4 Steps to Implement Unbiased Customer Data For a Better Customer Experience

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Darshan Shah

November 29, 2022

Today, businesses are attempting to make data-driven decisions to enhance customer experience, but if human biases affect consumer data analysis, it may be a fruitless endeavor. Data analytics can assist businesses in making data-driven decisions. But often, common data biases can skew how organizations interpret the data.

Due to basic human nature, unintended bias creeps into customer-facing technologies and is unconsciously woven into databases, software, and AI. This can result in the wrong identification of the target audience and thereby lead to poor customer experience. If left unchecked, unintended bias can lead to a loss of billions and damage the brand's reputation as well. But there is a way out. It is possible to identify data biases and implement actions to remove bias from your customer data.

Dangers of Using Biased Data

The measurement of television ratings could be a clear example of the use of biased audience data. Program selection, ad pricing, and user experience are all influenced by data collected from TV rating measurements. These figures are still used partly to inform choices worth billions of dollars.

However, there has been a fast change in how users consume entertainment content. Therefore, it is outdated to construct a system to record live programming sent linearly over the air or cable.

A list of the most-watched shows across streaming networks should be issued. Moreover, emerging viewing habits such as fractional attention across multiple devices and platforms should be evaluated, such as OTT platforms, social media apps, etc.

Customer data bias is a serious consideration when developing practical CX projects. These days, it's easy to discover someone basing a choice on information that is inaccurate or outdated. This is because many CX leaders need help to implement their ideas. After all, they must keep repeating bad habits and making biased and unproductive judgments.

Some of the dangers of using biased customer data could be as follows:

Your capacity to provide an effective CX can be severely hindered by a lack of a high-quality, complete client dataset, which may even cause your addressable market to contract.
Models developed with biased customer data may result in erroneous algorithms and moral, legal, and safety concerns.
Sometimes they can produce unfavorable stereotypes based on race and gender, which helps institutional racism and sexism continue.

Customer information only eliminates some bias. However, it can provide you with room to step back from your presumptions and start considering all the possible angles from which a given scenario might be seen, understood, or handled. Maintaining a reputation among clients, partners, and present and future staff entails providing fair and unbiased customer data.

In fact, data-driven businesses are 23 times more likely to gain new clientele, six times more likely to keep them as consumers, and 19 times more productive. Innovative companies have already begun putting effective solutions into practice to refine data and hence improve customer experience (CX).

What Are the Benefits of Unbiased Data?

Here are four advantages of having an impartial view of your consumer data and using a trustworthy analytics system to understand the situation as it actually is.

1. Real-Time Customer Data for Quick Information

Real-time analytics can instantly access an instantaneous reality of the CX of your business operations thanks to faster and more effective technology. In fact, 60% of those surveyed admitted that they frequently use customer data in decision-making. You no longer need to rely on previous customer data and trends at least a month old when you utilize an analytics platform that provides information in real-time.

This enables you to evaluate past performance in light of the prior week or day. This might be especially helpful if you're developing a new CX program, a new pricing strategy, or analyzing the effectiveness of promotions. More readily available customer data can offer insights that could affect future behavior.

The ability to make better performance estimates in the future is another advantage of using real-time consumer data. The projections you make will be more accurate because you can access the most recent data.

2. Detailed Analytics to Avoid Assumptions

Lack of information might lead to a propensity for personal biases to impact how customer data is interpreted. If you have a preconceived notion of how your company should operate, examining customer data in isolation may result in your CX efforts being filled in with your own opinions rather than objective data.

These metrics can be made more engaging by having the option to provide additional in-depth analysis by just clicking rill-downs from within the dashboard. This removes the need for users of various skill levels to run separate reports to understand the consumer data provided, making business insights more widely available.

3. Enhanced Transparency

A single version of the truth can only exist if consumer data is handled entirely transparently, allowing everyone to view actuality. Everyone works toward bettering goals when information is available that is thorough and reliable across the board. The degree to which all departments are collectively aligned with the corporate business goals increases when you do this.

Additionally, by utilizing Key Performance Indicators that are integrated into readily accessible dashboards, progress can be monitored in real-time. Better working relationships between corporate partners may result from this openness.

4. Make Smarter Decisions

Data bias shouldn’t prevail among teams as it may hamper the final decision-making process. An unbiased approach helps the company in leveraging key data insights instead of relying on inaccurate or superfluous data sets. The main purpose behind unbiased data is the analysis which must be inclined towards quality and not quantity.

For example, relying on data showing rich customer insights into their behavior is much more significant than settling for data just depicting a brand’s top bestsellers. Hence, unbiased data can drive smarter decisions for the company in terms of customer satisfaction, product improvements, customer experience enhancement, etc.

How Can You Ensure to Get Unbiased Customer Data?

It should go without saying that no business intends to use customer information unfairly, either internally or externally. Even though biased consumer data is susceptible for many firms, bias can only be reduced when it is discovered.

