Are you leaving money on the table by not fully utilizing your customer data?
Studies show that companies leveraging big data have seen up to 60% higher profit margins. If you want a competitive edge, it’s time to get savvy about mining your data for insights to improve the customer experience.
At its core, great customer service is about having the right information at the right time to resolve issues quickly and keep customers happy. But in today’s world of multiple channels and data silos, that can be tricky. By taking a strategic approach to data management, you can turn an operational headache into a key business advantage.
Here are 5 ways that properly leveraging your company’s data can level up your customer service game:
Gain a 360° view of the customer
When data lives in separate systems for sales, marketing, support, etc., it creates major blindspots. A lead router or salesforce lead distribution system can centralize data from multiple sources into a unified view. This gives agents the full context they need for more personalized, intelligent service.
Accelerate case handling
The average company loses a staggering 20-30% in revenue each year due to inefficiencies. With proper sales lead management and data cleanup, you can automate workflows and put the right information in front of agents faster. Features like lead-to-account matching identify dupes and related records so cases don’t slip through the cracks.
Uncover valuable insights
Siloed and dirty data make it impossible to spot trends and areas for improvement. However, cleansed data from a centralized lead management software platform enables in-depth analysis. You can then use those insights to optimize processes and products and prioritize high-value customers.
Provide proactive service
Nobody likes waiting on hold or repeating information ad nauseam. What is data cleansing? It’s the process of consolidating, standardizing, and enriching data so it’s consistent and complete. With accurate data powering automated processes, you can anticipate customer needs and proactively address issues before they escalate.
Reduce operational costs
Outdated manual processes and poor data hygiene have a massive cost overhead. By implementing lead-to-account matching in Salesforce, along with data deduplication and cleansing, you eliminate redundant tasks and optimize your data infrastructure. The result is higher productivity and lower operating costs.
Now that you understand the “why,” let’s look at specific ways to put these principles into practice and start realizing the ROI of better data utilization.
Data cleanup & governance
The first step is establishing processes to maintain data integrity and consistency. Many companies attempt data cleansing initiatives but fail to implement ongoing data governance policies to sustain the quality in the long term.
Set standards for data entry and management across your tech stack, CRM, support systems, and more. Implement validation rules, required fields, and other guardrails. And clearly define roles and responsibilities for data stewardship.
You should also have a streamlined process for data deduplication – automatically merging or disposing of duplicate lead and contact records during lead-to-account matching, updates, imports, and conversions.
Centralizing data sources
As you standardize and cleanse current data assets, you’ll also want to integrate all relevant data streams into a centralized hub using tools like a lead router and lead management software. This could be your CRM system or a purpose-built data integration platform.
The key is consolidating customer details, activities, interactions, and insights across marketing, sales, and service into a “golden record” with a persistent, unique identifier for each lead and contact. With this comprehensive 360° profile easily accessible, service agents have the context to personalize each conversation and provide faster, more intelligent service.
Analytics & business intelligence
Once you have clean, centralized customer data, you can apply analytics and BI tools for deeper insights into service performance, customer needs, and behavioral trends.
Track metrics like case volume, handle times, resolution rates, and CSAT by:
- Product
- Service channel
- Customer segment
- Agent
Use this intelligence to identify opportunities for self-service offerings, knowledge base expansion, process improvements, and customer experience optimizations.
You can even build predictive models to anticipate issues and take proactive service measures for customer retention and upsell/cross-sell.
Workflow automation
Automation should be the final piece of the puzzle. With accurate data fueling your processes, you can eliminate many repetitive manual tasks and reduce handling times.
For example, you can automate:
- Case creation and routing based on record data
- Escalating high-priority or complex issues
- Data validation and lead deduplication
- Research and data appending for better context
- Follow-up tasks and notifications
By reducing human intervention for basic, rote processes, your service team can focus on the more complex, high-value tasks and personal interactions that truly move the needle.
Making it happen
Leveraging your data to transform service delivery is an ongoing journey, not a one-and-done initiative. It requires a cultural commitment to data quality, intelligent use of technology, and alignment across functions.
Start by getting executive buy-in and building a cross-functional data governance team with representation from IT, marketing, sales, service, and any other data stakeholders. Empower this team to audit current data issues and processes, formulate a strategy, and roll out changes in phases.
Celebrate small wins along the way, like achieving a certain percentage of data cleanliness or automating a workflow to reduce handle times. Reinforce the impacts on customer experience, loyalty, and revenue.
As data quality and utilization mature, you can gradually roll out more advanced analytics, algorithms, and automation capabilities powered by that trusted data foundation.
The time and resources invested will pay massive dividends. Businesses leveraging customer data for service have seen massive increases in:
- Cross-sell revenue
- New service revenue
- Customer satisfaction
- Retention metrics.
Are you ready to stop just scratching the surface of what your data can do and leveraging it for the real impact?
By following the steps above, you can turn customer data into a key competitive advantage for more intelligent, cost-effective, and engaging customer service delivery.
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