Digital transformation - Improve customer experience with big data

Do you know what your customers want when they visit your website? For instance what makes them bounce away to visit your competitors? All too often, business owners and executives accept customer behaviour on their websites as something natural and unavoidable. This is particularly unfortunate, as they could be using big data and analytics to find out what obstacles or challenges stand in the way of more sales. Furthermore, this can be the key to getting higher overall values per sale, and increasing customer retention. All of this is possible with the help of big data and digital transformation.

What is 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. A business needs to do more than adopting a few cool technologies and being present online and on social media platforms – it needs to transform to incorporate these changes.

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 instead of driving to a store to get it?

Digital technology – and, in particular, mobile tech – has changed our lives drastically in less than two decades. So why hasn’t your business changed? You can start to see how a digital transformation is essential to keep up in the digital era.

How digital transformation improves customer experience

Now, let’s talk about how your company’s digital transformation affects 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 nowadays have mastered, is digital competence. If a company is digitally competent, it has a website that is at least marginally functional. It tells customers where they can purchase goods or services, but in most cases it is static instead of dynamic and responsive.

In the second step, digital literacy, a company has an active presence on social media platforms, and a responsive, mobile-friendly website. This also has some extended functionalities, including an e-commerce store and other features. Basically, a digitally literate company has the tools to be fully digitally mature, but it has not yet taken the last step.

Diving into a digital transformation, means setting up a data collection and analysis group, team, or department: people and structures dedicated to digital marketing. Also data science will be incorporated into the company’s marketing plans. In short, it has 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 will 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.

And of course this is only a website example. But digital transformation can also help you leverage big data to optimise customer experience on apps and even offline instruments. There is so much to learn about your customers once you learn how to listen to the data.