What strategies make your business’s analytics tick? If you’re like a lot of companies, you may find yourself constantly recalibrating and trying out different measurements to see which offer the greatest insights. This is the natural result of just how many factors ecommerce tools, in particular, allow us to measure. The notion of adding more analytics categories to your current strategy, then, might feel overwhelming, but with so much evolution in sales technology today, there could be something to it.
So, what analytics tools should you be using to maximize your data insights and drive sales? Keep an eye on these 3 approaches, which are situated on the cutting edge of sales analytics.
Speak Up
One of the most important ways to understand what matters to customers today is to listen to them, and by listen, we don’t mean take surveys for feedback. Rather, with so much voice technology readily available today, businesses now have access to several different layers of insight into customer demands and preferences. These include speech analytics, which focuses on language patterns, as well as sentiment analytics, which focuses on tone or the underlying meaning of statements.
Both speech and sentiment analytics can offer businesses important insights into customer needs by helping to solve problems by diving deeper into given interactions. For example, if sentiment analysis consistently shows that customers don’t understand a particular issue even after its been explained, they might consider testing alternative support scripts until the analysis suggests otherwise.
Similarly, if speech analytics shows the same question coming in over and over again, your business might add an FAQ or blog post on the issue, freeing up support staff for more important calls.
Product Pathways
Another analytics strategy that’s recently seen a lot of growth and interest is product analytics, which looks at customer behavior to create meaningful cohorts, reduce customer churn, and add value across the sales ecosystem. In practice, this might mean identifying what products or what parts of the sales experience, seem to discourage customers – acting as pain points – but can also include taking a closer look at the action patterns of your most valuable customers, with the goal of replicating them.
It’s important to note that product analytics typically avoid descriptive insights, despite the fact that these factors may seem highly subjective. Instead of surveying customers to find out what they think motivates their individual actions, they focus on grouping customers together to see what common thread connects behavioral groups, a distinctively quantitative approach.
While there are a number of other approaches to business and sales analytics, an emphasis on tone, natural language processing, and customer groupings are all key to business growth. That’s because they’re all relational, focused on how businesses can more effectively serve their customers, rather than on how they can create more sales.
This isn’t a minor distinction, at least not for customers, who – in a crowded marketplace – will ultimately choose those businesses that adjust to serve them. It’s time to tune in and solve their problems, and these tools will help you do that.
