Corrie Carrigan: Episode Analytics

Read the transcript below.

CORRIE CARRIGAN: Experience is the new product. Customers care not just about the product itself, but the whole experience that surrounds a product.

Take laptops, for example; it's not just about the hardware and software that you buy. It's about the quality and convenience of the tech support that comes with it as well.

So as companies increasingly focus on customer experience, they've developed a new unit of measure, the customer episode. A customer episode could be something like paying a bill, buying a new phone, or filing a claim. And customer episodes can be comprised of multiple touch points across an increasingly wide variety of channels.

So really understanding customer episodes and the pathways that customers follow as they interact with your company is no easy feat. And that's where episode analytics tools can come in handy. They allow you to collect, integrate and treat large sets of data so that you can make sense of how customers are interacting with your company.

Now, choosing the right tool is important, but just as important is really giving careful thought to how you plan to use the tool to manage your business differently.

The most common use of tools like this, that we see, are retroactively conducting diagnostics to really understand and identify points of failure and friction in the customer episode. We also see some companies that use this data to predict Net Promoter Score, based on customer feedback from previous customers who followed similar channel paths.

In the most advanced use of this data that we see, is more real time and providing visibility to frontline team members into customer activity prior to the customer picking up the phone to call or initiate a chat session, or even to anticipate the customer needs and proactively reach out to customers who appear to be having an issue.

Read the Bain Brief: Running the Business through Your Customer's Eyes