How Customer Analytics in Billing Software Helps You Understand Customer Behavior

With the advancement in technology, the customers are connected in a better manner like never before. Your customers would have all the information before they come to make the purchase of your goods and services.

The challenging aspect is that the customers expect the businesses to know their needs and expectations before they make the purchase.

The organization should be able to make the prediction as to where the customers are in the buyer journey and use this insight in order to improve their varied operations, prevention of fraud, inventory planning and so on.

Deeper the understanding of the customers, more likely it is that the organization will be able to build exceptional customer service, thereby creating a strong competitive advantage.

“A happy customer is a brand ambassador that any business or organization can have”

Every business should spend time understanding the interactions they had with the customers in relation to their brand and products over various channels. This will give insights as to how to improve conversions, products, and services in order to meet customer satisfaction.

Customer Analytics is an activity within e-commerce where customers’ online shopping pattern and the internet browsing behavior is taken into consideration for the purpose of examination by the software.

The results would be used by the marketing professionals to increase the revenues for the online merchants.

Advantages of Customer Analytics in Billing Software

Customer Analytics Rationale

Customer analytics is also known as customer intelligence which is a customer-centric approach in order to manage business decisions. Such an approach analyzes data available regarding customers and their behavior.

An approach that is metric-based is considered critical to the success of business management. This approach manages the marketing retention and customer relationship management of the company.

The following will provide business insights into how customer analytics can help in customer behavior:

• Customer analytics can help in increasing the response rate and enhance customer loyalty. The return on investment is increased by contacting the target customers with relevant offers.
• Contacting the target customers who are most likely to respond and thereby, reducing the campaign costs.
• Accurately predicting which customers would most likely leave and then developing a campaign to retain them.
• One of the benefits of billing software is Understanding the target population in a better manner and by segmenting customers, the required message can be delivered.

A Complete Guide to Understand Customer Behavior Analysis

1. Improvements on the website

As per the study conducted by Baymard Institute, 7 out of 10 shopping carts have been seen to be abandoned by the users.

Some might have abandoned due to unavoidable reasons whereas other buyers might have left due to design flaws which may be due to JavaScript errors, problems with pages and so on.

A good analytical tool will be eligible to let you know the causes, help you make the changes and ultimately improve customer behavior.

2. Identification of Referral Sources

Customer analytics is helpful in identifying which marketing channels the customers use in order to reach the organization.

Such information will help the business to focus on marketing initiatives in order to attract more customers.

This information will also help to ensure that the strategy used by the businesses is cost-effective that resonates with customers in a proper manner.

3. Retention of the Customers

Marketers are well aware of the fact that it costs more money to attract a new customer than it takes to retain an existing one.

As per the study by Ogilvy, Google and TNS- 74% of the respondents felt that the word of mouth was considered as a major source of influence.

Analytics provide much-needed information as to how long it took the customers to receive the response on a query and how satisfied they are with it.

As per the study of IBM and eConsultancy, it was found 37% of customers felt that their favorite brands understand them.

4. Having Efficient Data Analysis

The problem the company faces is not the unavailability of customer data but what to do with all the information. As per the research study conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Service (HBR-AS), it was seen that when half the business leaders were surveyed, they felt that the customer experience is considered as the top two differentiators for their business.

Before collecting the data, the businesses need to define their objective which may be increasing customer engagement, improving the user experience or building targeted campaigns. Once the clear objective is established, then the source from which the businesses can obtain the data is identified.

Therefore, regular surveys, call center logs, web traffic analytics and so on provide a clearer picture in terms of customer needs.

5. Testing of Customer Interaction

Customer analytics help in conducting tests that would help in knowing what type of information will be meaningful for customers. For instance, the businesses may change the content of their homepage every few days to know what engages the customers more and how to make the sales shoot up. Such data could be used to track the conversion rates, retention rates and retarget those users who are not able to convert to a sale.

6. Predicting Customer Behavior

With the development of technologies, the evolvement of customer behavior will be witnessed. It is considered the job of the business to evaluate the emerging technologies and how these technologies would have an impact on the customer behavior and accordingly steps would be taken to address the changes occurred.

