How many times have you been in a meeting and, in one form or another, gone back to the question: what do our customers really want? For a lot of businesses, this question is rhetorical — we think we know what our customers want, and so we tell them what we think they want to hear. But in the digital age, we don’t even have to ask anymore. Your customers are telling you what they want, and what they don’t want, all the time. If you track their conversions, movement through a site, returns, and even online feedback, you can see this data materialize. But this is a double-edged sword. Too much feedback can be overwhelming, or even outright confusing. Learning how to make the most of it is a sure step toward better business.

One of the ways that you can start mining your customer feedback to improve your bottom line is with Business Intelligence (BI) software. BI programs take large amounts of data and, using analytical tools, create easy-to-read visual representations of information that help you make informed decisions in real time. Sounds great, right? But of course, before you can find your answers, you still have to know what questions to ask. And yes, they have to be a little more specific than “what do they want?”

Here’s an example. One of our customers, a coffee shop chain in Europe, wanted a better picture of what their customers wanted, too. They used Dyntell Bi to aggregate their data from registers across all their stores, allowing them to analyze every shop’s individual data as a whole. Now, no matter if they want to break down their data by shop, city, region, country, or their whole organization, they can do so quickly and effectively with up-to-the-minute information.

So, what exactly does this mean for customer feedback, you ask. If used correctly, it means everything.

Say you’re a clothing retailer and your stores in a certain region are suddenly taking a hit in sales because of a slew of returns. Rather than ignoring this, you can analyze the sales data from the registers at those stores to see what products are being returned, tracing their type, cut, and even their origin. Maybe all of the products on a specific truck were somehow damaged, and you can then begin recalling everything else that was on that vehicle, or stored in that warehouse, to avoid negative customer feedback. Or, you’ll discover that the sizes on products from a specific line were mislabeled, and customers were buying things that didn’t fit.

Or, perhaps you’re receiving a slew of negative feedback forms online about a specific product, data which is feeding into your BI dashboards and showing as a downward spike in customer satisfaction. However, when you look at data from your registers, you see that you’re not actually selling as many of that product as you’d think based on what you’re seeing online. The dissatisfied group must be small, then. That means this could possibly a localized issue, or a problem with the customer service in a specific region. Or the spike could even be attributed to a very small number of customers who are very vocal, creating a data smokescreen that would conceal other issues without help from BI analytics.

Let’s head back to the coffee shop for a final example. Our customer is having an issue with negative feedback. But all the products used in the shop are up to standard, an examination of the premises shows that everything is in good condition, and the manager hasn’t reported any problems. But they have a constant stream of data coming from the registers, and the online feedback tracks time and location. By discerning who was working the register and making the drinks at the time when negative feedback was being reported, the company can offer extra training and oversight to employees who may be creating unsatisfactory customer experiences, solving problems with careful analysis.

You, too, can pinpoint complex problems and discover simple solutions with the power of business intelligence software programs like Dyntell Bi. If you’d like to learn more, sign up for a demo or reach out to one of our sales representatives today.