[null, {"document_url": "https://www.ngdata.com/using-customer-intelligence-data-to-improve-customer-loyalty/", "unformatted_src": "https://ngdata-web.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/2018/06/blog-252-1.jpg", "src": "https://ngdata-web.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/2018/06/blog-252-1.jpg", "formatted_filename": "blog"}, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null]

27 Customer Experience Experts Reveal the #1 Way Enterprises Can Use Customer Intelligence Data to Improve Customer Loyalty


With cloud computing and state-of-the-art data solutions available at every business’ fingertips, enterprise companies of today have access to more information about their customers than most could possibly imagine having.

But what many enterprise businesses don’t always realize is that information about their customers is valuable customer intelligence data waiting to be used and applied towards improving their business. And for customer-facing businesses, one of the best business improvements you can possibly make is increased customer loyalty.

Since NGDATA helps enterprise businesses better understand and utilize their business data, we wanted to learn more about how business data can positively affect customer loyalty. More specifically, we wanted to discover tips from customer loyalty experts on what ways a company can use customer intelligence data to forge better customer relationships. To do this, we asked 27 customer loyalty experts and customer experience marketing pros to answer this question:

“What’s the #1 way enterprises can leverage customer intelligence data to improve customer loyalty?”

We’ve collected and compiled their expert advice into this comprehensive guide on how to improve customer loyalty by using intelligence data. See what our experts said below:

Meet Our Panel of Customer Experience Experts: Jim Tincher

Jim Tincher is the Founder of Heart of the Customer. With a lifelong passion for customer experiences, Jim founded Heart of the Customer to help companies of all sizes increase customer engagement. Before launching the company, Jim led customer engagement initiatives at Best Buy, Gallup and UnitedHealth Group. In the process, he became an expert in using Voice of the Customer research to identify unmet needs, develop new products and improve customer service. His Heart of the Customer Customer Experience ModelT is a powerful tool designed with one simple goal: customer loyalty. Customers ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies use his processes to improve customer-focused results. His fascination with customer experience led him to test himself by becoming a Certified Customer Experience Professional, only the second in the world to earn such a designation.

The best way for a company to build customer loyalty is to…

Operate the way your customers want.

Sell the way they want to buy, and transact the way they want to. Data is critical – but only once your company really understands your current and ideal customer journey, and can then use the data to see how they’re doing against that.

We worked with a large manufacturer of home furnishings who focused their entire marketing efforts towards their dealer channel. But once we studied the customer’s purchasing journey, we discovered that huge sections of customers don’t want to go to dealers just to learn about the products. They were scanning social media, websites and blogs to learn about products, and were frustrated because they couldn’t find it. Once we understood what to look for, then our client was able to take a fresh look at their data, and recognize that the traffic was there all along – they just didn’t understand what customers were looking for. This knowledge enabled them to build a new strategy to disintermediate the dealer channel, and go direct to their customers.

We also worked with a non-profit who was seeing low levels of member commitment, but weren’t sure why. By studying their member journey, they were able to realize what that data was telling them, and are now developing a new strategy to raise that level of commitment. Robert Sidky

Robert Sidky is the Director of IT of Medical Guardian, a leading provider of medical alert systems, and has an extensive IT background, including more than 12 years of call center leadership, expertise in key technologies and strong telecommunications skills. Prior to joining Medical Guardian, Robert worked for Longevity Alliance as Vice President of IT Infrastructure and Operations where he oversaw disaster recovery plans, worked with inside and outside sales teams, improved processes, and managed facility build outs. Before starting at Longevity Alliance, he spent 6 years managing the Information Technology Infrastructure at Corporate Call Center where he managed IT budgets and IT capital expenses as well as contract negotiations with all third parties and customers. Robert is committed to innovative leadership and the success of Medical Guardian.

When it comes to the #1 way enterprises can improve customer loyalty, my advice is to…

Humanize the customer service experience.

When most people think about leveraging data, they don’t often think about the human component behind the data. Automated customer satisfaction surveys and review programs allow us to listen to our customer needs.

