This sponsored post is produced by Jeff Tseng, the CEO and cofounder of Kontagent.
Think about your best interactions as a customer. What made those experiences so great? Was it the consistency? The way the business knew what you needed without asking? The fact that they made you feel appreciated? Or a combination of all the above?
Chances are it’s probably the last one. And it’s also probably safe to assume that the customer interaction you had in mind wasn’t regarding an online purchase order you completed on your laptop but rather was with an actual person.
In my Kontagent Konnect 2013 keynote, I examined the future of technology as it relates to business and consumers. And one thing is certain: Mobile and data will be what drives the customer experience. For everything sector — banks, retailers, travel companies, and even the health care industry — mobile will become essential to doing business.
The three elements of a meaningful customer experience
It might sound a little outlandish, but as mobile car service company Uber, HotelTonight, and others like it show, mobile is capable of creating customer experiences that are as good as interacting with a real person. Unlike any other digital touchpoint in history, mobile devices can deliver a customer experience that’s omnipresent, relevant, and intimate—the three elements of an ideal customer experience.
And the reason these companies are able to do this is because of customer data.
The role of data in disrupting the market
Your mobile device is essentially an extremely sophisticated sensor that’s constantly collecting data about your preferences.
Moreover, unlike with a desktop computer, because your mobile device is always with you, you are more willing to not only include personal details about your life in it, such as your contact list and daily calendar. But you’re also more willing to share that information with mobile companies you trust in exchange for using the services they provide.
And this is what makes mobile such a powerful platform. Because companies are able to tap into this level of data, they’ll be able to learn what their customers truly want. You won’t need focus groups or research reports to craft your next product release or upgrade, because with all the data you’re collecting, you’ll be able to create exactly what your customers desire. And even more importantly, you’ll be able to find out whether you actually delivered what they wanted by testing hypotheses.
But make no mistake, the process isn’t simple. After all, separating and extracting actionable information from your metrics requires data science expertise. The customer data sets in the age of mobile are bigger than anything companies have dealt with in the past. Using data science to to build deep, engaging, and personalized mobile customer experiences require more than just being able to collect data.
The bottom line is that if you want to disrupt your market and become (or stay) its leader, crafting a mobile customer experience that’s omnipresent, relevant, and intimate is key.
Data is vital to doing it, but having a platform built to capture and visualize all your customer metrics is just one part of the formula. The sheer complexity and volume of data today means that having a data scientist on hand to make sense of it all is essential, along with having your entire organization committed to using data to guide every decision.
Learn more at blog.kontagent.com.
About the author: Jeff Tseng is Kontagent’s CEO and co-founder where he is responsible for driving and shaping Kontagent’s future growth and dominance in the mobile customer intelligence industry. An adept programmer and data modeler, Jeff built the first iteration of Kontagent’s proprietary data analytics engine. He has bachelor and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was also a Ph.D. candidate in the same discipline. You can reach him at @jefftee.
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