Measuring the pulse of business: Are you in real time?

We’ve entered a new age of business. No longer does price or quality alone dictate a business’s success. Today’s deciding factor? Customer experience. Exponential increases in the availability of technology mean that customers face more choice than ever before—and more access to information about your business. Every single interaction a customer has with your business can be written about online, shared on social media, and spread by friends and family. Thankfully, customers are willing to pay a premium for the right customer experience. It’s mission-critical to your organisation’s success that the customer experience is managed well. And you know what they say… You can only manage what you measure.

There are clear benefits from measuring the customer experience. Research has shown that over 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience. On top of this, another study by Aberdeen Research has identified that organisations consistently asking for and measuring their customers’ feedback saw a 28% increase in revenue and a 14% increase in customer satisfaction – goals for virtually every business’s strategy. Customers who have fantastic experiences become promoters, spend more with your business, cost less to serve, and stay longer. It goes without saying that this makes life a whole lot more enjoyable for everyone. The key to unlocking this panacea is gathering the right data on your customers’ experience.

Dancing with data

Here at Customer Radar, we talk a lot about validated and instant customer feedback. You could say we’re a bit of a broken record. Or, you could say that we understand where the business world is headed. The ability to collect and analyse large sets of data in real-time is increasingly becoming more critical to running a successful business. As it stands, the average manager spends two hours per day looking at data. Ex-Vertica CEO, Chris Lynch, highlights that, “big data is at the foundation of all of the mega-trends happening today, from social to mobile, to the cloud and gaming.” With this being said, it’s become clear that businesses need to be able to dance with data. Fact beats opinion every time, so it’s always best to back important decisions with solid, meaningful data and take the guesswork out of business. Data enables you to benchmark where you are – measuring your progress continuously from people to departments, regions or groups.  

To move forward, don’t look in the rear mirror…

The trouble is, a lot of companies do data all wrong. They see the process as something static, done by an accountant in a room, for one snapshot in time. Recommendations of which business units to focus on are given based on the previous year’s performance, and focus is adjusted accordingly. In this day and age, that’s like driving on the motorway only looking in the rear mirror. Not only is it dangerous, but it’s a waste—there’s real-time, actionable feedback available from your customers today! All that’s needed is to tap into this, being responsive and open to learning, and your business’s future all of a sudden looks a whole lot brighter.

Instead of looking backwards, remember three words: Ask, Act, Improve. Continually feed information on the customer experience right into your managers’ laps by asking for validated and instant feedback. Stock has run out and customers are getting grumpy? You’re able to act on it straight away, rectifying the issue with your customers before they have time to post about it on Facebook or moan to their family. Then you’re able to use the data collected to identify trends in the business, and continuously improve the business. The value of real-time feedback is unprecedented—it’s truly the only way to measure the pulse of today’s business world.