If someone handed you a spreadsheet full of hundreds of data points, how much valuable information would you be able to glean from that within five minutes? An hour? Six hours? The answer is probably that even with hours, you wouldn’t get very far without some helpful data visualization software. 

Luckily, business leaders today have access to more tools and software than ever to help them get the most out of their data. One of the tools they can use is data visualization software, and it’s particularly useful for creating a better customer experience. Use this guide to discover how data visualization software improves the customer experience. 

What Role Can Data Visualization Software Play in the Customer Experience?

Data visualization — the process of visually representing data sets with graphics like charts, maps, and graphs — has applications across business departments. You can use data visualizations to improve your security, develop better marketing strategies, and conduct competitor research, for instance. One application of data visualization software that doesn’t always get enough attention, though, is customer experience management. 

Your business can use data visualization to better understand your customer data and find ways to improve the customer experience. Most businesses collect vast amounts of customer data between profiles, product interactions, customer service interactions, buying preferences, and other data. It’s too much data for your customer-facing teams to efficiently sort through and apply to customer experience management. With data visualizations, they can rapidly understand your business’s customer data and use it to improve their customer experience. 

Depending on what kind of data you’re working with, you can use different types of data visualizations including:

• Temporal data visualizations: time series charts, timelines, line graphs, scatter plots
• Network data visualizations: matrix charts, node-link diagrams, word clouds
• Geospatial data visualizations: cluster maps, heat maps, dot maps, cartogram maps
• Hierarchical data visualizations: sunburst diagrams, tree diagrams, dendrogram diagrams

Your data visualization softwares, if you use them, will create these visualizations for you automatically. All you need to do is connect your customer data sources to the software so it can continually update your visualizations with the most current data. You’ll always be operating with the best, most up-to-date information when you use software that allows for real-time data streaming. 

Use Cases for Data Visualization Software

There’s a variety of ways you can apply data visualization softwares to customer experience management within your enterprise. Here are a few examples to give you some ideas:

Analyzing the performance of your products or services

Part of delivering a strong customer experience is providing your customers with the best possible products or services. You can use data visualization to analyze how well your products or services are performing with your customers. Look at the macro level — how all your customers respond to certain products/services — or the micro level — how certain customer segments respond. Either way, you’ll gain actionable insights that help you adapt and meet the needs of your customers. 

Improve customer service

If your customers have any issues with your products or services, you want to ensure your company provides the best possible customer service to address those concerns. Otherwise, you risk alienating customers and hurting your brand’s reputation. Use data visualization software with real-time dashboards to monitor sessions between your customer service team and your customers. You get a better sense of how your customer service representatives engage with your customers, and whether there’s anything they can do to improve their service. 

Engage your customers

Though data visualization software is primarily intended for behind-the-scenes use, you can also present customers with their product data in data visualization dashboards. This is an increasingly popular strategy for engaging customers and keeping them involved with your business. A financial institution, for example, might show customers data visualizations that depict their account balances over time or their spending by category. These interactive dashboards where customers can view and explore their data can help set you apart from your competitors. 

Identify customers experiencing recurring issues

Some customers repeatedly experience issues with your products or services and thus require a different kind of customer service than your average consumer. Using data visualizations software, you can easily identify customers who experience recurring issues to better meet their needs. You can separate these interactions from the rest of your customer service data, too, to gain a more accurate look into your customers’ needs. 

By picking out recurring issues, data visualizations also help you make improvements to problem areas in your customer experience. If you see that customers repeatedly encounter problems with a certain aspect of your products or services, you know to look into those issues in more detail and make changes. 

Reduce junk data

Regardless of how well-structured your data collection methods are, some junk data is an inevitability. You can’t just ignore this junk data, though, because it can skew your analysis and lead you to make decisions based on incorrect information. That defeats the purpose of conducting data analysis in the first place. Using data visualizations, you can find and eliminate junk data before it impacts your analysis. These junk data points will often stand out and be obvious once you’re looking at the data set presented visually. You can get to the heart of what matters and ignore the junk so you don’t let bad information impact your customer experience management strategies. 

Final Thoughts

Improving your brand’s customer experience can make a huge difference to the success of your business. When you develop a positive customer experience, you’re more likely to have loyal customers who continually patronize your business and promote it for you with word-of-mouth marketing. Why not take advantage of all the tools that can help you with customer experience management, then, including data visualization software?

If you’re interested in improving your customer experience with the help of data visualization, try Live Earth. Live Earth is a real-time data streaming and visualization platform that gives you unprecedented control of your business, including your customer experience. Contact us to learn more about the ways you can use the Live Earth platform to improve business performance.