As we know optimization has been the key to keep Businesses thriving, in older days we never had a proof of concept to know whether an optimization led us in the right direction. As businesses are moving more and more towards internet-based digital platforms we have the ability to analyze consumer behavior and optimize our business accordingly. The logic behind customer science is that every business tries to provide the best experience to its customers but what they are doing is based on assumptions whereas what they need is data science driven customer journey to green shoot their business. Today let’s discuss how customer science is the next big thing for businesses as they adapt data science driven approaches.
Customer Science Journey for Businesses
Let’s break down the digital transformation and customer journey that should be developed by businesses with a customer science driven approach to deliver the results with almost every tweak we implement. Just go by running the tweaks in a cycle of analyzing, development, testing, and adaptation.
Customer Science Driven Digital Transformation for Businesses
Customer Science Driven Development
The first step is to develop the first mobile or web application without assumptions. There are dozens of parameters to conduct a study for high customer engagement and satisfaction so just spend little time to create such reports. Develop your digital transformation tools on the basis of data generated from this study. Create simple tools in a step by step approach to test their success rate quickly.
Customer Science Driven Optimization
Research and develop different matrices to test your success rate and capture deeper insights from the business. The second step is to optimize the business on customer science driven data that is captured by initially developed simple tools. The optimization step will have two scenarios:
- Goals are achieved in testing: If the customer science-driven simple tools are able to deliver the anticipated results then we can scale up these tools to achieve more goals on our bucket list.
- Goals are not achieved in testing: If the customer science-driven simple tools are not able to deliver the desired results then we should pivot from our previous approach quickly to save time and money. Try another custom science data-driven approach.
What Benefits Does Customer Science Deliver to Businesses?
The data science in customer science is based on customer journey which focuses on recognizing customer needs so that they can be fulfilled with a minimum expenditure of effort, time, and money. Such an approach will help you in increasing the business’s return on investment. Let’s segregate the benefits of customer science with respect to the customer journey.
Customer Science Driven Customer Segmentation
The first phase in adapting customer science is to analyze business data to generate customer or user demographics. The reports of such analysis will enlighten us in knowing who the customer is, what is their average age, gender, country, and how economically well they are doing in life. What kind of content, services, and products are we offering in which they are interested in. Once we know all these insights we can channel our efforts wisely to generate maximum revenue.
Customer Science Driven Customer Engagement Enhancement
It has been observed in many studies that the conversion rate to repeat visitors to a business is very high so it is a key area where a business must focus. The average time spent with business is also a key element that tells us about customer engagement with the business. The businesses need to work on increasing these metrics to increase their ROI. To make the users visit again businesses should serve the personalized content, better user experience, cashback offers, or something intuitive based on what your business data analysis tells you to adapt.
Customer Science Driven Customer Acquisition
The above analysis will let us know the interests of our users who influence them to become our customers. We can implement the following things to acquire more customers:
- Serve more influential content for converting users to customers.
- Monitor time spent on forms, drop out rate and point to ease up the buying process.
- Develop heatmaps to know if there are any elements on the business’s digital platform which are complicated or are not visible to users.
- The heatmaps also tell about products, services, and content’s user engagement level.
Recently I have witnessed two such real-life scenarios. One is where we changed the image on the contact page of a business and its consequences were a drop in the conversion rate. In the second scenario, the button to enter a section was placed on a slider which was not visible to users and they were not able to visit that section. Guess what helped us in figuring out this thing?
It was simply google analytics.
Customer Science Driven Customer Experience
Customer experience is a key metric on which every business should work. The focus could be less or more according to the business strategy and model. Although the Apple iPhone has one of the most expensive models yet they sell more units than their competitors all because of great customer experience. The hands-on tools we have these days can tell us about problems that customers are facing, what’s frustrating them. All we have to do is solve these problems.
Customer Science Driven Customer Retention
All of us know that these days following are the key elements for customer retention but what we don’t know is that what works for a business:
- Provide cash-back offers
- Good user experience
- Easy buying processes
- Showing personalized and relevant products
- Provide good customer support
With customer science, we can easily and quickly find what’s working for a business and the amendments that need to be made with sections that are not performing well.
Proof of Concept of Benefits of Customer Science
- Google’s advertising business, ecommerce stores’ marketing campaigns are thriving, which are all targeted marketing activities based on customer science and it’s a no-brainer that if they did not have generated ROI then no one has poured the money again to such campaigns.
- Salesforce has become one of the tech giants in 20 years just by focusing on customer science.
- The most valuable companies today on earth are tech giants like amazon, google, Netflix, and more who rely heavily on customer science. These companies are about 30 years old and have beaten the valuation of other companies who have been in business for more than a century.
The next phase is to track customer activities in a physical store by collaboratively analyzing data collected from LiDAR, CCTV, mobile phone apps device data, and network providers. Such a data set will be extremely accurate and insights generated from such a data set will be extremely comprehensive.
Tools to Adopt Customer Science in Business
Crazy egg that helps in recognizing the time spent by users on online forms. Hotstar helps you by tracking average user activity focus by generating heat maps. Salesforce offers einstein analytics to capture business insights. Google Analytics helps you in tracking the conversion rate of each and every page, user demographics, etc. The story doesn’t end there as you can extend its capabilities with google tag manager and data studio.
