The Business Value of Customer Experience Analytics

In a customer-driven market, customer analytic solutions that reveal how and why your customers may be struggling on your website are invaluable.   Armed with this information, you are better able to understand your customers’ behaviors and enhance customer experiences across web and mobile channels.  So, while a detailed understanding of your customers is key in today’s competitive environment, being able to truly quantify the business value of customer analytics can be a daunting task – but one that is all the more important as you compete for funding in an era of shrinking budgets.   The ability to determine a practical return on investment (ROI) for deploying a customer analytic solution requires a careful review of business benefits and financial costs.

Leveraging customer insights to maximize business opportunities

Customer experience analytic solutions, such as IBM Tealeaf Customer Experience (CX) on Cloud, provide actual visibility into your customers’ experiences so that you can quickly identify issues that lead to transaction abandonment and implement design improvements that optimize your customers’ experiences.  The insight into your customers’ online experiences goes beyond providing quick-fixes to issues, however.   With an enhanced view of your customers’ journeys, you are better able to discover higher level trends to further enrich your customer relationships and create continuous customer experience improvements.  The result is incremental revenue from increased conversion rates and improved customer retention across channels.   Increased revenue is not only realized through higher conversion rates and retention of customers, but satisfied customers are certainly more likely to refer new business your way as well.   

Save valuable time and money to reinvest in your business

As you know, time is money and customer analytics can save you significant time in the reproduction of issues, especially those that are difficult or nearly impossible to duplicate.   Issues that could take you days to discover on your own can now be uncovered in as little as minutes.  At the same time, another key benefit of a customer analytic solution is how it helps you identify and understand the extent of a problem, so that you can prioritize your development efforts on the prevalent issues that affect the most customers, saving you both time and money.  Finally, deploying a customer analytics cloud offering allows you to avoid upfront hardware costs and save on on-going maintenance and labor costs.  The incremental revenue recognized from optimized customer experience, coupled with the ability to focus your time and resources on other high impact areas of your business, can translate into a significant value for your business.

Weighing the costs for increased business value

While the value to your business can be substantial, there are internal and external costs you need to anticipate in measuring the ROI for a Customer Analytics solution.  Yearly cloud licensing fees and initial professional and training expenditures need to be evaluated, as well as man-hours spent on the planning and implementation of the solution’s initial deployment.    With the deployment of a cloud offering, there is minimal incremental IT administrative support required; however, costs for incremental customer experience staff should be considered.  Specifically, an analyst resource to support the customer experience analytics solution with event and report generation, issue prioritization, and monitoring of alerts and dashboards is an important consideration. The actual deployment and support costs can vary depending on your business size, requirements, and adoption rates, so it is important to consider possible impact and implementation risks in your financial assessment.  

With continuously tight budgets, you must answer for every dollar spent, as well as optimize your customers’ experiences for successful business growth.   Fortunately, the right customer experience analytic solution can help you leverage your customer data to help increase ROI and improve your customers’ experiences.   Based on a recent Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study, the IBM Tealeaf Customer Experience on Cloud solution can yield a potential three-year risk adjusted result of 196% ROI with a payback period of 4 months, demonstrating significant value to your business.

Ready to invest in business growth and customer loyalty?

To learn more about the cost savings and business benefits of IBM Tealeaf Customer Experience on Cloud identified using Forrester’s TEI framework and methodology, you can download the IBM commissioned study by clicking on the tile below.   If you have questions or would like to see a demo of your website with IBM Tealeaf CX on Cloud then simply request a IBM Tealeaf CX on Cloud consult.