However humanizing that experience to better interact with our customers goes a long way to show we care for them as an individual not just a number. We try to complete many of these surveys over the phone, so that there is still human interface with customers. These programs allow us to provide a better overall customer experience for each person that signs up for our service and plays a big role in customer retention and loyalty. Stephen Timms

Stephen Timms is the President, Americas of ClickSoftware. Stephen has been with ClickSoftware for 9 years, rising to President of the Americas region in 2014. In his time at ClickSoftware he has led several teams through significant growth of customers, employees and revenue. He started his career teaching Networking and DataComms to post-grad students, and combines deep technical expertise to his vast sales skills and strong leadership style. He graduated Harvard Business School Executive Education – General Manager Program, in 2013.

What I believe will bring the new customer intelligence data necessary to improve customer loyalty for enterprise businesses is…

The Internet of Things.

The opportunity for otherwise inanimate objects to ‘come alive’ in the Internet-of-Things provides what I believe to be the most dramatic source of data that will help service organizations build customer loyalty and, in a way, turn themselves into heroes in the eyes of customers. Here’s how.

By relaying their state of function, machines in the IoT are going to enhance human component of service delivery, and the value that service organizations can bring to the table, by helping them carry out problem resolutions, upgrades and maintenance tasks on behalf of customers in a more predictive way. The IoT, in short, lets service engineers interact with any given machine from their desktop or mobile device — before, during and after a service visit – to decide what needs to be done, when it needs to be done (urgency) what parts are required, and whether the prescribed fix took care of everything.

Take for example, a connected washing machine. It will be able to detect that it is starting to fail and, rather than signaling to the owner and putting the onus on them to take action, it instead notifies the appliance store’s service department to reach out and schedule an appointment with that customer. In so doing, the appliance store creates a new, predictive-based service offering and solidifies its standing by virtually preventing downtime for the appliances it sells, customer after customer.

This pattern will replicate for other, more urgent systems such as heating or A/C, where the prospect of avoiding a break down on a Sunday in the dead of winter or summer carries unspeakable value. Bhavesh Vaghela

Bhavesh Vaghela is Chief Marketing Officer at ResponseTap, a market leader in call-based marketing automation. With more than 15 years’ experience in Marketing IT Software and Services, Bhavesh has worked extensively across EMEA, APAC and North America. In his role as CMO at ResponseTap, Bhavesh is able to draw from his strong experience in Enterprise Software and Cloud Marketing to drive awareness of the benefits of call-based marketing automation. Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions for him.

When it comes to successful customer interactions, the consumer is still often interested in speaking with a real person before making a purchase; in fact, 64% of people get frustrated when they are only able to interact with a company online. If companies want to improve customer loyalty, they need to…

Use the insights gained online via conversion tracking and take them to the call. This means having strong links between a call centre and the marketing division.

The data gained from conversion tracking allows us to build a consumer profile, which we can then take to the call. This means the sales agent is already clued in about the needs of the customer before they’ve picked up the phone, making them much more likely to deliver great customer service. When on the phone to a company, 78% of people in the US find it most important to be put through to a well-informed person on the other end of the line that solves the problem. Deborah Sweeney

Deborah Sweeney is the Owner and CEO of MyCorporation, a leading provider of online document filing services for clients who wish to form a corporation or limited liability company. For more than fifteen years, MyCorporation has helped small business clients and real estate investors incorporate their businesses in a reliable and affordable manner.

My company has been in business for over 16 years and we attribute a great deal of our success to customer loyalty. We believe that one of the best ways to leverage customer intelligence data to improve customer loyalty is to…

Engage the customer with additional services and value-add offerings based on their previous purchases.

We support small business owners and help them with their corporate filing paperwork. We leverage the information about the business to help them to understand additional filings and requirements over the lifecycle of their business. When the business owners/entrepreneurs can focus on their business rather than concern themselves with ongoing legal requirements, it is a huge relief. The customers know and trust that we will take care of this part of their business requirements and therefore, they become loyal customers. Don MacLennan

Don MacLennan is the CEO of Bluenose, a customer success platform that empowers SaaS businesses to proactively manage customers, and is passionate about analytics and insights that lead to great products. He has held leadership roles in several subscription-based businesses, where he came to understand the importance of customer engagement and loyalty. He started Bluenose with the desire to help other vendors build great products and delight their customers.

