4 Strategies To Leverage Customer Support Data For Continuous Improvement

Customers are no longer buying products or services. They are engaging with the experience of a brand. Data analytics helps businesses understand and build on this idea and experience.

The most successful businesses are those that have been able to leverage their customer support data to full effect. Optimum utilization of customer support data can help a business in multiple ways:

• Get to the root cause of customer complaints
• Proactively solve unexpected issues creating bad experiences for customers
• Inform long-term, customer-centric improvement in product and operations
• Increase sales and revenues by addressing the needs of customers promptly
• Create projections and predictive analysis to speed up the turnaround times
• Streamline internal operations, especially in the marketing and sales verticals
• Generate the best customer experiences and build brand loyalty

Using customer sentiment analysis to understand support ticket data is like gaining an insight into the expectations and behaviour of every consumer. If you know, in detail, the drivers of friction in the customer journey of a consumer you can fix and personalize.

In this article, we are going to look at four strategies to leverage customer support data for improvement. However, before we begin, let us look at why it’s important.

Customer Support Data: Meaning and Definition

According to research, nearly 50% of all customers expect a brand to respond to their query within ‘One Hour’. This includes any digital touchpoints like website form, email, social media query, live chat, telephone calls, etc.

Customer support data is usually in a qualitative format that shows the text-based conversation between a support agent and customer. Each conversation holds information on why the customer contacted you today, which when looked at in aggregate is a clear indication of the common customer pain points.

A brand’s customer support data is essential when launching a new product, or getting feedback for improvement because it gives you fast feedback from the market. Numbers and data opens the door for marketers to take a knowledge-based step rather than just going by guesswork.

How you can turn Customer Support Data into a tool for improvement

• Get Access to the Best Tools and Software

If you are looking to successfully leverage customer support data, you need to have the right tools at your disposal. AI and natural language processing (NLP) software is best in class at the moment for understanding support tickets and reasons for customer contact at-scale.

The power of AI technology here is that it enables customer conversation analytics with speed, granularity, and at scale. When buying software though, make sure it helps you understand multiple channels of customer contact, whether it’s social media chats, comments, live chat support, or NPS survey results.

• Understand where to focus:

Collecting and leveraging customer data enables businesses to understand where to exactly focus their time in order to achieve better results. Analytics and numbers can be done by AI platforms or machine learning and free marketers to work on strategies and future goals. Realising where to focus can be extremely helpful to form a high level of content and messaging.

• Ensure insights gets into the right hand

Uncovering granular insights from support data is one part of the puzzle. But you should invest in a communication channel to distribute that data to the right teams in your company. To create a truly customer-centric change, the product team needs to know the causes of complaints about the product, the operations team needs to know the drivers of poor customer experience from operational factors.

When your team is responsive, you can get ahead of complaints. Around 80%+ of customers will leave a company they love after two negative experiences, so reducing them is key to maintaining healthy business growth.

• Create a customer data-driven culture

At the end of the day, every business needs to ensure that data from every digital touchpoint informs decision-making. This is where customer support data can play a major role in creating a well-structured, highly profitable, and successful business organization.

A good customer support software helps in creating the perfect sentiment analysis. This together with the customer support team helps every vertical of the business organization. This can help in optimizing the marketing campaigns and spends, create the ideal sales funnel and also help the CRM team.

Customer-centric cultures require strong leadership that enables their team, allows failure to be a learning experience, and sets the example of listening to customer feedback.

Conclusion

Businesses need to realize the fact that being budget-tight on software that helps you become customer-centric is disastrous. Many businesses feel that ad-hoc analyses, semi-trained support agents tagging data, and monthly reporting is enough to get the voice of the customer to the rest of the company— but it’s not.

With increasing competition among brands, you need real-time data, on-demand analyses, and automatic processes. Leveraging customer support data has emerged as a new model for growth, profitability, relationship-building, and branding.

Fast personalized response times from brands always puts forth a positive image of the brand in front of the customers. Can you list some major advantages of pursuing a holistic customer support strategy in the comments section below?