How to deliver better customer experiences with business intelligence

How to deliver better customer experiences with business intelligence

Blog title: How to deliver better customer experiences with business intelligence

Dasha Leijon |February 8 2023 11 min

Much has been written on the positive impact a well-executed customer, patient, or visitor experience initiative can have on your bottom line. And yet many organizations still struggle with how to develop a clear picture of their customer journey that will allow them to devise appropriate customer experience programs that drive growth and revenue.

Sound familiar?

Part of the problem is that organizations have vast amounts of data but lack a centralized location to gather and analyze it in a way that can truly deliver the impact they’re seeking.

Information is siloed by departments or platforms. When coupled with a lack of time and resources, gaining the insights needed to develop winning customer experiences becomes an exercise in futility. And yet “data is emerging as the strategic currency of the digital age,” according to a recent EY report.

That’s where business intelligence comes in.

What is business intelligence, and what role does it play in the customer experience?

Business intelligence is the process of gathering and triaging data to gain insights into where and how you can drive improvements. When applied to the customer experience context, business intelligence refers to the ability to extract insights from customer journey data and analytics to make informed decisions that enhance the customer, patient, or visitor experience.

Through a business intelligence tool, organizations like yours can gain greater visibility into the entire customer journey. It acts as a customer experience control center, providing real-time dashboards and reports that enable you to analyze, score, and monitor the customer experience to pinpoint specific customer journey phases that need to be improved.

You can then identify issues in real-time, prioritize improvements based on the impact of enacting them, and develop a plan for resolving them. For example, say that wait times are impacting your customer, patient, or visitor satisfaction score.

Using business intelligence, you can first look at daily patterns to identify high-traffic days and build your work schedules based on demand. Another option could be to look at individual staff performance to identify training opportunities for those who could perform better.

Aside from providing you with more visibility, business intelligence can also help you track and measure the effectiveness of your solutions in real time. In turn, you can leverage those insights to make informed decisions that drive the needle toward your intended goals and objectives.

How to make business intelligence work for you

Sure, implementing a business intelligence solution can resolve your customer experience challenges by consolidating all your data sources in one place. But for it to be effective, you first need to create a customer journey map, a topic we've covered at length in this blog.

This map is a visual representation of your customer journey. It provides a clear look into how customers move through the journey from when they discover a need to when they become a customer. Check out this blog to get a step-by-step guide for building this map.

Once this visual aid is created, the next step is to collect all the data generated across the touchpoints from prearrival to post-service/product delivery. Knowing how each customer engages your business at each touchpoint and understanding what qualifies as a good or bad experience is key to orchestrating the best possible experience.

This is the point where a business intelligence tool shines. It enables you to understand the KPIs you should establish to succeed by isolating the analytics of each stage in the journey, facilitating data-driven decisions. A platform like Qmatic encapsulates all this information and provides the insights you need in graphical online systems.

Management and staff can then access this information to answer questions such as:

  • The number of customers visiting your location daily
  • The average wait time for key services
  • The demand for specific products or assets, such as waiting rooms, equipment, or lab tests
  • The history of every visitor's interaction with your organization
  • The number of visitors your staff services daily
  • The visitor's experience, feelings, and desires at each touchpoint of the journey

With this information, understanding how to develop the best experiences to drive your specific outcome is much easier. You can delve deep into the customer data and analytics at specific stages of the customer journey, evaluating each piece of information by customer segmentation, staff use, and media content to identify opportunities and operational inefficiencies.

You're no longer operating on assumptions of what your customer wants but instead have concrete data that can enable you to deliver on those expectations. For example, you can use the data to understand how to best train your employees, automate manual workflows and allocate resources better during times of high demand — all of which contribute to positive experiences.

How business intelligence elevates your operations

Data is power. With it, you can devise better strategies that drive ROI, improve the efficiency and productivity of your organization, and give you more insights into your customer's wants and needs. It does this by:

  • Removing silos and unifying your business around a common cause. By housing every interaction under one roof, you can streamline operations across every department, and equip employees to act with clarity and confidence. Staff members can see how their actions impact the bottom line and how they contribute to the organization's goals. This creates a more agile, more engaged workforce that can deliver a consistent experience across the customer journey.
  • Creating a more customer-focused organization. With personalization playing a vital role in the customer experience, having a tool that can give you a deeper understanding of every customer’s motivations across the journey is key. A business intelligence tool collects and aggregates this data, so you know what initiatives to prioritize based on expected outcomes and impacts.
  • Identifying opportunities to enhance and improve productivity. A business intelligence tool is designed to collate data from various sources into a centralized database and produce the analysis of those data points in the best format possible. This intelligence can then be used to create dashboards based on the question you're trying to answer — producing benchmarks and comparisons to help you make data-backed decisions and engineer strategies for future initiatives.
  • Providing clarity into ensuring customer satisfaction. Feedback surveys are an excellent resource for understanding exactly how to improve customer experiences. But they don’t tell the whole story. You also need to have indirect feedback, such as actions taken by the customer throughout the journey, to understand the motivations behind their activities. Business intelligence lets you see both direct and indirect feedback in one place to make the proper correlations between behavior and the intended outcome.

Selecting the right business intelligence solution for you

Several solutions in the market can provide the customer data and analytics you need to develop winning customer experience programs. But most only solve one part of the customer experience puzzle. The solution is to select the technology and vendor provider for your organization that can comprehensively address all your issues under one umbrella.

After all, business intelligence is only helpful if you can see all your data streams in one place. The right partner understands this and will work with you to ensure the solution is configured to meet your specific needs within the context of your organization.

You'll also want to find a vendor with experience in your industry and a solution that combines customer journey analytics and measurement tools under one platform. Bonus point if it also enables you to import data from their system into your favorite business intelligence tools such as Microsoft Power Bi, Tableau, and more. For example, the Qmatic customer journey platform allows you to import its data into your system of choice so that you can visualize data how and where you want.

If you’re interested in learning more about Qmatic’s business intelligence capabilities, connect with a specialist today to get a closer look.

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Dasha Leijon

Dasha Leijon

Product Manager, Business Intelligence

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