How to Use Customer Data: A Guide for Customer Success Teams

Create a productive environment for Customer Success team, provide them with necessary customer data.

As customers use your product, they generate data just by going about their daily workflow. And you would be missing out on a huge opportunity if you didn’t capture that data, analyze it, and organize it. Doing so gives you a detailed picture of how customers use your product and interact with your team, making it easier to identify opportunities to enhance the customer experience and improve your product or service. 

By using best practices, you can make the most of all that data being generated every day to provide greater value to your customers. Here’s how to use customer data to deliver a better customer experience.

Collect Customer Data

Gathering data is incredibly valuable for your customer success team, even if it seems like a monumental task. Follow these tips to make sure you’re gathering data in the most effective way:

  • Bring your many data streams together. You need to look at multiple data points because if you limit yourself to only one piece of data, you won’t get full visibility of the customer journey. And that means you could be overlooking key insights that could completely change the game. By pulling data from multiple locations, you can create a contextually relevant picture of your customer.
  • Gather data in one place. Getting a clear idea of a customer’s status can be challenging when you have many data points and many customers. So, make sure you’re making all relevant data easily accessible from one central location. You need the ability to consume data in one place within a single view.
  • Be sure data is actionable. Once you have complete visibility of the right data points, how are you going to use it to decide the best engagement strategy for each customer? You need the ability to gather actionable intelligence, organize it, and examine it carefully, and take action. All the data in the world isn’t useful if you can’t leverage it to make real changes.
  • Evaluate the kinds of data you’re collecting.  You may collect quantifiable data that tells you about the ways customers interact with your product or brand. You could have qualitative data that comes from customer surveys and tells you about their attitude regarding your brand. Or you might collect identity data, which tells you more about who your customers are as people, what they value, and what matters to them. Either way, the data you use should be exact, allowing you to put them to uses such as equations.

So, now you’ve gathered all this data and made sure that it’s the right kind of data. Now, what do you do with it?

How to Use Customer Data: Best Practices

While technology has given customers so many options that companies must become customer-centric in order to remain competitive, having visibility of engagements also gives you many ways to learn about customer’s preferences and anticipate their needs. Here’s how to use customer data to grow deeper, lasting customer relationships:

  • Demonstrate a thorough understanding of your customers’ needs and goals. Showing customers that your company knows their unique, individual preferences demonstrates your commitment to giving them the best experience possible and deepens trust. By centralizing your data and its insights, all of your organization’s teams will have the information they need to provide personalized service to every customer. Customers will appreciate seeing how much your organization takes an active interest in their satisfaction and success.
  • Eradicate customer service barriers. One of the worst barriers to memorable customer service is poor internal communication. Luckily, there’s an easy way to fix this. You can track metrics specific to escalations such as time to close or identify trends in the types of escalations coming through. By collecting and internally sharing this information, your team can flag a customer who may be struggling and reach out. This creates a comprehensive, convenient service and shows the business is really listening to the customer’s needs. Team members will be able to share information, preventing a situation where a customer is frustrated that they are having to explain their goals over and over again. If you improve internal communication to present cohesive engagements, customers will see that your company greatly values their patronage. 
  • Foster long-term relationships. In order to maintain relationships long-term, your enterprise must not only understand customers’ needs and goals during the onboarding period but throughout all stages of the customer journey on an ongoing basis. Collecting data from support tickets, touchpoints, product usage, and Voice of the Customer feedback all offer windows into customers’ evolving needs. Customers will appreciate that your company grows with them and is always looking for new ways to provide value.

Remember, data is incredibly valuable— but only when you can organize it and know how to analyze and apply it. 

Give Your Team the Tools They Need to Use Customer Data

If you need help gathering customer data and leveraging it to deliver a better customer experience, try using a customer success platform. Even if you know how to use customer data, it will be much harder to use it to gain visibility of how customers use your product or identify areas of the customer experience that would benefit from improvement without software. And your data is only valuable if you’re able to act upon it in ways customers will find relevant and helpful.

While you could collect data by hand, it’s monotonous and time-consuming. But the right software will gather data from multiple sources into a centralized location for you. This makes it easy for all members of your team to dive deep into all the information available about a customer. Then, the software can help you identify the actions you need to take based on this data. 

Don’t underutilize your data. Reap its full value and give your customer success team the customer success platform they need to make smarter decisions and optimize the customer experience. 

Totango has all the capabilities you need to analyze your data within one interface and apply it to improving the customer experience. Request a demo or explore Spark to learn how our customer success platform can help you reposition your organization around your customer. 

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