Knowing what data is important, acquiring it, and strategically utilizing it, is the foundation of successful customer experience campaigns. We sat down this week with Steve Estes, BlastPoint’s VP of Product, to talk about how we are helping companies use data-driven customer intelligence in ways that have, until now, been reserved for the largest organizations.
Good data, used properly, is the key to efficient customer experience campaigns. The trick is using the right data, to target the right people, through the right channels, with the right messaging to achieve your goal.
You’re not alone
You’re not alone, though, if you’re worried that you might not have the right people in place or the data you need to get started. You might even think you need millions of dollars to get the ball rolling. As it turns out, however, it’s just a matter of letting the data you already have tell the people you already have (i.e., your current employees) how to use it. In just a couple of months, this can not only make your customer experience efforts more efficient and effective, but also dramatically improve your promoter scores and other KPIs as well.
The facts you need
Data, after all, is just a bunch of facts. And it’s only as good as the accuracy of those facts and the power of those facts to tell you something useful. Knowing what data sources apply both to your industry and to the particular problem you’re trying to tackle is key. “You might know, for example, that a certain customer segment’s favorite ice cream flavor is strawberry,” explains Steve Estes, BlastPoint’s Director of Product, “but if you’re not in the ice cream business, that piece of information doesn’t hold much value.” Knowing what data is important, acquiring it, and then strategically utilizing it, is the foundation of successful customer experience campaigns. “It’s about combining an understanding of your internal customer data with targeted external demographic data” to get results, says Estes.
Until now, access to these kinds of decision-making tools has been reserved for the largest of companies with the most data engineers and the biggest budgets. BlastPoint’s platform democratizes customer intelligence, so that every organization, no matter the size of their staff or the state of their data, can improve their customer experience campaigns almost immediately.
“BlastPoint’s platform segments your customer population into groups of ‘digital twins’ who are alike in numerous relevant ways instead of just a couple of broad demographic characteristics. This ends up having a much greater impact on your ability to communicate effectively with each of these groups.”
Steve Estes
One-size-fits-all campaigns cost you time and money
Sometimes companies starting out with customer intelligence aim to save money by taking the most basic route of designing their CX campaigns by stereotype. Like targeting women of a particular age range in a specific location. This quickly becomes a one-size-fits-all campaign within this broad group.
While you might get marginally better performance than the baseline using this method, you could get much better results with more specific targeting. “It’s the individual differences among people in these broad groups that let you make your communications more effective and empathetic,” says Estes. “You could target a mobile app at millennials, for example, and then later find that actually some of your best users are older people. That sort of surprise is very common across every industry.”
Don’t “boil the ocean“
BlastPoint’s proprietary algorithms segment your customers by looking holistically at hundreds of data points about each customer. It learns which ones are most important to the particular problem you’re addressing, and subdivides along useful lines – perhaps multiple times – until you have groups of customers who behave similarly in your particular situation.
“While it’s probably not possible to figure out the exact right message for every individual customer,” says Estes, “BlastPoint’s platform segments your customer population into groups of ‘digital twins’ who are alike in numerous relevant ways instead of just a couple of broad demographic characteristics. This ends up having a much greater impact on your ability to communicate effectively with each of these groups.”
Results speak for themselves
Using data to segment customers helps you spend your customer experience dollars much more efficiently. Utilities, for example, are avoiding millions of dollars a year in write-offs because BlastPoint’s algorithms revealed a $400 threshold below which customers generally pay their bills and above which they are likely to default. They’ve operationalized this data to prioritize the outbound outreach regarding payment assistance programs.
Our technology also helped a leading automaker focus its electric vehicle campaign on the 20% of their customer base that was most likely to either own or be interested in an EV, and showed a major utility how to increase engagement with their chatbot. The latter saw click-through rates on Facebook at the average rate of all Facebook ads – much higher than traditional utility promotions.
Segmenting and operationalizing your data with BlastPoint’s platform gives you the biggest bang for your CX buck, by helping you prioritize your efforts to make the most impact. Reach out to us to find out how.
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