1. Develop Checks and Balances

Before system analysis and solution design, bias-free appropriate, advanced technical systems are created. The best approach to combat bias is to diversify the CX team that performs the task. With 48% of Chief Information Officers reporting that their organizations have already implemented or intend to implement AI and machine learning technology, businesses continue to show a keen interest in this field.

Diversity of opinion is equivalent to a variety of needs. This typically results in systems with built-in checks and balances. Before writing a single line of code, everything from the algorithms the system will use to the testing and auditing procedures used should be discussed.

2. Gauge Execution Capacity

It's time to unlearn what you've learned if you're still using the conventional intuition-based decision-making models so your CX improvement ideas can flourish. Your instincts are poor decision-makers. When creating your next CX initiative, there is a benefit in neutrally evaluating consumer data.

Experience improves your ability to take in and process new information. Still, you must rely on objective consumer data to make well-informed judgments and assess your capacity to implement your ideas.

The most challenging aspect of running a business is making decisions, and no amount of expertise or method can replace assessing the organization's preparation for execution. Although they have the data, CX leaders need more crystal-ball intellect to instantaneously consider whether their team can carry out their vision from a commercial perspective.

3. Adopt a Holistic, Inclusive Viewpoint

Customers are more likely to buy from, support, and trust businesses with a clear mission — a goal-oriented one aids in defining the company.

This is primarily because a person's emotional connection and association with a brand are no longer just determined by how they react to a marketing campaign but are also influenced by how they feel about the brand's reputation, values, ethical business practices, and inclusivity.

4. Monitor, Audit, Retrain, Redeploy

Ultimately, the only way to secure moral technology solutions is to constantly watch over, check, and audit them while asking for user input on their effects. Even without considering fairness and prejudice, model drift—in which the underlying technical system assumptions change over time, becoming less relevant and finally obsolete—is a well-known problem in data science. When this occurs, advanced solutions should be retrained, redeployed, and the end-user base should be aware of the drift and the solutions implemented.

The same holds true if an audit or customer-provided evidence shows that a system no longer complies with fairness standards. Models for decision-making and customer experience must then be taken offline and only deployed again after those requirements have been met once more.

How to Implement Unbiased Customer Data?

Here are some steps to utilize and implement unbiased customer data to result in a better CX:

1. Develop Your CX Programs Considering a Customer Data Segment

Every person is different, displaying various requirements at various times, responding to multiple triggers, and acting accordingly. Therefore, there are as many possible forms of marketing as there are people. Significantly smaller firms frequently make the error of attempting to implement their CX initiatives globally to increase their reach, especially given the fact that their budgets are considerably smaller than those of large-scale businesses.

Instead of advocating a one-size-fits-all strategy, your CX initiatives can really achieve considerably more if you carefully segment your objectives and speak to the people you are selling to. One easy way to segment is as follows:

Choose whether to market to prospective prospects and current or former clients.
Each of these groups ought to be at a different level of familiarity with your business and might need various incentives to win their patronage.
Once you've chosen your target audience, use additional consumer data to keep your campaign as focused as feasible.

Your campaign can be more tailored, and your ROI can increase the more specialized your clients are.

2. Emphasize Customer Preferences

As a CX leader, you must know that customer needs and preferences vary and are arbitrary. To provide further direction on how to proceed, there is one customer preference thread that never changes.

You can do the following to evaluate customer preferences:

Get back to data visualization.
Create a survey chart.
Review your customer data to find out the most common customer preferences.

You can also:

Craft a customer data analytical model.
Include business KPIs and customer service to determine how customer preferences are met.
Analyze if they are delivering a bad or a good CX.

3. Recognize the Customer Journey

The customer journey is seldom seen as linear in digital marketing. Customers can choose from various routes to go where they want to go. They can start the adventure with a chatbot or anything else based on what works best for them.

When crafting your next CX program, you need to:

Remember the touchpoints that customers may utilize.
Give a great experience at every stage of the customer's purchasing process.
Collect customer data at every step to understand customers' wants and operate with their preferences.

It should be noted that using a mobile phone will give users a different experience than using the company's website.

4. Test and Improve

Your CX program will be operational at this point. It needs testing and particular area upgrades. Remember that the CX method is only partially adequate, especially if you implement it for the first time. Please take the time to examine numerous CX factors and make adjustments as needed. Review it and uncover actionable insights based on your customer preferences to make your CX strategy accurate and streamline business operations. This will boost your performance and allow you to compete in business.

The Key Takeaways

In multi-billion dollar industries, assessing your company's performance and making decisions following those results is critical. Furthermore, investors and C-suite executives can be made or broken in any industry by precise measures that result in wiser CX decisions. Correct decision-making demands accurate, unbiased information from the necessary sources and the grit to abandon tried-and-true routines.

4 Steps to Implement Unbiased Customer Data For a Better Customer Experience

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