44% of businesses implementing customer service data into their operation increase their revenue and retention. Overlooking customer data might result in losing a chunk of a customer base and having to spend up to 5 times more on acquiring a new customer than retaining an existing one.
Today we will take a closer look on what customer data can do for a business and the right ways to implement them into perfecting the customer experience.
In this article, we'll cover:
Core Rules of Data Gathering
✅ Come Up With a Categorization System
60-73% of all data inside a company goes unused. A team could put their time and effort into collecting every single piece of data there is: from personal information about every customer to the history of their visits and purchases. None of this will bring any results, if there is no system in place.
Categorize and analyze the data you need only. This is the best way not to overwhelm the system.
‼️ Remember Why It Is Necessary
Set clear goals and be sure to stick to them. Whether you want to better understand your customers, provide personalized services, or make sure your promotions work properly — gathering customer data will give you a better understanding of the processes.
👀 Always Look for Customers’ Insights
The final stage of data collection is the correct implementation. Do your customers have a higher activity during winter holidays? Add people to the team around Christmas.
Do your customers prefer communication over the chat? Train your support team and provide them with the best online chat tools for higher efficiency.
Implement the changes based on the customer data you gather. This is the way to ensure a smooth and carefully-crafted customer experience.
Types of Customer Data Analytics
Descriptive (What Has Happened?)
Examples: customer satisfaction KPI, the number of conversions, the number of cases resolved.
Descriptive customer service analytics is the most basic one. Its main task is to summarize data to describe certain events. It derives from business trends or raw customer data. Businesses can use it for budgeting, predicting future demand trends, and setting up future operational processes.
Predictive (What Will or Might Happen?)
This type is useful when it comes to predicting customer behavior and the future of customer service. Businesses can leverage it to stay ahead of the trends by combining it with AI or ML tools.
Overall, this type of customer service analytics can be used to enhance and improve customer journey.
Prescriptive (What Should Happen?)
Marketers say a prescriptive analysis is just an evolution of a predictive one. Prescriptive analysis tells businesses what they need to do to perform better, attract more customers, and provide them with a better experience along their journey.
Over 51% of marketers base their decisions on customer data. This allows businesses to provide superb customer service and retain most of its customer base. 86% of customers will come back to a brand providing excellent purchasing experience. In the same time, boosting your customers retention by just 5% might result in 25-95% revenue increase.
Channels of Data Collection
Help Desk
Helps desk systems are vital when it comes to customer service teams. Not only do they help support consultants streamline customer communication, they can also provide business with valuable data.
Help desk systems can gather:
- Average ticket resolution time.
- The number of customer tickets open.
- Support tickets backlog.
- Open tickets per support consultant number.
These data help get a deeper understanding of the support team’s efficiency.
CRM System
Besides giving a business an outlook on the state of its customer tickets, a CRM system can give voice to its customers. A properly set-up CRM system gathers:
- Ticket opening data.
- Number of iterations on a particular ticket.
- Customer purchase history.
- Customer retention and churn rates.
Collecting these customer service data provides valuable ticket managing information. It demonstrates the efficiency of a customer service and support team and shows the bottlenecks of the resolution process.
Customer Surveys
92% of customers will hesitate to buy from a brand if there are no online reviews left by its customers. This shows the importance of proactive online and email surveys.
70% of customers will leave a service review when asked. Making sure customers feel free to write reviews about a brand can:
- Make any service adjusted to customers’ needs and wants.
- Make a customer service team’s work see-through.
- Give voice to customers.
- Make a brand open and approachable.
- Make customer retention easier and faster.
Incorporating customer surveys into the business processes will provide more customer data. Giving voice to customers can result in better services, higher level of retention, and higher profits.
How to Implement Customer Data Into the Service?
- 🤖 Create automation
With customer data collected, a business can focus on creating automation and streamlining the process of directing the data on improving customer experience. Automating them can prevent leakages and breaches. With 95% of leaks being caused by a human mistake, the importance of automation cannot be underrated.
- 💛 Create personalized offers
60% of consumers want and expect personalized offers from a business. If implemented correctly, they can increase customer satisfaction and provide a better customer experience.
When it comes to implementing data into customer service, it is important to know that 57% of customers are willing to provide their personal information in exchange for personalized offers. Handling the data is not easy and requires a ton of restrictions and security regulations. PCI DSS and ISO certification, GDPR and HIPAA compliances are to be put in place in case a business wants to handle customer data and use it to improve customer service.
- ⬆️ Improve omnichannel approach
According to Intrado:
- 49% of users prefer notifications to text messages.
- 53% of customers contact brands via email.
- 45% of users prefer talking to a live support consultant.
- 48% of customers prefer online chat for self-service interactions.
With 98% of American customers switching between different devices on a daily basis, businesses adopting an omnichannel approach see 91% increase in retention.
Gathering data on customer communication and ensuring an omnichannel approach could increase customer satisfaction and ultimately business profits.
- 😎 Improve team’s productivity
Customer data reflect how a customer support team is working. Surveys and the possibility to rate a chat or phone interaction provide invaluable information on what customers are paying their attention to and what shapes their customer journey and satisfaction.
Seeing the results of their work and being able to identify the roadblocks will help a support team rely on their strengths and work on their weak spots. As a result, the team is more efficient and the customers are more satisfied, which improves retention and acquisition rates.
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Anna started out in financial markets, diving into daily research on bonds and stocks. A passionate reader with a love for historical literature and international cuisine, she’s now all about mastering customer communication. She writes in-depth about customer support, backed by extensive research, and has become an expert on the topic.
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