5 Customer Analytics You Should Be Measuring

Living in a time where we are so surrounded by technology, we would think that it makes sense that companies would start to take online information and use it to their advantage. Businesses around the world are using customer analytics to drive up profits and keep customers happy.

But what is customer analytics?

Customer analytics is the process by which data from customer behavior are used to make business decisions. In more simple terms, it’s businesses tracking your every move online, compiling profiles on each customer so they can improve the shopping experience. The information they take ranges from four main categories. These include personal, quantitative, qualitative and descriptive data. Now that we have the basics, read on to find out more about the top 5 Customer Analytics You Should Be Measuring to increase your businesses profits and better adapt to customers.

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See also: Prioritize Customer Conversations

Best Customer Analytics to Boost Business

1. Demographics

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Demographics are the basics of customer analytics. It is essentially a personal profile on each one of your customers. These consist of categories such as age, gender, race, geography and income. This information is important to marketers especially. For example, if a company is trying to target teens and young adults through their marketing campaign, they would be able to see if their advertisements are getting to the correct people. If they see that for some reason only people 40+ are visiting their site, it is easy to conclude that they need to find a new way to reach their intended customers. Demographics, although seemingly basic, are one of the most important customer analytics to track.

2. Sources of Incoming Traffic

traffic source analysis

Being able to track where your customers came from is also an extremely important factor when it comes to customer analytics. If your company has been trying to market on different platforms such as email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat, you can see what campaigns are working. This is essentially the same as the demographics analytic except the difference is in the application they are coming from and not personal qualities.

3. Returning Customer Conversion

repeat customer pie chart

Gaining new customers is 6.5 times more expensive for a company than keeping an existing customer, so why not prioritize your existing customers? This is why using the metric of returning customers can save companies vast amounts of money. If a customer has already been on your site, you can once again track the way they got to the page. Noticing that most of your returning customers are coming from social media, you could possible scale back outside marketing or TV ads. This would most likely cut costs and allow you to focus more on keeping your old customers as well as increasing advertising in places that tend to have returning customers.

4. Page Views

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Page views, one of the more simple topics in analytics, are simply the number of visitors your website or individual page gets. It is important to get the most page views you can to bring in as many customers as you can. This function can also monitor specific blogs or PDFs that your company posts. This will allow your company to post more blogs or PDF that are on similar topics. It is important to know what part of your website interests your users the most so you can develop more of that material.

5. Average Session Duration

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When it comes to making big business decisions, such as spending large sums of money on advertising, a company will want to know who to target and why. All of this information can be found using Google analytics. It is important to know who spends more time on your website so you can gear your advertising toward them. For example, the average Facebook link stays open for only 10 seconds where average direct URL is open for closer to 53 seconds. The people who spend more time are obviously more interested in your product, but you also have to look at where the traffic is coming from to understand the true data. You can even see what pages on your website are visited the most. For example, say that a company has a blog page that attracts more views than any other page. You can have your employees focus on outputting more blogs on topics that have been getting the most clicks and highest average session duration.

Analysis of The Analytics

google analytics logo

As you can see, all of these chosen analytics work together, but a company has to find the patterns and solutions to the problems they are seeing. While it may seem that monitoring just demographics or page views will not boost a business too much, the long tail effect comes into play by monitoring more and more analytics. As the world keeps embracing the technological changes in our society, more businesses will move to using customer analytics to improve business strategy and efficiency. Google analytics makes tracking your customers habits and desires that much easier too. These analytics are the best option for a company to get a well-rounded look at who, what, and where website traffic is coming from. They lay the platform for more analytics to be built on.

5 Creative Ways You Can Use Customer Service to Amp Up Your Online Marketing Strategy

Looking for some quick and easy tips to improve your online marketing strategy? Look no further. Customer service, a once again focused upon aspect in the business world, can improve your marketing with a few simple tricks. Stick around or read 7 Online Marketing Strategies to Maximize Website Visits, The Art of Killing Digital Advertising or 5 Ways Companies Have Used VR for Marketing.

Customer Service Hacks to Kill Your Online Marketing Campaign

1. Mix Your Marketing and Customer Service Team

customer service marketing post it

Marketing is the part of the business that brings customers in, while customer service is what keeps them there. For this reason, it only makes sense that the two work together. Companies also have a 60-70% chance of keeping old customers but only a 5-20% chance of gaining new ones. When the marketing and customer service group work together, you can target existing customers and save lots of money too!

2. Use Social Media as a Customer Service Tool

social media icons

Companies should see social media as a huge opportunity when it comes to advertising and customer service. People contact companies over Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all the time. Just the other week, I was on a United Airlinesflight, and I had tweeted at them. They responded asking me how my flight was going within minutes. This is a great example of how customer service over marketing channels is so important. It shows to their followers how much they are invested in their customers and that they truly care. This also shows that the companies are up to date when it comes to interacting with customers. They are open to change and customers want to see companies that embrace change like they do.

3. Feature Customers on Social Media

customer spotlight

Another idea to boost your marketing campaign using customer service is through customer spotlights. Your company could pick a customer of the week. This could be through the amount they spent, the positive interactions they have with your company, or many other things. You could then post this through social media. This once again shows that the companies are invested in their customers and that they like to give back to the community.

4. Use Customer Reviews as Promotional Material on Social Media

customer reviews star ratings

When it comes to showcasing your customer service team, what better way to do it than through customer reviews? Your company can prove to its customers that its product and customer service teams are actually rated highly. Best Buy is a company that does this very well. They post their reviews to social media, at stores, and in other online ads. It is proof that they have satisfied customers.

