Customer experience (CX) is not just a discrete action; it is an emotion.

Customer experience refers to how your customers (or anybody else) perceive your brand after contacting you. Having an engaging customer experience builds loyalty and increases customer retention, allowing your company to boost the top line.

According to InfoQuest statistical analysis on customer satisfaction, a totally satisfied customer generates 2.6 times the income of a somewhat satisfied customer and 14 times that of a somewhat dissatisfied customer.

For businesses, it is evident that crafting engaging customer experiences is difficult. Even if your company has invested a lot of resources in developing a fascinating product or service, if the business teams aren’t able to engage your customers, it will affect your bottom line.

In today’s world, engaging customer experience is no more a differentiating factor but a norm. Yet, business teams are finding it increasingly challenging to deliver a personalized customer experience. Creating engaging customer experiences consistently can be difficult, especially with all the other daily goals and duties you and your team face. The good news is that you already have the tools you need to improve the customer experience if you use operational analytics in your organization.

With the help of operational analytics and real-time sync of customer data into your operational apps, your business teams can convert customer insights into scalable actions and deliver engaging customer experiences.

Have a look at how to improve customer experience using operational analytics – gain more visibility, convert data into actionable insights and outdo your competitors.

Table of Contents

What is Customer Experience?

The customer experience (CX) is a phrase used to describe several levels of customer interactions with your organization. Their interaction with your customer support team is a component of CX, but it is not the only one.

Customer experience may range from accessing your mobile app or website to engaging with your marketing efforts or directly utilizing your product or service.

Customer Experience Excellence Engine | How to Improve Customer Experience
Image Source

There are two kinds of customer experiences. These are direct and indirect:

  • Direct Customer Experience: Any engagement initiated by the customer is referred to as direct customer experience. This encompasses the purchase lifecycle, the product or service experience, and customer interactions with your employees.
  • Indirect Customer Experience: Indirect customer experience relates to passive interactions with your organization. This includes internal marketing activities and external advocacy or opposition, such as reviews, word-of-mouth communication, and media attention.

How Modern Organizations are Outshining Customer Experience?

Holistic Experience vs Specific Interaction

The complete customer journey is referred to as the customer experience. Modern organizations execute processes that involve discovering and being aware of their business – first purchase and post-purchase care, relentless improvements, and collaboration across customer channels and business functions.

As a result, these companies are always looking at and analyzing various customer touchpoints and require the involvement of multiple departments to provide an engaging customer experience.

Talking about the components of customer experience, i.e., customer service, marketing, advertising, sales, automation, etc., these activities only include only one or two touches in the entire journey of a customer. Modern organizations have started recognizing the importance of holistic experience that comes through the use of these individual components that refer to a specific consumer engagement with a company.

Reactive vs Proactive

Customer experience is all about anticipating the customer’s needs. Modern Organizations continually try to enhance the customer experience and avoid difficulties by charting customer journeys, researching funnel drop-off spots and website data, and soliciting customer feedback. 

By having a proactive approach, modern organizations are listening to the customers, learning from their behaviors, and adapting their business to better suit customers’ requirements are all part of providing a great customer experience.

Modern organizations are adopting a more proactive approach by thinking about the future consequences for their customers rather than just solving the present issues of their customers.

Ongoing Relationship vs Isolated Events

Customer experience is about customer interaction with a company. It is impossible to quantify or pin down a particular event or encounter. In this sense, customer experience is a continuing connection – if a consumer returns to your firm (which we all want! ), their customer experience continues.

Modern organizations have designed the customer experience in such a manner that it interacts with customers several times and in a variety of ways. This is achieved by educating potential consumers about a product or service by email, calling to inquire about service satisfaction, obtaining product performance data via customer feedback tools, and so on.

How to Improve Customer Experience with Operational Analytics?

Operational Analytics Workflow: How to Improve Customer Experience | Hevo Data
Image Source

Operational Analytics is a method for achieving collaboration across teams by utilizing reliable and easily available data from your Data Warehouse. It implies improved automation, communication across cross-functional teams, and more efficient workflows.

Reverse ETL helps you to perform operational analytics by synchronizing data back to where it is needed on a daily basis. This entails transferring data from an analytics Warehouse to your daily used applications like Hubspot, Intercom, Salesforce, and others.

