Understanding Customer Analytics

Video Image: What Is Customer Analytics?

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Understanding customer behaviour is key to improving interactions and business outcomes.

Customer analytics helps businesses analyse past actions, predict future behaviour, and tailor their approach to meet customer needs effectively.

To find out more, we asked David Samuel, Chief Product Officer at Contexta360, and Sean McIver, Product Owner at MaxContact, to define customer analytics.

Video: What Is Customer Analytics?

Watch the video below to hear David and Sean define what customer analytics is:

With thanks to the following people for contributing to this video:

David Samuel, Chief Product Officer at Contexta360
Sean McIver, Product Owner at MaxContact

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What Is Customer Analytics?

Customer analytics is the process of gathering and analysing customer data to understand behaviours, preferences, and trends, as David outlines:

“This capability enables users to gain specific insights into their customers, so they understand how they will behave when interacting with your organization, so that you can respond accordingly.”

It provides contact centres with valuable insights that help improve customer interactions and decision-making.

One key area within customer analytics is speech analytics, which focuses on analysing conversations to extract meaningful patterns.

The Four Main Categories of Customer Analytics

“Customer analytics is a broader field in which speech analytics sits. It’s insights into customers. And generally speaking, it falls into four main categories.” – Sean

These four key areas are:

1. Descriptive Analytics – What Happened?

This involves looking at past customer behaviour, such as purchase history or service interactions, to identify trends and patterns, or as Sean puts it:

“You’ve got what happened. So the customer historically has done ABC.”

2. Diagnostic Analytics – Why Did It Happen?

This step seeks to understand the reasons behind customer actions, and it examines factors that may have influenced decisions, such as product quality, customer service experiences, or marketing efforts.

“You’ve got almost a diagnosis side of things.

Why was that the behaviour of the customer?
What drove them to that?

You can then utilize that to understand what’s likely to happen from an individual customer, or customer base side of things.” – Sean

3. Predictive Analytics – What Will Happen Next?

Using historical data, contact centres can anticipate future customer behaviours as Sean explains:

“Using all of that information, you can then do something that’s a bit more predictive.

What will encourage a customer to engage?
What language do they really respond well to?
When do they respond well to that?”

This includes identifying likely purchasing trends, potential churn risks, and preferred communication channels.

4. Prescriptive Analytics – How Should We Act?

With predictive insights, contact centres can refine their approach to customer engagement.

“This allows you to modify the way in which you interact with customers so that you’re reaching them at the right time, in the right space where they are, and with the right people speaking to them, or communicating with them.” – Sean

This includes adjusting messaging, timing, and channels to increase response rates, boost customer loyalty, and improve overall satisfaction.

Why Customer Analytics Matters

By understanding customer habits and preferences, contact centres can tailor their strategies to offer more relevant and timely interactions.

“I guess an example of that may be, the deeper you understand your customers’ buying habits and lifestyle preferences, the more accurate your predictions of future buying behaviours will be.

And then you’ll be more successful at delivering the relevant offers, if that’s your business, that would attract them rather than offering things that will turn them away.

So in turn, it should help to increase response rates and loyalty and ultimately return on investment (ROI)” – David

Effective use of customer analytics leads to better customer experiences, higher engagement, and improved return on investment (ROI).

If you are looking for more great insights from the experts, check out these next:

Author
Robyn Coppell

Robyn Coppell has worked as Digital Content Manager for Call Center Helper since 2021. After University her first job was in a contact centre and has stayed in this space ever since.

She has experience of contact centre operational management, software systems, css and php coding. She edits a lot of the guest content that is published on Call Centre Helper.

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