Unified Customer Intelligence. It’s new. It’s exciting. It’s rapidly shifting the CX industry.
But how do you go about building a business case to bring Unified Customer Intelligence into your organisation?
Sadly, no matter how revolutionary a new system or software may be, it’s unlikely that it’ll get funded unless you set out a clear and compelling business case to justify the additional spend and to show how it aligns with your business's overall CX, revenue, and growth goals.
This is especially true for investments in revolutionary new technologies like Chattermill’s Unified Customer Intelligence platform.
With multiple projects and business departments all fighting over the same funds, it’s essential that you set out why Unified Customer Intelligence will help you better understand your customers, drive growth, and help your leadership team achieve the objectives they’re personally accountable for.
It’s only by doing this that you can swiftly embed Unified Customer Intelligence within your organisation.
This piece will outline the business outcomes you’ll need to cover in your business case. Some of these are easier to quantify – like improving customer retention. Others are broader business benefits that are also worth highlighting. We’ll highlight some key stats for both.
Find out more about Unified Customer Intelligence
Better understand your customers
One of the critical things we all need to do to improve our businesses’ customer experience and, consequently, retain customers is to better understand our customers in the first place.
Companies often dedicate multiple resources to this. Marketing sends out user surveys or spends thousands on market research reports. CX collects qualitative customer data. Product teams go through hundreds of rounds of user testing.
While all of these are important and provide data that can be used to improve each of these areas, none of them gives the full picture. The result is no team truly understands what their customers think and feel about the experience, marketing, and products delivered.
This is where Unified Customer Intelligence comes into play. Why? Because it analyses every customer conversation, every customer feedback, and customer support interaction. So product, marketing, CX, and almost every other part of the organisation are armed with the customer reality. This then enables you to deliver improvements that delight customers.
When you’re writing your business case, if you’re going to include a section on better understanding your customers (and in our opinion, you probably should!), ensure that you frame it in this way: Unified Customer Intelligence enables ALL of your teams and your business to become more customer-centric.
As we know, customer-centricity separates brands like Spotify and Amazon and forgotten brands like Kodak and Blockbuster.
Unify your customer data
Companies today have more customer data than ever before. But few have a truly unified view.
In a survey at the International Customer Experience Management Summit earlier this year, only 10% of CX professionals said they have a unified view of their customers.
Whatever the root cause of such a non-unified view of your customers, the result is that you make decisions based on a partial understanding of what your customers think and feel about your products and services. For example, if you send out surveys that only deliver quantitative data, you don’t understand the essence of your customers’ feelings.
Further, if all teams are only looking at one or two data sources, this gives them a siloed view and means each team has their own view of what should be prioritised, making it very difficult to prioritise as a whole business.
There's also often overlap between sources. For example, in support data people will tell you about their upstream experience with the product/service, and within app & Trustpilot data, people will tell you about support. Without a unified view, you're missing key parts of the customer journey.
Unified Customer Intelligence helps businesses combat this. By analysing text and unstructured data, you get a fully-formed picture of all your customers, based on what they’re saying in their reviews, feedback, conversations, and support interactions.
It’s this unified approach that will allow you and your business to make decisions based on the customer reality, ensure all teams are aligned around your CX strategy and help you prioritise based on the full customer journey as opposed to pieces of the puzzle.
Improve your business's customer experience
Improving your customer experience is more than likely why you’ve chosen to push to bring Unified Customer Intelligence into your organisation.
As we well know, delivering exceptional customer experiences is what sorts the wheat from the chaff, whatever industry you work in.
Chattermill’s Unified Customer Intelligence platform enables you to do just that. After all, you can’t radically improve your customer experience unless you fully understand what your customers truly think about your products, experiences and brand.
There’s a good reason why the world’s most customer-centric companies – including Uber, Spotify, Wise, and HelloFresh – power their customer experience with Chattermill. When it comes to building your business case, this is not a point to be overlooked.
Drive greater customer retention
We all need to improve customer retention to grow our businesses.
According to an eConsultancy report, 82% of companies say that retention is cheaper to execute than acquisition. Fundera's research also tells us that 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers, with 80% of profits coming from 20% of a company’s existing customers. In other words, customer retention is critical to business profitability and success.
What’s the best way to retain your customers? I hate to drive this point home again, but retaining customers ultimately comes down to understanding why fans of your brand love you, and also, why those who leave you choose to do so.
Unified Customer Intelligence enables you to find out both. Not just from the surveys you send, but also from customer support interactions, app and public reviews, and conversations.
The business benefit is pretty clear: if you can understand and retain your customers, you can drive growth, expand margins, and increase profits.
Enable your business to become more customer-centric
A less quantifiable but decisive outcome of adopting Unified Customer Intelligence is its impact on customer-centricity.
Recent research from Usersnap tells us that customer-centric organisations experience 3x growth compared to non-customer centric organisations. (3% annual growth compared to 9%).
So, being customer-centric pays. We only need to look to the unicorns and market-dominating brands today. Their growth is all built on being customer-centric. Amazon, Uber, Spotify, Monzo… this list could go on.
So how does Chattermill help? It enables you to get closer to your customers by allowing you and your business to easily see what they think and feel. Across every single interaction you have with them.
Customer-centricity might not be the first thing at the top of your CEO’s mind when it comes to deciding budgets (though in some organisations this might well be the case). But the proof lies in the fact that almost every brand that succeeds in today’s economy is customer-centric. And many of them power their customer-centricity with Chattermill.
The key to a successful business case? Paint a compelling picture
Sad though it may be, the department that gets its projects funded is that which can tell the most compelling story. There’s a good reason why sales and marketing get such a large budget share when you think about it.
But, since executives and business leaders may not know much about Unified Customer Intelligence or its revolutionary benefits, it’s doubly essential to paint a compelling story of why investing in a platform like Chattermill will deliver critical business value.
For more tips on how to get executive buy-in for Unified Customer Intelligence, check out this recent post on How to get executive buy-in for Unified Customer Intelligence.
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