Customer Analytics Tools: The Modern Tech Stack for 2024 and Beyond

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    More About Customer Analytics

    Customer data is floating everywhere. Unfortunately, the traditional analytics machine is a clogged one. It involves multiple teams to harvest the data (which is often incomplete) and analyze it (often inaccurately), before taking action (or not). But customer analytics tools are evolving and fast thanks to the AI revolution. Let’s check out the top customer analytics tools you must consider today. 

    What is Customer Analytics?

    Customer analytics is a methodology that leverages components like user segmentation, predictive modeling algorithms, data visualization tech, real-time in-app user behavior tracking, and communication data to be strategic, and move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach. These tools help improve business outcomes across  product, customer success, support, growth, marketing and sales.  

    Customer analytics can help teams optimize their customer experience to reduce points of  friction (that often leads to churn) and increase the type of engagement that can lead to upselling and advocacy opportunities. By leveraging insights gleaned from customer analytics, B2B businesses can not only attract customers effectively, but can orchestrate exceptional experiences across various touchpoints.

    What are Customer Analytics Tools?

    In the dynamic realm of today’s competitive market and ongoing global recession, relying on guesswork and shooting in the dark are no longer viable options. 

    Customer analytics tools gather data from communication channels such as emails, in-app chats, websites, social media, and review portals, then use analysis techniques like data mining and predictive modeling to transform raw data into meaningful customer behavior and preference insights.

    Benefits of Using Customer Analytics Tools

    In addition to providing a 360-view of the customer journey, customer data allows organizations to strengthen their multifaceted customer-centric strategies. Additionally, this approach provides a guiding compass for aligning business practices with evolving customer needs and preferences, which is essential for effective acquisition, retention, and engagement strategies.

    Here are just a few of the benefits of implementing customer analytics tools:

    • Enhanced customer engagement to create stickier accounts
    • Increased understanding of upselling and cross-selling opportunities
    • Optimizing the user journey with an iterative approach
    • Reduced churn rates by detecting friction points in real-time
    • Boosting brand awareness and enhancing customer advocacy  
    • Lowering acquisition and retention costs significantly
    • Reducing the need for manual analysis (often slow and incomplete)

    Types of Customer Analytics Tools

    Creating the optimal Customer Analytics tech stack to address your specific use cases and requirements can get complicated. It involves harnessing a diverse array of tools to collect and scrutinize customer data, enabling you to track and  analyze user web behavior, gain direct insights, and gauge customer responses to your product features, all ideally in real-time with minimal manual intervention.

    The modern tech stack should ideally include technology that can provide the following insights: 

    Customer Engagement

    The inclusion of behavioral data from user  interactions across channels is imperative for real-time insights and response, like sending a personalized email or other communication based on how the customer is interacting with the product, training materials, content, etc 

    Enter customer engagement tools. 

    These solutions analyze customer data from the various communication channels. These analytics serve a dual purpose: offering insights into customer engagement and serving as a catalyst for improving customer experience initiatives and driving targeted ops. Businesses can strategically implement in-app guides and highlight the value of underutilized features to reduce friction.

    Recommended customer engagement tools: 

    • Sendoso – Sendoso catalyzes revenue growth and enhances customer retention by allowing users to create personalized, automated, and meaningful user experiences. It helps detect friction points and reveal growth opportunities.
    • Verint – Verint harnesses the potential of AI and data, unlocking outcomes that were scarcely imagined a few years ago. By gaining new insights, you can elevate the customer experience and reduce customer engagement costs.
    • Stonly – Stonly empowers numerous businesses to achieve swift and precise resolutions by offering step-by-step guides, decision trees, and dependable AI answers for both agents and customers.

    Service Data 

    A recent survey by Hiver found a staggering 72% of customers will switch brands following just one unfavorable customer experience and 52% of them expect a response to their queries within 24 hours. This underlines the critical importance of delivering positive and seamless interactions – fast- especially as businesses scale up. 

    Having updated and accurate service data helps businesses seamlessly track, prioritize, manage, respond to, and resolve customer queries or employee requests, streamlining the support process for enhanced efficiency.

    Recommended service data tools:  

    Zendesk – Zendesk helps extract service data while concealing behind-the-scenes complexities. It balances sophistication for intricate use cases and simplicity for swift implementation, all in a user-friendly way.

    Intercom – Intercom helps boost productivity and enhance engagement by guiding customers before they ask for help. It provides immediate and cohesive support across all channels and helps collect vital service data.

    LiveAgent– LiveAgent helps elevate post-sales satisfaction by enabling seamless support across all communication channels, while providing revenue teams with in-depth service data and actionable insights.

    Product Usage and Engagement Data

    By harnessing product usage data, customer engagement solutions can be contextualized and personalized in a relevant way. From user onboarding and customer success to in-app messaging, A/B testing, feedback collection, and more, product usage and engagement data is now needed for businesses looking to scale up in 2024.

    Product usage and engagement data plays a pivotal role in enhancing customer interactions with your product. Armed with this knowledge, you can strategically optimize future engagement initiatives throughout the entire customer journey.

