Customer Support Software Changed the Way We View our Customers
Today’s customer support software not only tells us what our customers do, but tells us why and shows us how to change behavior patterns. Customer support software gleans a wealth of information which, if not acted upon, can be like leaving money on the table.
How do you view customers? Most of us view our customers through the eyes of “what did they do?” which is past experience and their past behavior. Since adding predictive analytics we can look forward and make educated decisions which anticipate the future needs of our customers. CSM software helps us solve problems, achieve business objectives, uncover patterns of customer behavior, and ultimately, improve performance.
Fewer than 25% of companies conduct any business-case models for IT investments such as analytics. However, a 2004 report of dozens of companies found that the median ROI for projects that incorporated predictive technologies was 145 percent. That compared to a median ROI of 89 percent for those that employed only traditional methods of analysis.
In the traditional view customers are seen as a group such as “all holiday shopping increased by x percent in online shopping.” However, today’s company needs to dig deeper than that to understand changing customer attitudes and spending patterns. Those attitudes and patterns must be leveraged into deep, long-term connections with high-value customers.
The new view we have of customers is “why did they do what they did?”, “what were they responding to that we did?”, “what influenced their change in behavior?”, and “Will they make the same decisions in the same circumstances next year?” Answers to these questions allow us to do things like discount, offer free shipping, cross-sell, or up-sell at prime times to garner the greatest returns.
