The key to a standout CX? Data — and the know-how to use it

For B2B companies and B2C companies alike, the common denominator to delivering a superior customer experience is data, and more specifically, how good a company is at leveraging data to shape its CX.

In fact, as critical as CX is to the success of an organization — “Experience is everything,” according PwC — data is key to companies gaining a thorough understanding of customer preferences, priorities, tendencies, expectations and pain points, and having a clear line of sight into the quality of customer journeys. Excel at identifying, gathering, curating and analyzing the right data, from the right sources, at the right time, and you put yourself in a great position to provide a consistently excellent CX, which in turn translates directly to the bottom line. In a 2023 report, Forrester found that a one-point CX improvement by a mass-market auto manufacturer would lead to more than $1 billion in additional revenue. For an auto/home insurer, that figure approached $370 million.

The reason I’m highlighting data’s critical role in shaping CX? Because I see a huge opportunity for organizations, whether they operate in the B2C or B2B space, to use data to build a decided and sustainable competitive advantage by providing the kinds of experiences and journeys that customers crave — but evidently aren’t getting nearly enough of these days. The perception of CX quality among U.S. consumers in 2024 dropped for an unprecedented third consecutive year, according to Forrester, to its lowest point since the inception of the firm’s CX Index. At the industry level, the CX averages for 10 industries significantly declined, while only one industry’s improved: airlines.

That lackluster performance opens the door wide for companies to cultivate new customers and strengthen relationships with existing ones simply by providing a better CX. To get there, companies must have a mastery of their data. Here’s a look at how to go about gaining that mastery, and bringing it to bear on your organisation’s CX.

Prioritise integration.

Having the freshest, most accurate and relevant data means little unless that data can flow unimpeded, in real time, within and across teams and the entire business. If it resides within scattered spreadsheets and siloed systems that don’t communicate well with one another, data can be lost irretrievably as it moves from one system to another (if it can move at all), while uncovering the insight that informs how to improve CX can be exceedingly difficult and time-consuming.

On the other hand, if your organisation’s digital systems (for finance and accounting, customer relationship management, etc.) are fully integrated within a single seamless environment, that puts you in great position to apply intelligent analytics to your data (more on that in a moment) to uncover friction points in CX and identify opportunities to elevate the overall customer journey. Essentially, it gives your business a single source of truth. By synthesizing operational and sales data with CX data gathered in the moment from customers, you’re likely to find uniquely valuable insight into how operational factors impact the customer experience.

Cast a wide net to capture data. Just as important, your organisation must have tools to gather fresh, actionable CX-relevant data from internal and external sources. Internally, that means capturing data around every single customer touchpoint and interaction, and using listening capabilities to collect feedback directly via in-the-moment customer experience surveys and indirectly by gathering and analyzing posts on social media platforms (artificial intelligence can help). As part of the data gathering process, be sure to key in on the metrics that paint the most honest and accurate picture of your CX, such as Net Promoter Score, the most widely used CX metric among B2B companies, according to the Qualtrics XM Institute.

All that information comes together to form a unified 360-degree view of the customer experience across touchpoints and channels. That gives you the means to shape customer experiences that distinguish you from the crowd. And not only can data show you how to improve CX, it also can identify emerging customer needs and wants that lead to opportunities to develop new products and services.

Yes, there’s an investment to arm yourself with the capabilities to capture and manage all this data. In my experience, that investment pays off exponentially over time.

Apply intelligent (and predictive) analytics to your data.

Analytics tools give you the means to slice, dice, overlay and correlate data in all sorts of creative and revealing ways, so you’re using solid, data-derived insight, not just experience and gut feel, to shape your CX. They can show you who your ideal customers are from a profitability standpoint. They can break down CX and financial data, for example, to reveal a category of customers that are highly profitable for your business but also unsatisfied with the CX you provide, so you can find specific ways to address that disconnect. AI-driven tools also can predict the impact certain tweaks to your CX, such as remedying friction points in the ordering process or in order fulfillment, likely will have on sales and revenue from specific customer segments.

In a world in which the cycle time to sense, analyze and respond to sentiment data and other CX-related information matters more than ever, AI-driven analytics tools can do all this rapidly, so you can roll out CX upgrades quickly and consistently.McKinsey research shows that improving the customer experience can increase sales revenues by 2 to 7%, profitability by 1 to 2%, and overall shareholder return by 7 to 10%. Ultimately, data is the fuel that powers this value-creation engine.