Data-Driven Success: Channel Companies Revolutionize Customer Experience with Analytics

Data-Driven Success: Enhancing Customer Experiences in Channel Companies

Understanding customer experience by capturing and analysing data throughout their journey of interactions is a key focus for many channel partners and their customers because every lost interaction has the potential to negatively impact revenues. Furthermore, as we are all aware, acquiring a new customer can cost 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one, according to Harvard Business Review.

Using analytics, an organisation can make informed business decisions by tracking customer journeys from their initial outreach in the queue, via multiple interactions, through to resolution of the query. Now, where hybrid working is commonplace, more than ever, it is critical for every business to understand if enough resource is available to successfully answer calls, how long it takes to resolve queries, and how calls are being handled. Call recordings should be reviewed to gauge customer satisfaction and train staff for consistency in customer experience.

Whilst delivering good customer experience relies on strong external communications, it is just as important to know how internal teams and departments communicate and work together. Especially important for managers of hybrid teams, analytics helps to monitor activity to support their well-being. For those using Microsoft Teams for internal collaboration, Teams analytics can be reviewed to monitor staff well-being and management styles to provide additional support in their roles.

Every business of every size and type should have access to their business communications and collaboration analytics to fully understand both internal activity and external customer interactions.

Elevating Data and Analytics: Essential Standards and Channel Company Add-On

Customers already have an expectation that their communications supplier will deliver some level of insights on their chosen communication services.

To achieve the most success from analytics as an ‘add-on’ in channel product portfolios, in our experience, ‘add-ons’ should become an integral part of the proposition. This can be achieved through bundling-in analytics, or promoting it as an ‘opt-out’ rather than ‘opt-in’ model, or white-labelling for consistency in a corporate brand. Further integration of the proposition can be achieved by leveraging APIs, to take control of provisioning journeys within their own eco-system, and make it easy to onboard new customers.

APIs can also be leveraged to deliver analytics to end users in a way that works for their vertical target audience – helping to present business-critical data in the way a business needs it, when they need it, and for a better experience.

Winning Analytics Offerings: Empowering Resellers and MSPs for Success

To create a winning offering, MSPs need to focus on the benefits they deliver to their customers and focus on delivering a whole solution. The more useful and relevant the information to each customer, the more powerful.

It is important to understand that analytics is not just about statistics but the insights it delivers. Presenting analytics in a way that easy to understand, and easy to access is critical.

Resellers and MSPs need to understand every customer and what they need. They should demonstrate the value of analytics in relation to their specific business needs. Relevance and personalisation are key and APIs are ideal to support this. Insights will be most used when they are delivered in the right format, to the right people, at the right time. This can, for example, be via customised displays, shared wallboards or scheduled reports.

Once embedded into a customer’s systems and procedures, the service and supporting analytics deliver considerable value that will become indispensable. And as a SaaS product, this means recurring revenue with low churn.

With the growth of Microsoft Teams now reaching 300 million active monthly users, and the rise in the use of Teams for calling, Microsoft cannot be ignored by any MSP or reseller. Many organisations use Teams without any real understanding of whether it is helping or hindering their internal and external communications. Collaboration analytics are available to deliver true insights into how users are collaborating, providing the means to make real improvements to internal communication. This has a massively positive effect on employee engagement and wellbeing as well as customer experience. Collaboration analytics coupled with call analytics will drive further improvements in customer experience.

Emerging Trends in Analytics: Shaping the Future of Data-driven Decision Making

UCaaS and Microsoft Teams will continue to dominate the way we work as they help to bring services together into a single ecosystem. Alongside this, the analytics will also evolve, becoming more and more critical to internal and external business decisions.

AI-driven and self-learning analytics are coming fast, with the potential to transform the power of data analytics. Although applications like ChatGPT have proven that these advances in technology still require human oversight to ensure accuracy and context.

And whilst ChatGPT may provide generalised insight, adding new perspectives to data analysis, true business intelligence is empowered by data from an organisation’s own systems and applications. Ensuring relevance to a company’s unique objectives and activities will take data analytics to the next level