In today’s competitive arena, it is said that the business which uses robust analytical solutions will have away in order to empower their marketing teams so as to have a superior customer experience that will increase customer loyalty that would eventually increase the sales.

Rising Bar for Customer Analytics

Earlier, in a way to crunch a large amount of customer data efficiently and accurately by means of technology in order to achieve actionable inputs, analytics was not available. As and when the technology was made available, the businesses leveraged it in an effective manner and gained a significant amount of competitive advantage by using customer data analytics.

In recent times, the companies are looking deeper than the standard customer data analytics so as to increase customer marketing efficiencies.

Usage of Customer Analytics in Billing Software in order to study Customer Behavior:

In the corporate arena, one should look for that billing software which would eliminate the manual entries, thereby, automating routine operations in order to cut the time consumption.

It is very difficult to discover a one-size billing software that fits all the requirements of the organizations. Instead, the focus should be on those billing software that caters mainly to the vertical industries and incorporate those payment methods that are configurable and usable in different markets.

The billing process is considered very important as it can impact customer behavior and reduce the overall cost. Introducing the new billing programs or features would be time-consuming or costly.

It is very important to understand the outlook of customers and how are they paying their bills. Also, what issues the customers have with the billing process and the features they think are missing. With the use of customer analytics, the information can be analyzed so as to take the billing process to the next level.

• Mobile Payment

It has been found by Fiserv, that 60 percent of the customers are happy and satisfied when the bills are paid via mobile devices. The billing cost can be reduced by increasing the number of customers because less processing time and manpower are required when making payment through the mobile. Also, the satisfaction levels of customers increases as the process requires fewer efforts from the side of customers.

In order to make customers move to mobile billing, analytics can be used to determine which customers have a mobile device and are still not paying through this medium.

Reaching out to these customers to determine why these people are not using their devices and making the payment and make them talk regarding their concerns can provide much-needed insights to drive sales for them.

Customers might benefit from a quick tutorial who have downloaded the mobile payment application and have not used it. To make the customers feel important, these calls would increase the mobile billing adoption rates and decrease the billing costs on paper subsequently.

• Emergency Payment Options

It has been seen that no one wants to be late in making their bill payments but everyone has been close when it comes to their payment deadlines and wanted to make the payment as quickly as possible.

By increasing the emergency payment options, you can increase customer satisfaction and reduce the time and money your utility would spend on disconnections and collections.  This would lead to the customer-focused employees to work on those areas that would boost the revenues.

The first step is seen to use the data and customer analytics on payment history that would help you create customer profiles of all those who paid late or near the deadline.

Use this information to determine whether the additional billing options or increased customer knowledge and awareness on current plans would bring timely payment.

Send a quick survey on the phone or online to those customers who regularly miss making the payments. This will be helpful for you to determine which emergency payment method would be useful to the customers.

• Payment Reminders

Reminding the customers about their bill payments would definitely reduce the late bill payments. It has been found, as per Fiserv that 43 million households have shown interest in setting up the alerts for the mobile bill in order to avoid too late or missed payments. Also, 77 percent of respondents made a statement that the reminders of digital pay would enhance customer satisfaction and the adoption of e-bills would be increased. Using analytics, to find the customer segment which is most prone to late payments and then determining the specific time and the format of the reminders to be sent would be effective.

It has been observed that billing is not an afterthought as spending money is emotional for people. The idea is to make this billing process painless as much as possible. But with the help of analytics, necessary adjustments can be made in the billing process in order to keep the customers happy.

Wrapping up 

“Customer Analytics is all about addressing the right audience at the right time along with the right message.”

Customer analytics helps to understand what motivates the customers and what drives them to take the next course of action in terms of their interaction with you. This information can be used to improve relationships with customers. The digital age has drastically changed the way customers behave.

Big data analytics can prove fruitful in understanding the customer journey in a better manner. Once you understand the customer behavior, identification of the next best set of actions to take with the customers becomes easier, thereby, leading to far more valuable outcomes.