What is the customer analytics process?

Customer success analytics re a driving force behind loyal and growing customer bases. It’s all about anticipating and evaluating your audience’s needs and finding ways to serve those needs. Instead of simply reacting to outcomes, you must approach customer success with intention and precision. Many businesses are realizing this, as 78% responded in a recent survey that they will spend more time on proactive tasks this year.

But with so many types of customer success analytics, it can be difficult to find the best solution for your business. How do you approach customer service from a data analytics perspective for your business’s particular needs? By having an analytical lifecycle process where all steps focus on the same end goal—improving customer experience.

What Are the 6 Steps in the Analytical Process?

Many branches and paths exist in the analytical process, but we have found these six steps to be the main touch points for improved customer experience.

1. Define Customer Success

If you don’t know exactly what customer success looks like for your business, it’s impossible to create a successful customer analytics process. This applies to any business with customers, whether it has a few big SaaS customers or hundreds of individuals. If you’re not sure where to start, consider the following questions:

• What pain points do your customers have?

• How do your offerings and services answer the needs of your customers?

• Are there issues causing customer unhappiness? What are they?

• What drives customers to keep coming back to your business?

These questions are only a starting point for crafting your customer success definition. Every business will have its unique offerings that will impact this definition.

2. Collect and Analyze Data

Once you have identified the meaning of customer success for your business, you can begin collecting and analyzing data about your customers. Some common sources and methods of data collection include:

• Reviewing transactional histories

• Conducting customer surveys and focus groups

• Offering incentives for customer feedback

• Gathering data from social media performance

One way to simplify this process of analytics and collection is by utilizing a high-quality customer success platform, such as Planhat. We allow businesses to structure, manage, and interact with their customer data in powerful ways, significantly simplifying this step.

3. Automate

Customer analytics, data science, and automation have come a long way in the past few decades. You most likely already have certain automated processes in place through your current tech stack. If so, consider how your current automation works with your customer analysis process. The best analytics companies will offer automation that acts during critical moments of each customer’s journey while evolving based on gathered data.

For example, Planhat’s platform has a customer health center that provides AI-powered health scores based on your business’s customer success strategy. You can also automatically email customers and watch customer interactions in real time, allowing you kick-start key processes exactly when needed. Whatever automation process you choose to use, it should learn from your data and inspire new ideas for empowering employees and customers.

4. Make Data-Based Decisions

This may feel like the hardest part of the whole process to some. You can gather and analyze all the data imaginable, but what you do with it is the key to success. So when considering which customer success platform to use, you ultimately want a data platform built for action.

Let’s say you send out a customer survey through your platform asking about preferred communication methods. 90% respond that they hate getting email newsletters. Your next move should be figuring out a new way to communicate with those customers. Whatever alternate methods you choose may be based on that same survey or other data you’ve collected. This allows your business to eliminate weak processes and improve customer satisfaction.

5. Measures Outcomes

Making the best, data-based decision isn’t always easy. Sometimes experimentation is necessary to see what works and what doesn’t. This is why measuring the outcomes of changes is vital to the customer analytics process.

The health scores we mentioned earlier are an excellent way to evaluate the ripple effect of implemented changes. These scores will indicate any existing churn, allowing you to understand the current satisfaction level of your customers and anticipate future needs. If you tried something new and it didn’t work, that’s okay! It only means you have deeper insights on customer satisfaction, all of which will influence your next, more successful strategy.

6. Reshape the Process

All of these steps are a continuous cycle, but this last one especially so. In a competitive market, a stagnant business environment will most likely not lead to fruitful results. You must constantly be looking for ways to improve.

What might this look like? One of our customers, an animation company called Toon Boom, realized their broad mix of customers made it difficult to standardize solutions. Using the flexibility of Planhat, Toon Boom was able to reshape these solutions into unique plans for each customer’s specific needs. They found that being able to see the various data points for every customer, for each company, and for different segments ultimately led to improved financial performance.

Bonus Step: Integrate with Planhat

We like to think of the customer analytics process as connecting the dots of your business. Many of our customers come to us with a full tech stack that is deeply incorporated into the foundation of their business strategies. Rather than starting with a clean slate, we find that integrating all of these applications into a single view of all your customer data is the right way to go.

If your business is ready to improve its customer analytics process, go ahead and sign up for a free Planhat demo today! We would love to show you exactly how to build personalized solutions, free up employee time for other business pursuits, and create new growth opportunities.