    Recommended product usage tools:

    • Mixpanel – Mixpanel is a product analytics solution that enables teams to effortlessly scrutinize real-time interactions, conversions, and retention across devices, fostering continual enhancement of user experiences.
    • Amplitude – Amplitude offers comprehensive insights for your digital product strategy. Tailored for modern product and growth teams, it provides real-time analytics, cross-platform tracking, and robust behavioral analytics.
    • PendoPendo empowers you to enhance software experiences, ensuring happier and more productive users. Gain insights to address key questions, helping users derive maximum value and fostering growth efficiently.

    Loyalty Data 

    The foundation of customer retention  is laid by exceptional customer experiences. Enter customer loyalty data. This data  can help you understand which customers are most likely to  be repeat customers, or recommend your product or service and analyze the patterns that these buyers have in common. 

     Certain customer analytics tools can unveil insights like revealing whether customers consistently choose your brand, which customers are most likely to leave positive reviews on social media or review portals, and more. 

    Recommended loyalty data tools:  

    • Talon.One – With its customizable rule-based engine, Talon.One helps engage customers across various touchpoints, enabling contextual campaigns and automated workflows without the need for in-house development.
    • Trustpilot – Trustpilot empowers businesses to engage and foster trust with customers by enhancing overall experiences, increasing Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), conversion rates, and Return on Investment (ROI).
    • YotpoYotpo helps businesses drive conversions and social proof. It helps leverage customer loyalty data across all communication channels to optimize the customer experience and enhance growth metrics.

    Business Data 

    Also known as Business Intelligence, business data tools play a pivotal role in the collection, processing, and analysis of vast volumes of both structured and unstructured data sourced from internal and external systems. Ranging from documents, images, and emails to videos, journals, books, and social media posts, these tools are adept at exploring diverse data formats. 

    Business data empowers revenue executives to make informed decisions, leveraging insights derived from predictions, market trends, and key performance indicators (KPIs) – all invaluable data-driven decision-making assets.

    Recommended business data tools:  

    • Tableau – Tableau empowers individuals and organizations to embrace a data-driven approach. This analytics platform simplifies data exploration and management, accelerating the discovery and sharing of key insights.
    • Qlik Sense – Qlik Sense offers augmented analytics, visualization, dashboards, embedded analytics, reporting, and alerting. Its AI-powered tech reveals hidden insights through dynamic data exploration and fast calculations.
    • Sisense – Sisense empowers organizations to integrate analytics seamlessly into customer and employee applications. An AI-driven analytics cloud platform, it customizes intelligence, ensuring timely insights in any context.

    Predictive Data 

    Predictive analytics utilizes data to foresee forthcoming trends and events. Leveraging historical data, this methodology offers a lens into potential scenarios, steering strategic decisions for businesses. The predictions generated by predictive analytics range from immediate future events, such as forecasting churn, to more distant projections like upselling or growth opportunities.

    Predictive data emerges as a potent compass for organizations navigating the unpredictable terrain of the future. 

    Recommended predictive data tools: 

    • Staircase AI – Staircase AI enables the utilization of customer intelligence for predicting churn, uncovering expansive growth opportunities, and eliminating the necessity for cumbersome (and inaccurate) manual processes.
    • DomoBeyond traditional BI, Domo provides user-friendly dashboards and apps, connecting with existing systems for secure, scalable optimization of critical business processes, fostering exponential results.
    • Pecan AI – Amidst budget constraints and resource limitations, Pecan AI’s low-code predictive modeling platform empowers business teams with AI-driven insights, facilitating data-driven decisions and goal attainment.

    The Problem with Customer Analytics Tools

    Using customer analytics tools can help you make more data-driven customer decisions, but the harsh reality is that real-life scenarios are far from ideal. First, you’ll have to deal with implementation and integration technicalities. Then comes the onboarding and training process, without which your adoption and ROI will plummet rapidly. Thirdly, comes the most challenging step of them all – which can be difficult when teams are expected to do more with less manpower and resources.

    The problem can be broken down into two main challenges.

    Somebody Needs to Analyze the Data 

    Decoding the data maze is no joke. Since customer analysis tools generate a multitude of data streams (often out of context), sifting through them can seem like a challenge.Subsequently, it also requires meticulous processing, cleansing, and the unbiased analysis of the data to extract meaningful and actionable insights. 

    Somebody Needs to Actionize

    It’s possible to analyze data and extract valuable insights with a small team, but someone needs to take action on those insights. Relying on manual processes can lead to issues such as outdated or incomplete data being used to decide on action items. Additionally, as a business grows, the number of action items can become overwhelming for CSMs, support, and sales reps.

    Achieving Sustainable Revenue Growth with AI-Powered Customer Analytics Tools

    AI-powered customer intelligence tools are changing the way businesses break down user behavior and sentiment, all in an automated and user-friendly way. Your CS, sales, support, and marketing teams can now work with unbiased,  accurate and complete data that’s analyzed in real-time for best results. Some Generative AI tools even help with mundane day-to-day tasks like drafting emails and messages.

    Embracing AI-powered customer analytics and intelligence tools is the best thing you can do in today’s tough economic climate, where revenue executives are under pressure to deliver more with less. Don’t get left behind. The future is here.