The importance of customer service data in marketing really can’t be understated. Customer service staff are working on the frontline, they know your customers inside out. If you can collect key data from your customer service team and customers, you can start to build a picture of how your customers feel about your product or service.

In the past, marketing used to contain a good dose of guesswork. Marketers would look at the things customers (and everyone) seem to like and try and fit their brand around this. This is why you used to see so many adverts featuring sports cars or attractive women, even if the ad was for something completely unrelated like laundry detergent. Today, marketing is much more data driven. One survey of marketers found that 77% are confident in their data-driven approach and that 74% expect to increase their data-driven marketing budget in the next year.

Additionally, a Harvard Business Review study found that 76% of companies who operate with advanced technology integration and use analytics in their business goals report a better market position than those who don’t. Put simply, in today’s world, utilizing data is no longer an option, it’s a necessity if you want to secure your place in the market.

The Importance of Customer Data

Before we dive in, let’s first define exactly what customer data is. Customer data is essentially any kind of information which indicates how customers are using your product or service, or how they interact with your brand. By collecting, tracking, and analyzing this data, you can gain a better understanding of the user experience.

Why is Customer Service Data Important in Marketing?

 Customer data and customer service data can give several benefits. For example:

• It helps the business create better products.
• It helps increase conversions.
• When you understand customer expectations, you can attract more customers.
• It helps promote excellent communication with customers.
• Improves customer service.

What is Customer Service Analytics?

Put simply, customer service analytics is the process of collecting, tracking, and analyzing customer feedback to find valuable insights. By doing this you better understand your customer’s wants, needs, and expectations, and can build a great marketing strategy.

Several data sources can be used to gain key insights. For example, live chat data, chatbot data, NPS surveys, CSAT scores, emails, social media comments, and feedback from the customer service team. You can bring together qualitative and quantitative data to get a good picture of your customer base. Once you have this data you can work to improve your ROI.

Honest Marketing

A key thing to remember is that customer service analytics should serve to help the whole business, not just the marketing team. What we’re trying to say here is that you should never lie to your customers, whether that’s an outright lie or a creative bending of the truth. Often companies use misleading statistics in their marketing. These statistics might be based on real surveys they have conducted with customers gained from the customer service team, but they are still misleading to customers. Let’s take a look at a few examples:

• Small sample sizes or Favorable sample groups – “95% of our customers love our product”. This is much less meaningful if you first identify your loyal customers and only send the survey out to these customers. You can also exaggerate your success by using a small sample size. If only 10 people answer your survey, then you can truthfully say that 60% of people like X thing about your business. However, this sample is not representative of your full customer base.
• Tricky surveys – “100% of our customers are satisfied with their customer service experience”. You could easily get this result by sending out a survey where the multiple-choice answers are “Extremely satisfied, Very satisfied, Satisfied”. In this survey, there’s no option for the customer to say they were unsatisfied, so only satisfied people will answer the survey.

When using customer service data in your marketing, the goal should be to align your marketing with the goals of your customers. If short response time is important to your customers and your company has a short response time, then it’s a good idea to use this in your marketing. However, it’s a terrible idea to use misleading data to imply that you have a great customer service response time if this isn’t true.

Customer experiences and customer loyalty are extremely important in 2020 and will be into the future. Today, consumers are much more cautious about the companies they buy from. They want to buy from companies that align with their beliefs and also offer a great experience. Customers want convenience, a seamless buying experience, and a consistent experience from the companies they buy from. Today, having a good customer experience is much more important than getting the best price. This is why review sites like TrustPilot and Google Reviews are so important. Sure, price is still important to customers, but ultimately, they want to be reassured that they will have a good experience. They want to know that their product will reach their door quickly and that they will be updated every step of the way. They want to feel confident that if something goes wrong, that the customer service team will fix it swiftly.

Trust can be eroded extremely quickly if you mislead your customers, and since loyal customers spend more money than their less loyal counterparts, you must be honest. Focus on marketing your strengths, but don’t lie about your weaknesses. You can always work behind the scenes to improve your weaknesses by investing in emerging technology like AI chatbots, omnichannel platforms, analytics software, employee training, and other things.

Boosting ROI Through Customer Service Data

Here are some top tips for how to improve your ROI using customer service and customer experience data.

Segment your customer base

You can segment customers based on:

• Job title.
  • Number of monthly visits
  • The product or type of product they purchase
  • Location/age/gender

Use Text Analytics

Text analytics software can help you process tons of text data to find key insights. You can do this with live chat, email, social media, chatbots, surveys, and more. Analyzing text data is much easier than listening to phone calls and voice analyzing software is still in its infancy.

Analyze Customer Churn Rate

Do you have a high churn rate? If so, why do you think this is? Try to analyze your churn rate in relation to things happening in your business or actions you have taken. For example, did you lose customers with your last update? If so, it might mean that you misjudged what your customers want from your product or misunderstood how they actually use it. It could also mean that the marketing team miscommunicated something about the product and this turned some customers away.

Identify Opportunities Have Yield the Highest Impact

When it comes to ROI, you want to focus on the things that will have the most impact. Instead of trying to improve the customer experience for everyone in one go, start with one customer persona and try to make the customer experience great for these customers.

Three Tips for Getting Started

Have a Well-Defined Goal

We’re in the age of productivity. It seems you can hardly go online without seeing an article or video telling you how to be more productive with your time. Maybe you should start time-boxing like Elon Musk or Bill Gates? Maybe you need a to-do list? You get the idea. However, the key thing to remember about being productive, whether it’s in business or in your personal life, is that the quality of your goals is paramount. A goal like “write a novel” or “get 500 customers” is essentially useless on its own – it’s far too high level. If writing a novel was as easy as putting one thing on your to-do list “Monday – write a novel”, then we’d all have written novels by now, and yet most of the people that want to do this in their life haven’t done it. Why? Because the goal wasn’t well defined. You have to plan each step of the journey and take each step at a time. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour.

We recommend using the SMART approach to your marketing goals.

• Specific – Your objective must be specific rather than vague. Consider why it’s important, who is involved, which resources you need to use.
• Measurable – You need to be able to measure your progress towards your goals. This means you need to work with specific numbers or data, for example, “30% increase in sales”, “40% email open rate”, “X website traffic”.
• Achievable – It has to be something that can be reasonably achieved, and you should be able to demonstrate this by having achievable smaller steps.
• Relevant – This is the “Why”. You have to be able to demonstrate that this goal meets the wider objectives of the business such as increasing revenues or growing the customer base.
• Time-bound – This means setting a deadline for your goal as well as milestones and benchmarks for progress.

Use the Right Data

Not all data is created equal, and good data-driven marketing campaigns only work with accurate and relevant data. You can start with first-party data. This is data that you collect from your business such as:

• Sales histories (which products are the most popular)
• Customer service communications (how do customers feel about the product).
• Customer actions online (How did your customers behave on your website? Did they spend longer on one page than another? Does one page have a very high bounce rate? If so, then why is this?).
• Customer surveys.

You can then supplement this data by buying third-party data to find out more about customers within your market niche. Other companies have likely also collected great data you can use. Once you have all the data together, you can see much more clearly where your priorities should be in your marketing campaign.

Select Your Marketing Channels

Your marketing channels must be well aligned with your target audience and be appropriate for the campaign. If your customer service data has shown you that most of your customers for Product X are over the age of 50, then it would be silly to put a marketing campaign directed at these companies on TikTok or Instagram, where the user base is typically under 35.

Consider the strengths and weaknesses of each channel and focus on the channels that will give you the highest ROI.