As we shared in our recent eBook, customer loyalty today is driven primarily by a company’s interaction with its customers and how well it delivers on their wants and needs. Understanding and effectively developing a positive customer experience (CX) has become a requirement for any brand seeking to be relevant and combat growing competition.

CX today requires a combination of data-driven insights, friction-free customer interactions and an agile approach to meet them where they are and want to be.

Data-driven organizations have increased investments in data and the volume of it and for good reason; they realize that information about the buyer’s journey is critical to understanding, addressing and optimizing the customer experience.

As a way to make sense of the volume of data they’re managing through, marketing technology platforms and solutions have become ubiquitous, providing a seemingly endless firehose of information to sift through. Just look at the 3,874 marketing technology solutions represented in Scott Brinker’s 2016 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic. That’s more than twice the number of platforms than last year!

In a recent Forbes Insights Report based on a global survey of senior executives of large organizations, 58% of executives report actively using data, including social media data, to measure the success of their CX efforts. In fact, some organizations have literally thousands of metrics associated with CX.

But as I previously shared, marketers don’t need more data and metrics, they need more insights. Specifically, insights based upon understanding the metrics that relate to customer satisfaction, engagement and buying decisions. These insights can go a long way toward creating and improving customer experiences designed to keep customers loyal and engaged with a brand.

In the survey, marketers also reported a challenge with customer service requests requiring a chain of activities across the enterprise in order to deliver a good CX.

This speaks to another issue I’ve addressed. Marketers need a faster path to obtaining insights. Translating data into insights in real-time gives them an edge over the competition in improving customer experience, the only durable competitive advantage for brands today

How do organizations improve their ability to translate data into actionable insights? It’s been well documented that a chief concern among marketing leaders is finding staff members skilled in measurement and analysis, to the tune of 56% according to a survey released last month. For many businesses, the answer has been to hire more analysts to make sense of the data – and faster. However, for the growing number of businesses wanting to harness the power of influencer marketing, common marketing analytics approaches struggle with the intersection of influencers and social media analytics. Then there’s the issue of organizational readiness and a need to be more agile in meeting the needs of today’s digital consumer. One popular option is a technology-assisted service which can operate like a special forces team, ramping up a team’s capabilities, even training in-house marketers and their agency partners on how to analyze and translate influencer and social media data into meaningful, actionable insights.

The importance of pulling every lever possible to improve the quality of and speed at which influencer data is translated into insights cannot be underscored enough. Every minute of every day, online influencers are sharing a treasure trove of information about a brand’s customer experience. Their comments, conversations and the content they share provides insight into issues and opportunities with customer touchpoints. And, in the relentless pursuit of finding and keeping customers, they reveal potential avenues for improving CX.

It’s certainly great news that a growing number of organizations using data-driven CX are realizing a positive impact on improving customer experience. However, as more organizations adopt it, the question they should be asking themselves is whether they’re spending too much time in a state of intoxication – a virtual flood of data -- versus focusing on quickly getting to the insights that can help them with retaining customers long-term.

Download our latest eBook, Influencer Engagement for Brand Leaders: A Customer Experience Requirement, to get tips for leveraging the power of online influencers to provide the insight necessary to get your CX improvements farther, faster. As always, contact us if we can help you get started.