What is it that makes an Amazon or Netflix so popular among people?

Why is it that we go to a seemingly interesting website and then quickly leave it?

The answer may lie in the experience. You go to the Netflix app because you want to be entertained. You open the Amazon website because you want to compare prices and order a few things. Now, imagine if the design of the website or the app was confusing. What if Netflix did not give you personalized recommendations? What if Amazon did not categorize its items? You might waste a lot of time looking for what you want and might end up exiting the website or the app within a few seconds. For a digital-first company, that spells bad news.

Gone are those days when customer experience was just a way to stand apart from the competitors. Today, for apps and for software products, it is a necessity to survive in the hyper-competitive market. 86% of customers today are willing to pay a premium for excellent customer experience. A study by Walker suggests that in 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key differentiator.

So, how do you create an experience that will make your customers stay on your platform?

To begin with, how do you even determine what good experience means to your customer?

The answer may lie in big data.

How has Big Data Helped Companies to Improve Customer Experience?

Companies have increasingly started relying on data to find ways to make the customer’s experience frictionless.

However, with terabytes and zettabytes of data generated every year, companies find it hard to collect, analyze, and interpret the data correctly.That’s when they use technology like big data.

Big data extracts information from large data sets systematically to enable businesses to make informed decisions.

Here’s how.

1. Helps in Understanding the Behavior of the Customers:
   When you operate in a physical retail space, it is easier to observe the behavior of people and provide them what they need. But how do you emulate the same thing online? That’s where big data helps. With big data and analytics, you can find out how people interact with your product or website, how they prefer to engage, what prevents them from taking action?
   You can mine insights from customer support queries and online forum responses about what irks the customer? What features are they looking for? Understanding the behavior of the customer will enable you to make improvements to your product in line with the needs of the customer.
2. Helps in Rectifying Customer Pain Points:
   Taking the previous point further, big data helps you to rectify the issues customers face while using your product. Let’s take Amazon for instance. What made Amazon introduce the 1-click ordering feature on their mobile app?
   It was not a random decision. Amazon realized that most customers backed out on having to enter all their information manually during the checkout process. With the 1-click option, the users can place an order without entering any details. This saves their time and increases conversions for Amazon.
   Once you gather information on what prevents your customers from deriving the necessary value from your product, your UX and UI designers can rectify the design or you can take the call to add a much-needed feature.
3. Helps in Improving Visualization of the Website or App:
   To design a great product, you have to determine what you want the customers to do and then create the interface such that it helps them do that. Visualizing such a design might look simple, but if you want the design to be effective, you have to turn to big data. Let’s take Instagram’s example.
   Data revealed to the widely popular photo-sharing app that people were unable to find relevant images and videos on their feeds. So, they altered the feed from reverse-sequential order to display posts that they thought people would like to see, like, and share. This helped them to customize the data feed for their users and led to more popularity.
   The data collected through photos and videos let visitors discover new interests relevant to them. So, if you are planning to revamp the design of your product, read the data you collect from your customers and mine those insights to improve the usability.
4. Removes all guesswork and leads to data-backed experiments:
   Every product change will cost money for your company. It could also earn you bouquets or brickbats depending upon how your customers react to the change. So, if you want to experiment with your UX or UI, conduct data-backed experiments. Conduct usability tests on a small batch of loyal users to know their feedback on the changes and use those insights to improve or modify the design.
   Turn to predictive analytics to get a sense of what could happen. This saves time and money and helps you focus on strategies that have a greater chance of working.
5. Creates personalized interface for every user:
   Think of the Amazon homepage showing recommendations of products to buy or the personalized content recommendations by Netflix. Conditioned by the experience provided by apps like these, even enterprise and business users are demanding greater levels of customization.
   And the app and product experience can be so much more meaningful to your users too,thanks to big data. Analytics helps you bring that relevance in your products that encourages higher engagement.

Conclusion:

Until a few years ago, software products never thought of combining art and science to improve the customer experience. Today, customer experience has become more data-focused and customer-centric. And all credit for this significant shift must go to big data and analytics. Analytics has enabled companies to adopt science to create personalized experiences that make every customer feel special.