Customer data can be leveraged in a variety of ways to build loyalty:

Hooking up a proper understanding of usage data lets you know where your customer is on their individual journey and you can wire that into marketing automation technology to nurture your users intelligently.

For example, if you know a customer is getting stuck at a particular part, you can message them guides, walk-throughs and and instructional videos. If they’re still getting stuck, you can utilize that data to escalate so that there’s a personal outreach.

You can take it a step further by incorporating your customer’s input and data into your product in a meaningful way. Think about the example above: If a majority of users continue to get stuck at a portion, that feedback should be looped back into Product to eliminate the issue in future versions. Communicating to the user that their input made a demonstrable impact on the product can also create great customer loyalty. Scott McKain

Scott McKain is a globally recognized authority on creating distinction and delivering the “Ultimate Customer Experience ®.”  His book, “Create Distinction: What To Do When ‘Great’ Isn’t Good Enough To Grow Your Business” was named by thirty major newspapers like the Miami Herald as one of the “Ten Best Business Books of the Year.”  A member of the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame, he annually presents 75 keynotes to the world’s leading brands at major global events. Learn more about Scott and his work at http://scottmckain.com/.

The #1 way enterprises can use customer intelligence data to improve customer loyalty is by…

Using it to create an emotional connection.

Loyalty is created only when there is an emotional connection.  Why would we ever become loyal to something toward which we have no feelings?  We’re only fans of teams we care about — and we’re only loyal to organizations that create some type of emotional connectivity.

Therefore, the fundamental way in which data can have a significant impact on loyalty is when our information creates a competitive advantage that makes our interactions with customers more intensely personal.

There are three progressive levels at which any business interacts with its customers.  First is “Processing” – flawlessly delivering everything the customer has a right to expect, because they’ve chosen to do business with you — as opposed to your competition.

Next is “Service.”  “Customer service” consists solely of the activities you undertake to make Processing more convenient, friendly, and efficient.

The third, and highest, level of customer interaction is “Experience.”  This level adds the critical element of personalization — which creates emotion connectivity.  When the customer is convinced that we know – and care – more about them than a mere transaction, we stimulate loyalty and referrals.

The primary manner in which we can create personalization is through superior information.  In other words, we become able to leverage our data so we deliver insightful ideas, suggestions, and offers based upon that customer’s individual tastes, tolerances, and preferences.

This also means that we need to know more than their name, phone number, and e-mail address.  The friends we know best are frequently the ones we know the most about – the same is true with customers.  This isn’t a “Big Brother” type effort; rather, it is rooted in a desire to deliver the type of customer experience that reveals the most appealing aspects of our business to them – therefore, ensuring their reciprocal loyalty to us. Joe Pino

Joe Pinois Director of Client Success for Clutch, a leading provider of advanced consumer management solutions to a spectrum of brands. In his leadership role, he heads managed services and oversees operational aspects and strategic client relationships. Previously he served strategic operational roles for Merrill Lynch (NYSE:BAC), Fiserv (NASDAQ:FISV) and Prudential (NYSE:PRU).

The best way to strategically leverage customer intelligence to drive loyalty is to…

First and foremost, centralize your consumer data to gain a holistic understanding of your customers.

Today, many customer experiences with brands are dispersed and fragmented across an array of channels, including in-store POS, ecommerce platforms, mobile apps and social networks. Brands that are able to synthesize this data with consumer management technology are gaining the advantage of a 360-degree view of their customers.

This helps them to accurately identify their best customers, while understanding their behaviors, habits and interests on a multidimensional level. It also, in turn, helps develop meaningful relationships with relevant promotions, impactful rewards and streamlined communications across disjointed email clubs, promotional newsletters and reward programs with a focus on earning loyalty, motivating evangelism and growing the bottom line. Eric Duncan

Eric Duncan is Vice President of Digital Media & Data at LaneTerralever, a full-service strategic marketing agency. Eric is an early data, e-Commerce and online marketing pioneer who has established tenure in these disciplines over the last 20 years working for companies including Amazon.com (in its infancy), BCBSAZ, and on behalf other companies including Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Staples, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Target Corporation.

