3-minute read

Real-time analytics are like same-day delivery: You get what you want right away, without any of the complications and frustrations that come with waiting. They’re the ideal raw materials for crafting superior customer experiences, as they have a freshness and context missing from other, non-real-time, forms of data.

Making real differences with real-time analytics

Let’s say you run an online store. With real-time analytics on orders, page views, customer location and customer service interactions, you can see not only what a did shopper in the past, but what they are doing at that moment. This stream of real-time information, which could be encapsulated in a customized dashboard, gives you a more contextual and nuanced view of their activities than you would get from historical data alone.

These analytics in turn fuel positive, personalized experiences. A 2017 Forrester Consulting survey found that 90 percent of CX decision makers felt they could deliver a more personal experiences with integrated platforms enabling a 360-degree view of every customer. Respondents also cited real-time visibility as one of the top five requirements for gaining value from their customer data.

By enacting a data strategy that ensures your team’s ability to gather, analyze, and act on all of this information as it comes in, you can benefit customers, as well as the agents who serve them. The latter get instant, reliable access to actionable insights, without needing to go back and forth between applications or outdated spreadsheets. Meanwhile, customers themselves will see the difference in everything from more attentive assistance to more reliable order fulfillment and returns.

The power of real-time analytics to reshape customer experiences

For customers, a personalized experience will be a more important brand differentiator than price or product. Meeting these high expectations for a personal touch – knowing what happened in your last customer service inquiry, recommending relevant products based on history, and so on – requires connecting a lot of informational dots, a process that’s much easier when you have a constant flow of real-time insights.

The successful implementation and utilization of real-time analytics leads to a domino effect on the customer experience. It starts with the improved internal workflows we looked at earlier and ends with tangible results in hitting your KPIs for retention, loyalty, and revenue. Along the way, the use of real-time data delivers many benefits that customers can see.

Personalize the experience and get closer to the segment of one

One size doesn’t fit all. Let’s go back to that hypothetical online store. It’s a near certainty that shoppers who see the same set of “you might also like” product selections, regardless of what they bought before, would feel like you weren’t paying attention to preferences and were wasting their time. Not having real-time data on their behavior can have a similar dampening effect, since they might see stale recommendations based on past activity with no resemblance to their more recent habits.

Real-time marketing to wow the customer

The ongoing growth of ad tech spending shows one route companies are taking to make sure they personalize as many interactions as possible. This increased use of real-time marketing (RTM) helps present opportunities in advertisements, social media channels, and website content. A GolinHarris study found that RTM often has a positive effect on brand sentiment and word-of-mouth, showing how it can make customers feel better about an organization as the result of a personal touch backed by real-time analytics on their activities.

Leverage your dark data to provide real value

Beyond RTM, the channeling of dark data – i.e., useful information that previously sat unused in company databases – into real-time analytics can also help with putting together a complete picture of where customers have been and where they’re going. It’s not just a matter of gaining more visibility into their purchase histories; you can also get a better sense of which channels they prefer, how they’ve contacted you before, and where you should focus your personalization efforts with them going forward.

There’s no shortage of ways for customers to get in touch with your organization. The key question is how you synthesize the data from these touchpoints into a consistent engagement strategy.

Real-time analytics provides a better context , and increase the chances of a successful journey, no matter the touchpoints involved. Associated with a CRM solution , real time analytics creates exponential value with insights actionable by Sales user. It creates relevance and increase the touchpoint efficiency. It can draw upon both real-time operational data and historical information, giving agents a holistic up-to-date view of the customer. With this set of data at their fingertips, teams can more easily personalize their interactions over the phone, in person or through chat.

The integration of real-time analytics unlock new uses cases in CRMs solutions, making them more effective in responding to complex customer interactions. Since data is available from multiple sources in real time, it’s easier to handle situations such as someone placing a preorder in a brick-and-mortar store but then modifying it over chat at a later date.

These benefits and many more frequently translate into higher customer retention rates and increased revenues. Still, there’s a lot of technical and procedural groundwork to lay before real-time analytics can make a breakthrough difference.

Making real-time analytics a reality

A Harvard Business Review Analytic Services study revealed a significant disparity between the share of organizations that realized the importance of real-time analytics to their operations and the percentage who felt they had succeeded in getting value from them. For example, while 83 percent of responding organizations prioritized the transformation of data into actionable insights at the optimal time, only 22 percent considered themselves successful in this endeavor.

This gap can be closed with the right processes, tools, and services. Some of the prime candidates include:

Data Governance Strategy

Focusing on data governance means going beyond optimizing technical systems to ensuring the organization also has the correct taxonomy, personnel, and processes in place. The goal should be the availability of high-quality data that is managed and consumed in accordance with well-defined rules.

Agile master data management

Real-time analytics are only as useful as the data sources and systems they draw upon. Regularly maintaining and updating them as part of an agile data management strategy ensures that the right information is reliably available when and where your team needs it.

Information and system integration

Legacy systems are common obstacles to the seamless flow of information necessary to make real-time analytics work. While they’re far from the only potential issue here, they underscore the risk of having data sources that are disconnected from each other.

Integration is crucial in establishing a single version of the truth and creating the robust infrastructure to support the delivery of real-time analytics. Tightly integrated data sources allow you to pull relevant information from sales, marketing, customer service, and other departments to customize each interaction.

All of these solutions for building a suitable architecture for real-time analytics should serve company goals in addition to meeting technological aspirations. Logic20/20 will help you navigate this interaction of business and technology through custom consulting and deep analytics expertise. Connect with our team to learn more.