What is customer analytics?

Customer analytics has been one of the buzzing topics amongst executives for the last decade or so. But do we really understand what customer analytics is? What is the journey of customer analytics? And what is the benefit of a customer analytics program?

Companies are growing at a fast pace and it is becoming a challenge to track down every customer in terms of needs and behavior. 90 % of executives believe that an average of 14% of annual revenue is being lost because they do not possess the ability to act based on the customer data. I3C is helping companies leverage their data through customer analytics for increasing business value and for maximizing sustainable growth.

Analytics is a journey; it all starts by discovering a business problem and then looking into the data to understand the drivers. For a better understanding of analytics, we must first understand what the different stages of an analytics journey are.

Descriptive analytics – “What happened?”

Descriptive analytics is the conventional form of data analysis, where deep analysis is performed to understand the historical data. It is a description of the facts and figures of an operating business. Common examples of descriptive analytics are company reports that provide comparisons, historic view of the organization’s operations, customers, sales and financials. These include notable customer driven KPIs: net sales, customer acquisition rate, geographical distribution of customers and other historical insights.

I3C has helped several clients across various industries: banking, telecom, judiciary, postal services, and many more… in creating their data warehouse and topping it up with analytical dashboards evolving around customers, business performance and operations.

Organizations interact with customers through multiple channels and collect an enormous amount of data. All of this data is collected in separate systems like core banking, ERP, CRM, marketing automation etc. Those systems are implemented in variety of platforms and databases and we have seen clients struggling with multiple disconnected source systems.

i3C was engaged by one of the judicial bodies in GCC to bring together 40+ sources into a single data warehouse for achieving higher operational efficiency, cost reduction and business forecasting. We brought in the concept of first setting up a 360 degree customer view which was a centralized and structured hub of data from various departments. The integrated data became a one stop shop of information for customer profile, their journey and engagement with the organization. This view enabled our client to be more customer-centric and offer the best customer experience. The 360 degree customer view was then also used to design various operational and cross functional dashboards allowing multi-dimensional analysis.

I3C strongly believes in the idea of storytelling in every dashboard. The intuitive and insightful dashboards are designed in such a way that they help answers key questions like how is my business performing, what is driving my sales, which areas should I focus on to accelerate growth etc.. The executives are also able to slice and dice key drivers to the most granular level, using data aggregation and drill down features which can lead to better decisions.

The customer 360 degree view is not only useful in conducting descriptive analytics but can also be quite instrumental in executing predictive analytics.

Predictive analytics - “What could happen?”

Predictive analytics can help an organization in identifying the customers’ trends and patterns to determine who the best potential customers are and what value those customers have.

i3C uses advanced statistical modelling techniques which help narrow down to the top 10-15% customers or leads which can contribute to almost 80 to 85% of conversions in any marketing initiative.

When the organizations understand the customer needs, buying patterns and how each customer’s needs are different from one another, they are better able to customize the product offering and marketing communications. This helps in improving the overall customer experience, helps maximize sales, and significantly improves marketing ROI.

i3C has helped multiple organizations to target their most valued customers having highest likelihood for conversions by offering a unique combination of predictive analytics and campaign management strategy. From such initiatives, our clients have been able to act proactively and maximize the value from their marketing campaigns.

What companies should do in the era of customer analytics?

“Getting started” – Target a quick win and make it count! Organizations can start by picking a quick win to showcase the capability of the customer analytics program and the added value the program brings. They can pick a valuable project or business problem, a project that is relatively easier to execute, and can generate valuable insights. Before starting, the organization needs to agree on a plan on how to turn the insights into actions, and how the results will be measured. This experience will bring technical, business team and executives on board when they see the benefit of customer analytics program. This experience can be used to learn how to tackle more complex, broader-scale projects across the organization and expand the customer analytics program.

I3C has worked with one of the leading multi-national bank in GCC for setting up and running a successful customer analytics program spanning over 3 years. The first phase of the program focused on creating a strong data backbone and reporting capability for the bank. We developed a customer 360 degree view and business performance dashboards with drill down capabilities, enabling business heads in making data driven decisions. During the second phase, we focused on quick win marketing initiatives using advanced analytical predictive models for generating lead-lists. This helped the bank achieve sales lift of 5-6X in a very short period of three months. The third and last phase of the engagement focused on running an end to end customer lifecycle management program through analytics driven initiatives. We helped the bank launch more than 50 initiatives, resulting in a bottom line impact of USD 10 million over 2 years.

To conclude, Customer analytics is among the most powerful enablers companies have for translating data into useful insights about their customers. It helps deliver customer insights directly to the people who need them the most, in a format that makes it easy to understand, and act on them. Specific benefits of a comprehensive customer analytics solution include:

• Become customer-centric and proactive rather than reactive
• Increase sales to new and existing customers
• Lower customer acquisition and retention costs
• Increase customer retention rates and increase loyalty
• Increase customer lifetime value
• Improve the channel mix to lower cost to serve
• Deliver the right message by personalizing the interaction at the right time on the right channel
• Gain a complete view of customers across channels and actionable insight

Even though implementing customer analytic solutions is a great idea, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Gathering and analyzing data is resource consuming and time intensive, yet a very necessary investment.

With such a competitive market, it is very important to know how to stand out among other competitors by making customer analytics not just something that’s nice to have, but a must have.

For more information or to send us questions, please visit www.i3c.in

About the authors

Michele Abi Saleh
Michele is working as Project lead in Dubai office of i3 Consulting. She has over 5 years of experience in delivering engagements in the areas of Business Intelligence & Management reporting, Data management, and Predictive analytics. She has served clients in various sectors including banking, government organizations, and telecom.

Sarthak Agarwal
Sarthak works as an associate with i3Consulting. He has specialized in organizational performance improvement, operations analytics and Forensics.