When it comes to the best way enterprise businesses can use customer intelligence data towards building loyalty, they must understand that…

Loyalty is no longer a function of rewards programs and incentives; it is a function of great customer experience.

A comprehensive assessment of non-traditional data sources (call center data, pain points on the web, etc.) and understanding how these channels support each other in solving customer problems is key. Naturally, looking for attrition triggers based on customer interaction with services or products will arm the enterprise with the comprehensive information needed to improve customer experience, therefore improving customer loyalty. John Paul Engel

John Paul Engel is President of Knowledge Capital Consulting, a boutique management consulting firm. He has worked on corporate strategy projects for some of the largest and fastest growing firms in the world. His advice has appeared in over 180 business publications including INC, US News, WSJ, and CNN Money.

The most successful program using customer intelligence, from an immediate return on investment standpoint, is…

A reminder program.

Using a customers past purchase data you can discover patterns in their ordering and then remind them when it is time to make a purchase..

For example if a customer order flowers for their wife’s birthday last year sending them a reminder that their wife’s birthday is 10 days away is powerful.

Another example could be someone who purchased 30 diet pills that should be taken one a day. At the 20 day mark send them an auto reminder to re-order.

If it is positioned as a helpful service more than a marketing piece customers will value the reminder.

I have had clients experience 7-10% response rates to direct email reminders. Ted Zollinger

Ted Zollinger is Senior Vice President of Marketing and Product Management at AccuData Integrated Marketing. Ted specializes in using modeling and predictive analytics to drive campaigns for both AccuData and its clients. He provides long term strategic leadership and direction for marketing efforts as well as the development and definition of product offerings.

The traditional marketing paradigm has changed, and customers are more in control of how they interact with the companies they do business with than ever before. When it comes down to building loyalty, all companies need to understand…

Why a customer buys from you instead of all of the other options in the market, and how you can make sure your name is in front of them when they’re ready to make a purchase.

Capturing information on interests, intents, and interactions, and using everything you know about a customer to identifying the triggers that lead to purchases will keep your customers engaged with your brand. Lauren Milligan

Lauren Milligan is the Founder and CEO of ResuMAYDAY, a career consulting firm, and a nationally recognized Career Advancement expert and speaker.

A great way to create long-term customer loyalty using business data is to…

Give your customers credit when they help solve a problem.

Example: when a client points out a speed bump in the buying or servicing process, correct it and then let your other customers know this problem has been fixed, thanks to (client name).

Then, write up a white paper, an article in the company newsletter or on the company blog. Not only will the customer who spoke up feel valued, but other customers will know that their feedback is also welcomed. John Bara

John Bara is the President and CMO of Mintigo, a predictive marketing software platform that provides intelligence for Marketo, Eloqua, SaleForce and LinkedIn users, and has spent the past twenty years igniting some of the fastest technology ramps in Silicon Valley history. At Intel, John worked on the core Pentium team and worked with major OEMs including HP adopt Intel platforms. John helped Genesys Telecom become the leader in call center software. At Interwoven, John led the marketing team as the company became the leader in enterprise content management and also led marketing at XenSource which was acquired by Citrix.

The best way for enterprises to use customer intelligence data to improve customer loyalty is to…

Use it to better understand the business needs of their prospective customers, even before the sale occurs.

Our inside sales team uses Mintigo to create a “customerDNA” about each prospective customer with hundreds of data points that are attributes of the customer’s business.

These are data points our sales reps already know before they engage with a customer. While they don’t know everything about the customer’s business…they know a lot.

This helps break the ice, demonstrate interest and empathy, and avoid the selfish element of many of the worst sales calls. In a recent article we wrote about top 3 sales mistakes, one of the biggest mistakes is not knowing anything about the prospective customer’s business. By doing the analysis of the data before the first sales call is made, you can actually predict the key elements of the sale in advance and increase customer loyalty. Chip Bell

Chip Bell is a Senior Partner with the Chip Bell Group and has served as a keynote speaker, consultant, and trainer to many Fortune 100 organizations. He has authored seven national best-selling books, including his newest book, “The 9 1/2 Principles of Innovative Service”. His work on customer loyalty and service innovation has been featured in Fortune, Businessweek, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fast Company, Inc. Magazine, USA Today and Entrepreneur.