The best part is that operational analytics is a tactical approach—both in terms of tools and process—that you can begin applying in your business immediately to accomplish more with your data (and spend less time worrying about it along the way).

According to recent research by Capgemini, over 80% of respondents said that operational analytics is critical to increasing the top line or gaining a competitive edge in customer experience. Deploying operational analytics in the organization brings multiple advantages:

  • Faster Data-Driven Decision Making
  • Reduced Time to Actionable From Insights
  • Real-time Monitoring and Alerting

Common Use Cases for Business Teams Using Operational Analytics

CX encompasses several consumer interaction points as well as numerous departments. Assume your company is a retailer that specializes in selling sports shoes.

Here is an example of a simple customer experience journey where a customer wants to buy sports shoes. The customer noticed an advertisement for new sports shoes, went to the brand’s website for more information, read reviews on various customer review websites, contacted your support or service professional for the address to a nearby store, and purchased it.

Although the transaction was done at your physical store but to complete the customer journey, the customer had many touch points with the firm (blog and website, social media, live chat, video chat) and experienced the work of various departments (marketing, customer support, sales).

The total customer experience consisted of each phase of the trip. Thus, every organization should give more focus on how to improve customer experience since poor customer engagement at each step will impact your top line. In this example, the key to providing an engaging customer experience is connecting all consumer connection points.

With the help of operational analytics, you are getting real-time insights into your widely used applications such as Salesforce, Marketo, etc. Having the right data at the right time will help your company optimize customer journey touchpoints and improve customer experience with operational analytics.

Activate Your Data Warehouse With Reverse ETL!

Hevo Activate syncs data from your warehouse – Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery – into Business Applications – HubSpot, Salesforce, Zendesk, Google sheets, and many more. Check out our growing list of integrations.

Hevo Activate features –  SQL Query Editor, Custom Data Synchronization, Incremental Updates, Intelligent Data Type Conversion, and many more – help your business teams get accurate data without writing complicated Python Scripts. 

You can make faster and smarter decisions by operationalizing your product and customer data together – analyzing user journeys, and creating truly personalized experiences for your customers.

Enrich your applications with trusted data in your warehouse. Get started with Hevo Activate for reverse ETL today!

Get started for Free with Hevo Activate!

Supercharge Your Operational Analytics with Real-time Data Sync Using Reverse ETL

According to research by McKinsey & Company, 71 percent of consumers want organizations to provide tailored experiences, and 76 percent are upset when this does not occur. They have also identified that companies that expand quicker generate 40% more money through personalization than slower-growing competitors. Thus, focusing more on how to improve customer experience will help you in generating higher top line and customer loyalty.

Operational Analytics is one of the keys to providing personalized customer interactions. Businesses create vast volumes of data, categorized across numerous systems within the firm, leaving it unused for several applications, including marketing.

Companies must gather, integrate, and cleanse this data to maximize its value and make it actionable. Once you have the relevant data you can send this data in near real-time to the applications, allowing you to create a more personalized customer experience.

Sync Data from Warehouse to Business Apps with Hevo Activate

To send this data in near real-time, you will need to use an automated Reverse ETL platform such as Hevo Activate. With Hevo Activate, you can empower business teams with 360° customer profiling.

Hevo Activate Reverse ETL: How to Improve Customer Experience

Let us try to understand how reverse ETL platforms such as Hevo Activate will help you to improve customer experience in your organization.

  • Faster Data-Driven Decision Making: With the help of modern reverse ETL tools like Hevo Activate, you can import data from your warehouse to your business applications in near real-time and make better decisions.
  • Reduced Time to Actionable From Insights: Most of the time, your insights are trapped in business reports, making it difficult to take action on the basis of these insights. With the help of reverse ETL, you can send your insights directly into the applications of your choice and can take action from those insights.
  • Real-time Monitoring and Alerting: To increase your trust in your data, reverse ETL platforms like Hevo Activate provide an alert feature that notifies you of any suspicious activity or error while replicating data.

Core Examples of Operational Analytics in Action

Personalization

Personalization is the act of personalizing an experience or message to an individual based on information a company has learned about its customers.

According to research by Mckinsey with more personalization, companies are able to generate 40 percent more top line as compared to others.

