Guest blog post by Ronald van Loon.
Do you know what your customers want when they visit your website? And do you know what makes them bounce away to visit another site instead of choosing products or services and continuing to checkout on your site?
All too often, business owners and executives accept customer behaviour on their websites as something natural and unavoidable. This is particularly unfortunate when they could be using big data and analytics to not only find out what obstacles or challenges are preventing them from completing more sales, getting higher overall values per sale, and increasing customer retention as well. All of this is possible with the help of big data and a digital transformation.
What Is a Digital Transformation and Why Is It Important?
Before we go any further, we must be clear – big data and analytics are nothing more or less than tools. The key to success in the twenty-first century is to perform a digital transformation. Your business needs to do more than adopt a few cool technologies and have presences online and on social media platforms – it needs to transform to incorporate these changes into its fabric and structure.
To better understand what we are talking about, consider how much your life has changed in the last twenty years. When was the last time you stopped to ask for directions? How long has it been since you sat wondering about a piece of trivia, rather than pulling out your smartphone and Googling it? How often do you decide to buy an item online (using your smartphone or tablet) instead of driving to a store to get it?
How a Digital Transformation Can Improve Customer Experience with Big Data
Digital technology – and, in particular, mobile tech – has changed our lives drastically in less than two decades. So why hasn’t it changed your business? You can start to see how a digital transformation is essential to keeping up in the digital era.
So How Does Digital Transformation Improve Customer Experience?
Now, let’s talk about how your company’s digital transformation can affect your customers and their behaviour when they visit your site. You can think of digital transformation as the third and final step in a company becoming digitally mature.
The first step, which nearly all companies today have mastered, is digital competence. If your company is digitally competent, then you will have a website that’s at least marginally functional. It will tell customers where they can purchase goods or services, but it will likely not be dynamic or responsive. Your site likely won’t be mobile-friendly or highly functional.
In the second step, digital literacy, your company will have active presences on social media platforms, and you’ll have a responsive, mobile-friendly website. You will likely also have some higher functionalities on your website, including an ecommerce store and other features. Basically, you’ll have all of the tools to be fully digitally mature, but you will not have taken the last step.
When you decide to dive into a digital transformation, your company will create a data collection and analysis group, team, or department. You’ll have people and structures dedicated to digital marketing. You’ll incorporate data science into your marketing plans… In short, you will have fully embraced big data and learned just how much you can use it to improve customer experience and sales.
With this information woven into the framework of your business, you’ll look at your website analytics and identify exactly where people get hung-up in the buying process. Then you can find solutions to make the process flow more easily and quickly to reduce abandoned carts and bounced traffic.
Have you used your digital transformation to improve customer experience?
How has big data helped your business gain and retain more customers?
Let us know what you think!
About the author:
Ronald has been recognized as one of the top 10 global big data, data science, BI, data mining influencers by DSC, Klout, and Maptive, as well as top 10 predictive analytics influencers by Dataconomy. Ronald is author for leading Big Data sites like Datafloq and public speaker at leading Big Data, Data Science and Internet of Things (in company) events.