5. Give Special Opportunities to Special Customers

Across different industries, companies reward their valued customers differently. One company, BMW, gives customers who recently have purchased a car the opportunity of a lifetime. They invite them to BMW Days around the world and let them race their top-of-the-line cars. They will have all different types of cars, ranging from their M5’s to their I3’s. They let their customers go all out racing on the track for hours. They record these days, sending out these clips to social media. The services they provide their customers is something they will never forget. GM and Ford have similar days too that draw new customers in and keep existing customers happy. Other industries do this through their products. Tech companies invite customers to test out new products first and give feedback. This once again shows they take customer feedback seriously and then they can boast about it online. Lastly, smaller companies such as micro-breweries around the world invite customers to their locations and give tours and tastings. Half Acre Brewery, based in Chicago, USA, gives tours of their facilities and posts their reviews to social media. Time and time again, these companies get fantastic reviews and prove to their customers through online marketing that their customer service is world class.

Customer Service and Online Marketing

online marketing diagram

A company’s marketing team gets customers in the door, while customer service keeps them there. Using these customer service hacks for online marketing is a fantastic way for your company’s teams to work together. So if you’re looking to amp up your online marketing, merge your teams together, take to social media, highlight your customers, and boast about your customer reviews (only if you can back it up with facts). Most of these include social media in some way, shape or form, and that is why it is so easy to incorporate both your marketing team and customer service teams.  This increases both employee and customer happiness. If you are looking to read more into tracking your customers preferences and habits to better target them, head to 5 Customer Analytics You Should Be Measuring.

CTA marketing strategy template

Top 5 Secrets to Excellent Customer Service

A company’s most important feature, without a doubt, is its product. If there is no desire for the product, a business will not succeed. But what else makes companies stand out from others?

The secret lies in customer service.

Read on to find out about some secrets of customer service and one business, Woveon, that is truly a forerunner in this not-so-new industry.

Ways to Excellent Customer Service

1. Customer Loyalty

customer-service-loyalty

To start off on our adventure to world-class customer service, it seems fitting to talk about customer loyalty. When a customer is loyal, they will keep buying products, turning into more and more revenue. But how does a company identify and keep these customers happy? At Woveon, identifying important customers and helping with their every need is easy! Woveon has created AI (Artificial Intelligence) programs that identify businesses-valued customers in multiple ways. Say someone has shopped at an e-commerce website multiple times and has a great buying history but has now run into some trouble. If they contact the store via multiple channels such as social media or email, a representative from the business can pull up their information and understand they are a valued customer. They can focus on their problems more quickly, and this keeps up customer satisfaction.

2. Consistency

Much like loyalty, consistency is another key factor when it comes to customer service. Woveon makes it easy for a customer service representative to be consistent throughout their interactions with customers. The software records past interactions that allows the business to recall past services it offered to the particular customer and the means by which the problem was resolved. With all of this data, the company can provide consistent help to valued customers. This, in turn, can create word-of-mouth interactions, generating new customers.

3. Knowledgeable Staff

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Nothing is more frustrating than calling customer service and feeling more apt than the “resourceful” representative. This is why it is so important to have knowledgeable staff who don’t just stick to a script and set of instructions. Your employees should be able to problem solve on their own. In order to do this, one should hire people who show interest in their business and understand its products. However, having knowledge on more than just the product is important. For smaller businesses, getting to know your customers and being able to talk with them more on a personal level can be very important. With Woveon’s technology, this is a walk in the park. Woveon’s recorded conversations not only help with consistency, but it can also help a customer service rep get to know the client more by reviewing past conversations. Although this may not apply to all businesses, small to mid-sized companies can really benefit from having personable customer service reps who are extremely knowledgeable about their product and clients. So before hiring any applicant, make sure he/she is enthusiastic about the product or service the company provides.

4. Response Time

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“Thank you for calling. Your call is very important to us today. Please hold while we transfer you to our next available representative.”

We’ve all heard this dreadful message. Five minutes later, you are still listening to the same terrible background music and just waiting for your questions to be answered. This is why it is so important to have urgency when conducting customer service. If you make a customer wait for five or more minutes, their frustration is almost sure to be rising as well. To help this problem, Woveon’s interface has a simple search bar that any customer service rep can pull up and see what the customer’s history is. It includes common problems the customer has had along with small subcategories, illustrated in a 3D model that is quick and easy to use. Woveon’s incredibly accessible database and easy-to-use software cut down time that the customer is forced to listen to background music and become frustrated. Having dealt with many customer service departments, I can say that the best way to keep a customer happy is to be fast and knowledgeable about all potential problems. But even if you can’t identify the problem right away, act with urgency and get the process started as soon as possible in order to retain strong customer loyalty.

5. Apologize and Move On

apology

Everyone makes mistakes–some you can control, others just happen. It is always better to apologize first and then move forward. When it comes to customer service, the representative is almost never to blame; however, the customer may think differently. A customer service rep should apologize not only for the inconvenience the customer is going through, but also so the customer can sense that the rep personally cares about the problem. If you are nice to your customers, they, in turn, would be more likely to reciprocate. Of course, there will be good and bad customers, but as long as you are willing to be upfront, apologize for any mistakes you could have made, and are ready to solve the problem, most customer interactions will go smoothly. Remember, solving the problem is only half of the interaction; being fast, knowledgeable, and polite completes the customer service process.

To help you out, here are 5 templates to get you out of sticky customer situations.

If you want to retain and build a bigger customer base, a company has to have great customer service. Word of mouth “advertisement” is 5x more powerful than any media ad. Because of this, a company’s customer service has to be efficient, knowledgeable, and polite. Luckily, with Woveon, customer service comes easy. Using Woveon’s software is a hack in itself when running a business, and if you are ready to bring your business to the next level, start with your customer service using Woveon.