The #1 way enterprises can use customer intelligence data to improve customer loyalty is easy and powerful:

Talk with the front line—those scouts who are daily interacting with customers and, if encouraged to do so, gathering valuable real-time intelligence on customer wants, needs, expectations and aspirations.

If leaders encouraged the front line to ask customers, “What is one way we could improve our service to you?” and then regularly asked frontline scouts what was learned, it would yield valuable and insightful early warnings, trends, and themes that no survey could ever capture. Mark Fitzsimmons

Mark Fitzsimmons is President of 360 Degrees Management Consulting, specialists in assisting companies develop competencies & implement strategies to improve business performance and proﬁtability. 360 Degrees Management Consulting works with clients to provide data based solutions for the issues preventing them from achieving their goals by bringing excellence to the way employees perform their work, and the impact it has on the customer experience.

Delivering a story that customers can relate to.

Common to every great organization is the ability to tell their story in a way that is compelling; a way that resonates with its customers and instills pride in its workforce. The story creates an emotional response that is felt by the people who connect to the brand.

For any organization to consistently do this successfully, they need to have a deep understanding of their audience. In other words, they need to know their customer and be able to articulate their customers needs, wants and desires, often better than customers can articulate on their own.

As Henry Ford once said, if we had merely asked our customers what they wanted, they would have told us, a faster horse. Generating profitable customer loyalty doesn’t happen by chance. It happens through robust design. Organizations that get to know their customer in a meaningful way, do so because of the customer intelligence they gather, and the way they incorporate it into the story they tell. Zach Goldstein

Zach Goldstein is the CEO and Founder of Thanx, which enables merchants to
effortlessly identify, engage and retain their best customers.

The best way way enterprises can leverage customer intelligence data to improve customer loyalty is to…

Focus their analysis on three transaction criteria, recency, frequency, and value, while maintaining a frictionless customer experience.

Enterprises tend to get bogged down focusing on the concept of “get more and more data.” In reality, exceptional personalization and retention marketing thrives without so-called “Level 3” insights. Starbucks, for example, boasts one of the most widely successful loyalty and payment schemes in the country. Customers receive rewards based on their visit frequency and lifetime value, not whether they bought a Venti Mocha Frappuccino or simple house blend.

Reducing friction is also imperative. Faster throughput translates into real revenue and consumers demand fewer steps at checkout, not more. Enterprises should use the Apple Pay launch as a roadmap, where speedier checkout drove strong consumer adoption, and focus on eliminating check-ins, extra plastic cards, and additional 2D code scans. Without consumer participation, loyalty program don’t exist – regardless of the customer intelligence data analyzed. Ryan Freeze

Ryan Freeze is a Speaker, Serial Entrepreneur, and the Founder of Joint Retail Ventures, LLC. Learn more about Ryan and his work at http://www.rynfrz.com/.

The best way enterprises can leverage customer intelligence data in order to improve customer loyalty is to…

Use it to support better human interactions with your customers.

While there is a lot more information available to businesses on consumer behavior leading to trends and predictive outcomes, I always suggest that companies be cautious not to overlook the fundamental fact that we are all in the business of people.

Analytics and other measurable data that relate to your customer relationships are great but should feed a human interaction. If you do not translate this information into a communicable human interaction you’re left with the cold mechanical data which doesn’t foster engagement. The value is in the way data is translated into actionable relationships.

This also doesn’t mean automated text messages or emails with contextual reminders, even as convenient as they are becoming. That’s the number one way enterprises can leverage customer intelligence toward loyalty. Katherine Hunter-Blyden

Katherine Hunter-Blyden is Managing Director of KHB Marketing Group and has 20 years experience in marketing. KHB Marketing Group creates provides results-oriented marketing strategies to businesses, nonprofits and government agencies.

