Delegating to technology is a central feature in The Covenant Group’s program. Ongoing investments in your business are necessary to help it expand and grow. One of the newest tech trends promising to revolutionize the way many industries process and act upon information is Big Data.
The flood of emails, digital interactions and other data that companies receive on a daily basis constitutes the large volume of information that makes up Big Data. While this can be overwhelming, learning how to sift through all the details and find the nuggets of insight on your clients’ preferences and behavior is well worth the investment of time and money.
What technologies have you adopted in your business? Do you ever consider how your personal and company-wide productivity could be improved by new software, mobile devices and other technological developments? Are there any time-consuming tasks you currently perform that could be managed or reduced with help from technology?
We recently came across one example of how businesses can use Big Data to make the customer experiences they deliver more satisfactory customer experiences. Bob Hayes writes for Business 2 Community that Oracle was able to establish a set of metrics to measure how its clients interacted with the company – through various channels and departments – and then create an overall picture of what aspects of the business had an effect on customers’ loyalty.
The company measured its performance on three elements of service requests: the time needed to resolve an issue, how long it took to respond after the first customer contact and how many times ownership of the request changed hands. What Oracle learned from the project allowed it to create benchmarks for customer satisfaction, establish goals for managing relationships and educate employees on the best way to achieve client happiness, Hayes explains.
Granted, many companies do not have the size (or the budget) that Oracle does. But smaller-scale client relationship management solutions can enable your practice to process client data, turn it into insight and then transform that into action and strategies that will improve customer service. Encouraging greater communication across departments within your practice will also facilitate the sharing of information. For instance, a customer service representative would be able to inform an advisor that one of his or her clients is dissatisfied, enabling that advisor to act on the knowledge and repair the relationship.
You may diligently keep records on all of your clients in order to better inform your customer service, but how many of those details are easily accessible? Investigate the emerging field of Big Data and technologies that can improve your ability to access client data, analyze it and use it to deliver more intuitive service.