How Lucid Increases ROAS by Providing Personalized Marketing Campaigns Using Reverse ETL

Lucid is a visual collaboration suite that combines virtual whiteboarding, intelligent diagramming, and cloud visualization to assist hybrid teams in accelerating innovation. 

Lucid lacked the capacity to customize customer interaction across channels. They were not having the leverage to view the 360-degree view of their customers, which made optimizing ad spending and creating personalized marketing campaigns for their diverse audience difficult.

With the help of automated reverse ETL platforms, Lucid was able to replicate data from Warehouse to its business applications within minutes and managed to increase its ROAS by 52% by providing more personalized marketing campaigns.

Lucid Data Stack: How to Improve Customer Experience | Hevo Data
Image Source

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a powerful technique that assists sales and marketing teams in determining which prospects are possibly the most valuable to your firm and their current sales funnel.

It becomes inefficient for members of your sales team to manually assess each lead to determine whether or not they should go through the funnel as your organization grows. This is when reverse ETL comes in handy. You can operationalize your data directly from your warehouse to your widely used business applications.

How Zeplin Improves Sales Productivity Using Reverse ETL

Zeplin is a design delivery tool that helps teams to collaborate and deliver product designs and pass them off to development.

Zeplin allows designers to convey exactly what they want engineers to create, and it provides engineers with an organized workspace that combines workflow tools like Jira and Github. They were facing issues in identifying which leads they should target on the basis of their product usage.

By utilizing Reverse ETL, their sales team became more effective at prioritizing and closing sales when they had access to crucial product data within Salesforce. This data-driven sales methodology assisted Zeplin in meeting its sales target and expanding into an enterprise.

Customer Health Scorecard

A customer health scorecard is a data-driven method of assessing a customer’s overall involvement with your product or platform. It helps you to determine if a customer is likely to grow, stay consistent, or churn.

How Atrium Improves the Customer Success Team’s Productivity Using Reverse ETL

With all the data Atrium has, they were having two pain points, which they were not able to solve.

  • Gain a better understanding of their data.
  • Due to the ease of use and simplicity of Atrium, customers might miss how effective Atrium was for them.

Today, Atrium is able to send its data from the warehouse into Salesforce via reverse ETL, and it is used throughout the business, both in our sales motion and also in our success motion. It also enabled Atrium to advance their customer success teams and allowed their sales staff to remain on top of how each new user is interacting with Atrium.

Product Analytics

The practice of studying how people interact with a product or service is known as product analytics. It allows product teams to collect, display, and analyze data about user engagement and behavior. This data is used by teams to develop and optimize a product or service.

How Hover Improves Customer Engagement Using Reverse ETL

Hover is a prominent property data platform that serves homeowners, property insurance companies, and contractors. With Hover’s mobile app, homeowners can create a fully interactive 3D model of their home’s exterior with few images.

Hover was worried about how to improve customer experience because data is required. Despite having a culture that fostered data access for business teams, Hover’s data stack was simply not expanding to meet their demands.

When Hurricane Ida slammed the East Coast, reverse ETL allowed Hover to bring new data characteristics into Braze in less than a day to deliver customized notifications for affected homeowners. Reverse ETL also enabled Hover to remove its time-consuming bespoke integration code, allowing its marketing and data teams to focus on strategic goals rather than data concerns.

Final Words

Customer experience is higher than ever before, and word of mouth spreads quickly! And as the customers gain more power, the importance of the customer experience grows. Customer experience is an area that needs ongoing nurturing and care, and by focusing more on how to improve customer experience strategy, businesses will see a rise in customer loyalty, retention, and revenue growth.

With the help of real-time data in your daily used CRM or CX applications like Zendesk, Salesforce, or HubSpot, your business teams can provide the best-in-class customer experience. This problem is solved by operational analytics, which allows you to send near real-time data to the business applications rather than using that data to create business reports.

With massive competition among the companies offering similar products, it becomes necessary to know how to improve customer experience. Building that alignment and closeness to the customer using operational analytics brings the organization together and keeps it together. You stop talking about yourselves and your processes and the things that you
want to do and you start talking about customers and their experiences instead.

Saket Mittal
Former Marketing Content Analyst, Hevo Data

Saket is a data analyst who has implemented different marketing strategies for Hevo. He has authored numerous articles covering a wide array of subjects in data integration and infrastructure.

Empower Customer Analytics Using Hevo Activate

Get Started with Hevo