The #1 thing that enterprises can do to leverage customer intelligence data to improve customer loyalty is to…

Target new customers with the greatest lifetime value.

The simplest way to do this is to compare the profile of customers with single purchases to customers with repeat purchases and develop a character profile of the repeat purchasers.

What makes these individuals unique? What differentiates them from single purchasers? Once the character profile is created, use the profile in new customer acquisition to maximize the marketing budget. Blake McGee

Blake McGee is the Demand Generation Manager for Vyopta, a company that provides the most powerful analytics and engagement platform for enterprise video conferencing networks.

The #1 way enterprises can leverage customer intelligence data to improve customer loyalty from an inbound marketing perspective is to focus on…

Turning delighted customer into promoters.

Customer support programs, forums, and dialogues with individuals will be a necessary investment for businesses who want to begin streamlining a process for retaining customer loyalty.

I’ve heard of a few IT company’s in Austin TX building dedicated online support forums as a means of collecting customer intel as well as a source of lead generation. How ever you decide to gather intelligence, the focus should be finding ways to incentivize brand promoters online with customer intel. Analytics will be an important means of gathering intel and tracking repeat interactions with your brand in 2015. Ian Aronovich

Ian Aronovich is the Co-Founder and CEO of GovernmentAuctions.org, a site that compiles and provides information about government auctions of seized and surplus merchandise from all over the country.

The number one way enterprises can leverage customer intelligence data in order to improve customer loyalty is by…

Tracking every page the customer visits on your site, and every product or service he purchases.

You can then feed them information and freebies related to their interests that you gleaned from your tracking and thereby engender loyalty and longevity in your customers. Darin Alpert

Darin Alpert is a Serial Entrepreneur and Vice President of Business Development of BirdEye, a business reputation management company.

The #1 way for enterprise companies to use customer intelligence data to improve customer loyalty is to…

Look at their online reviews on sites like Google+, Yelp, Tripadvisor, Amazon, etc. and find trends amongst happy and unhappy customers to figure out how to make changes via products or operations. John Hingley

John Hingley is the Co-founder of Dasheroo, business dashboards done right!

The #1 tactic that has begun to be the biggest thing a business can do to improve customer loyalty, but so many don’t know how to or where to start, is…

“Listening” and reacting.

Some businesses even think they’re too big to listen to what customers are saying but it’s the most important thing they can be doing to improve loyalty.

Imagine a customer of Nike has a problem with a pair of sneakers they purchased and they shout about it online, Nike hears them, publicly answers back and replaces their purchase, for free. Now they not only have a loyal customer but hopefully one that gets them 20 more customers because of the way they’ve been positively treated, all because the big company “listened” and reacted.

And more and more tools exist to surface what people are saying and enable you to respond as well as track and analyze. There has never been a better time to be able to take “big data” and boil it down into something you can take action on and track what happened. Paras Arora

Paras Arora is the Vice President of Sales of Targeting Mantra, an e-commerce personalization service.

The #1 way enterprises can leverage customer intelligence data to improve loyalty is through…


I recommend that mainly because it is the fundamental rule of Customer Relationship Management – Treat different customers differently.

Through our research we have come to realize that customers reveal huge amounts of information about their preferences through their cross-channel activity and interactions.

They’d often switch between mobile, social, and web channels. So it becomes nearly essential for companies to follow that thread of interactions and customize display in a manner that would increase the chances of conversion. Steve Deckert

Steve Deckert is Co-Founder of Sweet Tooth, a loyalty app for retailers. Steve has helped over 3,500 merchants around the world reward over 15 million customers, improve their customer experience, develop their customer loyalty, and increase long term profitability.

The best way for enterprise retailers to use business data to improve customer loyalty is to…

First identify quantitative measures of what a loyal customer is, and what a regular customer is.

The objective is to determine the measurable differences between loyal and regular customers, and then implement strategies and tactics that specifically target moving these metrics.

Key metrics are customer lifetime value (CLV), average order value (AOV), likelihood to churn (%), purchases per year, and proclivity to refer friends (using Net Promoter Score).

