How to Use Customer Analytics to Keep Business Running During COVID-19

Introduction

The coronavirus outbreak rapidly escalated hitting businesses hard. Businesses didn’t even have time to manage a crisis plan and hence many were forced to scale back and some to even shutter entirely.

On March 23, nearly 40% of businesses in the U.S. ad intense competition not only from well-established companies but also from other small businesses.

According to a report from the National Federation of Independent Business, more than 76% of small businesses are being negatively impacted by the public health crisis. The ongoing pandemic and resulting lockdown await more clarity on how long the mass lockdowns will last.

This has bought businesses that are small-scale, large-scale, and startups to try to make the most of digital marketing to grow.

In the current crisis, there are several things digitalization is offering businesses that can help them start reworking and reopening. The time for turning risk into opportunity is now but businesses should know what can work in their favor and what does not.

Today, with the ongoing pandemic it has become more crucial than ever to understand customers and establish a relationship.

Understanding customers and reaching out to them in the chaos is a big challenge and customer data can help illuminate the road. It has proved itself effective in the past and will continue to work in the future.

The first step in using customer data to the advantage of the business is to track and evaluate it properly to be worth it in the first place. The next crucial step is to understand how and where to use customer analytics to your advantage.

Tracking Data of the Customer Journey

Successfully utilizing customer analytics begins with identifying what to track and how to track it. Track data throughout the customer journey is crucial as it helps businesses apprehend a complete picture of customers’ needs.

Taking data points from all across the systems is easy but it creates noise and unnecessary work.

The marketing team should note down isolated data points indicating individual victories or failures. This information says a lot about the customer’s overall experience. Furthermore, sticking to one particular data will make the process redundant; hence, it is crucial to collect different types of data.

Data that covers several aspects of customers will become more valuable in different stages of the customer journey.

Onboarding:

This stage is a chance for the business to make a great impression with an efficient process. It is an important metric to track during onboarding this includes things such as time between milestones and adoption.

Adoption:

This stage is also called the growth stage of a customer journey. During this time, the business can keep track of key adoption metrics such as time customers are spending with the product and feature adoption rate.

Renewal:

In this stage, businesses need to prioritize at-risk renewals. It is important to track customer behavior continuously and not just 30-60-90 days before renewal. Customer renewal rates and churn rates are obvious KPI’s here.

Escalation:

In this stage, it is the most important for the business that the customer feels heard. After this, the responsible team should help them find a satisfying solution.

It is also crucial for the team as well as businesses to learn from the experience by tracking data. The data should include all important factors such as to cause of the escalation, any prior warning signs, the process of handling escalation, and why it was successful.

Customer Success is an important aspect of everyone making it a cross-team effort of the whole company and not just of the CS teams.

Tracking crucial data is vital in crafting a successful business strategy for optimizing customer success. However, knowing how to correctly use that data is equally as important.

Using Customer Analytics in Action

Good customer success analytics is the essence of a good strategy because this data can show more than just the customer’s experience. Businesses can use this data to tailor each customer’s success strategy and predict their needs and preferences. Below are some of the actions in which customer analytics can improve drastically:

Onboarding analytics:

It can help businesses identify areas of improvement and use this information to improve processes. This will help optimize the overall onboarding experience.

Adoption analytics:

It can help you to understand which product features are more valuable for which user. This can help you identify different product features and provide them to particular users during onboarding.

Customer Analytics:

It also provides you insights into areas that are not being used by customers. This can help businesses build training programs to promote usage.

Analytics related to renewal and highlighting warning signs can give businesses time to prepare and respond effectively.

Escalation Analytics

It can help businesses achieve a clear understanding of all that is going wrong. So businesses can adjust processes and prevent the issue from arising again.

Customer data must be accessible to all members of a business to guide their decisions from a central location to promote efficiency.

These analytics should always be used for larger strategies within the enterprise and its customer success department. The right customer success solution will allow your businesses to take the most advantage of customer data.

Advanced Technology and Tools for Using Customer Analytics for Websites Effectively

To scale operations, businesses require effective customer success technology to make data-driven decisions. The right solution combine combines analytics with action by giving your team clear next steps concerning a given situation.

Various analytics tools can help businesses with customers’ analytics points, the effectiveness of digital marketing strategy, and the website’s performance. These tools and technology can be leveraged by businesses to gain these insights for growth.

Let’s look at the top five analytics tools:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that provides information about website visitors. Its most basic level shows pages on your website that are performing well in respect of traffic and conversion/channel.

Businesses can use it to check pages that have a high bounce rate. The insight will allow them to optimize them in such a way that visitors stick to the website.

Businesses allow them to create custom goals including a contact form filled, completing registration, buying a product, and others.

Its “Audience” tab can even show the user’s demographics, devices, browsers, age, gender, and other information. The key advantages of it are in-depth insights, visitor’s landing website, converting customers, analyzing basic SEO metrics, tracking campaigns, and setting custom alerts.

Finteza

Finteza provides an advanced web analytics tool that aims to boost your ROI. Businesses can use it to create sales funnels by pages, events, and sources.

Finteza lets you compare the performance of different pages, optimize the conversion rate, and analyze the quality of the traffic. It shows real-time conversion calculations for all sources to give you a more reliable insight.

Finteza can be very useful as it evaluates traffic quality including bot traffic, hackers, and spammers, and notifications during bad traffic.

This will give businesses time to take action and prevent the website from being hacked. It provides a behavioral analysis of individuals which can enable businesses to target each prospect. It also helps businesses check affiliates and add performance to eliminate low-performing sources.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is one of the most powerful self-serve analytics tools for converting and engaging more users. It allows businesses to collect customer and product data to define key business metrics and check the trend over time.

It uses correlation analysis, data science, and look-alike modeling to understand why the user engages, retains, and converts.

By using Mixpanel, businesses can check events, impact on user behavior through features, detailed information about customers, discover if their behaviors correlate with business goals, and impact by setting behavioral triggers.

SEMrush

SEMrush provides analytics reports which can be used to conduct advertising research. It also lets users see competitors and website ranking. It allows the business to discover organic and paid competitors, monitor ad copy and landing pages, and check their best keywords.

SEMrush is unique because it analyzes the performance of the website in organic search, provides insight into your competitors, tracks keyword positions, check the site’s health, and conduct backlink analysis.

Customer analytics is an important component of a successful strategy. It can help the CS team to be more efficient at meeting measurable business outcomes by gathering, analyzing, accessing, and take action on real-time customer data.

This is not just about the numbers but action data based on these numbers. Analytics tools, in this case, can provide a better understanding of customers and strategies that are working in your favor.

This approach to success in times of COVID-19 will be hard as it requires both time and capital. It is expensive to collect a wide range of data that is useful and valuable so companies will seek ways to overcome that cost.

However, this investment will be crucial in the long run. Coming out of the COVID-19 crisis, there will be a frantic appetite for modernization that enables the grabbing of new growth opportunities.

Conclusion:

Nevertheless, the winning companies will be those that successfully managed to keep their relationship with customers. It is an important time for businesses to speed up their productivity and for that, they will require new data. This data will help create strategies that will still help companies to come out of the COVID-19 crisis.