observations, customer insights are, for the most part, extremely important to the success and growth of a retail business. Using a platform to collect and analyze it can be a major component.
Customer service insights
Customer service insights can be especially important to improving the overall customer experience. For these kinds of consumer insights, research into how to elevate customer service efforts could rely heavily in analyzing existing customer service data. A customer data platform often plays a role in this as well, which could make it ideal for retailers looking to transform service from cost-center to profit-center.
A digital customer service solution backed by a customer data platform can enable retailers to provide exceptional service through multiple channels with streamlined workflows, centralized inboxes, straightforward tools for customer feedback collection, and more. By using customer service data insights from individuals behind service requests, retailers can reach the opportunity to more effectively craft tailored experiences for those individual customers. This means more personalized service and communication and giving customers the human-to-human experiences they seek.
By centralizing conversation with customers, it can be easier for customer service representatives to help those with requests in the most effective way possible. Previous chat, text, or calling information can be crucial to understanding a customer’s current concerns, so storing all of this information in one place could make the process of retrieving this data much simpler. Beyond these benefits, enhanced access to this information can further contribute to the development of individualized customer experiences.
Another helpful detail to note about these types of insights is that they can play a major part in the empowerment of customer service team members. Besides having an abundance of information at their fingertips, customer service team members can also provide faster service with the assistance of an intuitive interface. Features like request tags, status updates, task assignment, and up-to-date customer satisfaction figures can all contribute to making a data platform which has the ability to help optimize customer service even more powerful and reliable.
Customer intelligence analytics
In order to gain or develop further customer intelligence, analytics can be very useful resources and strong predictors of traits of customers. Maintaining a customer insights dashboard or data collection platform could make it easier to transform raw data into useful insight based on a single customer view. As retailers accumulate customer data and generate useful insights, their overall intelligence or genuine understanding regarding customers can increase.
On Lexer’s Customer Data Platform, there are tools and team members which can help further boost customer intelligence or IQ with AI-powered predictive analytics, third-party data enrichment, and targeted customer surveys. In an industry like retail where the customer is the main focus of operations, the natural conclusion this leads to is that customer data could be one of the most important aspects of running a successful retail business. Understanding consumers and consumer behavior can require advanced methods of analysis and data collection, which an analytics platform could help perform.
One of the main aspects of a customer data platform could be considered to be its ability to generate or develop a unified single customer view. This is important because it means retailers could be basing decisions and predictions on this capability. Lexer’s Customer Data Platform is actually built specifically for brands and retailers, which could be helpful in terms of understanding customers in the business to consumer sales environment.
Customer intelligence or understanding can often be considered as a factor that could make or break a retail business. Customers are happy when their needs are met, but a retailer must first understand what these needs are if they want to satisfy them. Analytics derived from a platform focused on customer data collection can play a major role in this research and discovery process. The more sources one can obtain this data from, the better.
Top customer data platforms
Now that the importance of customer data platforms is well-pronounced, a natural next step could be inquiry on which customer data platform vendors are the best. There are a variety of traits one could search for while attempting to determine what the top customer data platforms are. The decision to use a specific platform could be a heavy one considering how customer data and customer behavior data can have so much influence over retail businesses in general.
One factor a person in search of a customer data platform may consider is integration. By obtaining data from a variety of sources, platforms, and channels, the overall value and reliability of a customer profile could increase. These varying facets of consumers’ behavior in the retail space can all contribute to a fuller, more complete single customer view. With a single customer view, retailers could be much more effective when it comes to their decision-making, planning, and consumer behavior predictions.
Another aspect of a customer data platform that could be helpful to have is real-time information. The retail industry and customers of retailers or brands are always changing, so working from or relying on static, unchanging information could be detrimental to retailers’ efforts to meet customer needs and create engagement. Lexer’s Customer Data Platform, for example, provides real-time data. Not only does Lexer provide recent data for its calculations and data display, but Lexer also collects this data from a variety of sources.
Having a holistic view of the customer, as well as having a view based on current, up-to-date information, could be an extremely influential and important combination within a customer data platform. This can vary from customer data platform vendor to customer data platform vendor, which means a dedicated amount of research may be helpful when it comes to identifying which one is the best.
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