Generally, enterprises will implement different strategies at different stages of the “customer journey.” The ideal customer journey is: Visitor > Purchaser > Repeat (loyal) purchaser > Brand advocate.

For example: an enterprise that discovers repeat purchasers make an additional 3 purchases per year (when compared to a regular purchasers) should implement a rewards program where points are set to expire at a frequency that motivates an additional 3 purchases per year. Ashton Schmidt

Ashton Schmidt is a Marketing Strategist at Threshold Interactive, Ad Age’s reigning Small Agency of the Year (West). She works on CPG brands such as Butterfinger, Hot Pockets, and Nestea.

One of the best methods for an enterprise to use customer data to increase customer loyalty is by…

Participating in social media, and through social listening.

Digitally interacting with fans and followers gives a brand a friendly, relatable vibe. Consumers feel special and cared for when a brand takes the time to engage.

But which platform is best? What tone of voice should be used? What types of content would consumers enjoy?

These are all questions that can be answered through social listening. Social listening is the modern day focus group. Far more efficient and accurate, it involves gathering organic mentions of a brand across all digital and social platforms including websites, blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter, and more. Social listening is the #1 way enterprises can obtain and leverage customer intelligence data to improve customer loyalty.

By employing social listening through a service such as Radian6 or Crimson Hexagon, analysts are able to see not only what is being said about a brand, but who is saying it. From there, they can dive into demographic and psycho-graphic data to be put to use in their social media strategy. Mining nuggets of data about consumers such as why they love the brand, their affinities, the social platforms they use most, their geographic location, and their age and gender, puts marketers in a position to understand how to best communicate with their consumers. Brands are able to find the right tone of voice, the best platforms, and applicable subject matters to delight their followers.

Leveraging social media, with the help of social listening, is the #1 way enterprises can improve customer loyalty.

Jeff Catlin 
Jeff Catlin serves as the CEO and Managing Director at Lexalytics Inc. and has over 15 years of experience in the fields of search, classification and text analytics products and services. Prior to the formation of Lexalytics, Mr.Catlin served as the General Manager for the Unstructred Data group of LightSpeed software.

One of the best ways to use customer intelligence data to improve customer loyalty is…

By crunching feedback from your customers so that you can see what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong, at both the macro and micro levels.

You can use text analytics to analyze tweets, emails, survey responses, and other customer feedback to provide insight in many ways. Creating new leads/opportunities, confirming a target market, helping with customer churn, etc.

One of our clients is one of the biggest airline companies in the world, and they analyze all social platforms using sentiment analysis to make sure that all of their customers are reasonably satisfied. A customer sent an angry tweet about how the airline lost his bags on his recent flight. This airline company was able to filter through the thousands of tweets they get per day and extract only the ones with negative sentiment. The airline company was able to respond to the customer, return his bags and offer him a free upgrade on his next flight. The responded by sending multiple tweets of gratitude, showing their loyalty to the airline and everyone on the twitter sphere.

Another client specializes in developing video games. They use text analytics to see how the gaming community feels about their games. They feed the engine comments on reddit, the game’s blog, community forums, and they extract the popular themes that run through this dataset. If one of these themes, like “gameplay”, is very negative, then their development team will read some of the most negative comments, see how many negative comments there are that surround this theme, and take action accordingly. They do the same process to see what they’re doing right.

This helps keep their customers loyal to the particular game, as well as the company for doing such a great job at listening and making the changes that their customer actually want. David Ring

David Ring is the Product Marketing Manager at Computer Market Research, a software company based in San Diego, CA. The company is currently working on launching their marketing automation platform, MioDatos.

The best way to use customer intelligence data to improve customer loyalty is…

Through customer satisfaction surveys.

We use myReferralIndex, also known as the Net Promoter Score, to get an understanding of what our customers think of our business and how we can improve. The survey asks 3 questions. They include how likely are you to refer us, why did you give us this score, and how can we improve. Asking your customers how you can improve empowers them to speak their opinion and have it be heard. Businesses can use this survey to not only promote customer loyalty but also to grow their business.

Data-Driven Solutions from NGDATA

