How to Create a Big Data Customer Service Strategy

Most customers will remain loyal to your business if they have a positive customer service experience. However, over half of customers will switch companies after one poor experience. Big data in customer service will help you retain your loyal customers, attract new customers, and offer a better experience than your competitors.

You will learn how to collect and use big data in your business to improve your customer service strategy and create customer relationships that are built to last.

Key Takeaways:

  • Big data requires more complex systems for analyzing and reporting information than traditional data.
  • Most customers expect fast and knowledgeable help from businesses.
  • Big data will track a customer’s journey so you can offer personalized service.
  • A better customer experience will also increase your sales as you will have more opportunities for upselling, cross-selling, and retaining customers.

What Is Big Data in Customer Service?

Big data is the large amount of unstructured data your business gathers from different channels about your customers, company, and buyer behavior. This data is often too extensive for traditional data processes and requires other techniques for collecting and analyzing the data.

Big data can provide deeper analytical information about your business and consumers when done correctly. As a result, you will improve your interactions and make more sales based on customer needs and habits.

The following video will help you understand what big data is and why it’s a vital part of businesses today.

Types of Customer Experience Data

Not all big data is relevant to customer service. However, here are a few examples of valuable data that you can use to improve your customer service strategies:

  • Demographic information like their age, gender, marital status, and income
  • Buyer behaviors within your business and online
  • Past customer service interactions through chats, emails, or phone calls
  • Their customer journey from their first touchpoint to conversion
  • Online content interactions on social media and your website
  • Marketing and sales campaign outcomes
  • Customer feedback and surveys

How to Use Big Data to Improve Your Customer Service

The following image shows the results of Zendesk’s 2020 customer experience report and highlights what customers define as good customer service. Speed and availability are the top two factors contributing to a positive experience.

Customers say the most important aspects of good customer service are quick and quality support

Image from Zendesk

Over 72% of companies say analytic reports help them improve their customer experience. You can improve every area on this list through big data analytics by using it to build 24/7 support systems, unified experiences, and customized care.

How to Incorporate Big Data in Your Customer Service Strategy

Once you have a system in place for collecting big data, incorporate the following five strategies that use the knowledge you gained from big data to improve your inbound and outbound customer service.

1. Customize Customer Interactions

About 90% of consumers in the U.S. base their business decisions on whether a company has good customer service.

Even though good customer service looks slightly different for each person, most consumers agree on some factors. For instance, 63% of consumers and 76% of B2B buyers expect companies to know their needs and expectations.

While you aren’t a mind reader, you can read reports on a customer’s demographics, behavior, and buying patterns. These reports will help your customer service representatives provide that expected personalized experience. It also opens the door to more opportunities for upselling and cross-selling based on the customer’s past purchase history and future needs.

2. Unify the Customer Experience

About 40% of companies in the U.S. say interdepartmental collaboration is the main challenge affecting their customer experience processes. Whether this is a disjoint between sales and marketing or big data siloes, these communication breaks poorly affect your customer service.

The previous survey showed how many customers expect a fluid experience and don’t want to repeat information. You can build a unified experience and combat data siloes through big data. Use your big data platform to collect information from all teams to provide a clearer picture of the customer, share their previous interactions, and predict their future needs across all your departments.

3. Connect Qualified Customers to the Best Reps

Big data helps you target qualified leads with your customer service and pair those customers with the most relevant customer service representative.

For example, your team can use big data for advanced lead scoring techniques that sort consumers based on the number and type of interactions with your business. Through lead scoring, your customer service team can focus on the most valuable leads first.

Big data will also help you with lead distribution. For instance, you can use each customer’s demographic information and history to match them to a customer service representative in their location that is knowledgeable about their needs.

4. Offer 24/7 Omnichannel Customer Service

Customer service that doesn’t use big data is limited by the number of representatives on their team and hours of operation. However, big data works alongside artificial intelligence and machine learning to offer customers support even when your team is unavailable so that customers can get answers faster on their own time and in their own way.

Artificial intelligence can work with each of the following popular customer service channels by using chatbots, automated messages and phone calls, and interactive frequently asked question pages on a website.

Phone, email, online, and live chat are the top customer service channels

Image from Finances Online

5. Track Your Customer’s Journey

Creating a customer journey map helps improve your customer interactions and grow your customer service strategies. A customer journey map will provide the data you need for those personalized and unified interactions. It will also reduce the number of consumers that fall through the cracks because no one responded to their queries, or they receive the wrong information.

A customer journey map also helps your business because you can outline how your strategies are performed. That outline will help you predict future trends using the data you collect along the way. The results from analyzing your customer journey data will notify you of weaknesses in your strategy and help you continually improve so that you stay on top of the latest customer trends.

Create a Data-Driven Customer Service Strategy

Don’t lose more customers because of siloed data or poor customer service strategies. Instead, build a strong customer service plan on big data that will help you provide flexible, consistent, and personalized service to your clients.

Contact us to learn more about our sales and marketing solutions to improve your customer service strategy.

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