How Media, SaaS, Tech & Retail Use Behavioral Analytics (Examples)
By Nick Sabean
Advances in behavioral analytics are redefining how we do business. As brands spend more time and resources on understanding customer behavior, the result is a win-win for both customers and companies. It’s no wonder, given the potential of this data to:
- Optimize the customer journey
- Boost customer retention
- Increase conversion rates
- Reduce the cost of acquisition
- Improve customer experience
- Drive higher ROI for ad spend
That being said, the sheer volume of information distributed across multiple systems in a given day is mind-boggling:
- Walmart processes one million customer transactions per hour
- Amazon records $283,000 in transactions every minute
- Approximately 500 million tweets go out each day
With more data at our fingertips than ever before, making sense of it is all key to achieving results. Learn how different industries can benefit from collecting and analyzing behavioral data in real-time, across multiple sources.
The Retail Industry
As retail continues to move online, there’s a huge opportunity for eCommerce businesses to turn a profit and claim market share in a flourishing industry. Retail eCommerce sales in 2020 amounted to $4.28 trillion worldwide, with projections to grow to $5.4 trillion in 2022. While the potential is massive, it’s also a crowded market. Thus, sales funnel optimization is key to generating a healthy profit for online stores.
Knowing the steps a user takes to go from prospect to purchase enables you to optimize the customer’s journey through your funnel and make more sales, faster. A detailed funnel analysis can reveal opportunities to:
- Increase conversions
- Decrease drop-offs
- Improve customer engagement
- Optimize the customer experience along the way
For example, if many users add items to their cart but few complete the purchase, sales funnel analysis can help you figure out why. Whether shipping costs are a deterrent, your payment process is confusing, or account set-up is too tedious--finding and fixing these issues will directly impact your bottom line.
The Technology Industry
Unsurprisingly, tech companies have been early adopters of behavioral analytics to improve their products, services, and customer experiences. Gaming and B2B SaaS companies swear by behavioral data to understand their users and propel growth.
Now, FinTech companies are also capitalizing on the benefits of behavioral data to improve efficiency and make smarter decisions. While the banking industry has historically been slow-moving, FinTech innovators are propelling things forward with behavioral analytics in the following ways:
- Fraud detection: Unusual behavior patterns or multiple accounts opened using similar data within a short time period can tip off companies to potential fraud.
- Personalized marketing: Purchase and browsing history, geolocation data, and common user interaction patterns provide insight into how a customer will respond to a particular promotion or offer.
- Service improvement: Discover service hurdles and provide more timely and accurate customer interactions.
- Efficient use of resources: Seeing how customers use banking products and services helps predict customer lifetime value (CLV) and indicates where to focus resources.
The Media & Entertainment Industry
The digital age turned the entertainment industry on its head. Streaming services have all but replaced cable TV and movie rentals, not to mention changing the music industry forever. Companies like Spotify and Netflix now dominate the media industry --thanks in no small part to behavioral analytics.
Reporting over 155 million premium subscribers in Q4 2020, Spotify's subscriber base has more than doubled since early 2017. It should come as no surprise that Spotify uses behavioral data to keep you listening. The company uses data from over 50 million songs and 4 billion playlists to glean insights about search behavior, geographic location, and most used devices.
And that Discover Weekly playlist full of songs you love? It’s no accident. Spotify creates a highly individualized experience by analyzing the types of songs you listen to, all the way down to characteristics like beats per minute (BPM), loudness, and musical key. Spotify’s adept use of behavioral analysis creates a value-added experience resulting in more content personalization, better ad targeting, optimized media scheduling, and reduced churn.
The Healthcare Industry
Health insurance customers can rejoice--health insurance providers have begun using behavioral analytics to understand and improve their dismal customer satisfaction scores.
In addition, hospitals and other healthcare providers can use behavioral analytics to gain much-needed insights into a challenging industry. There are a number of ways providers can enhance patient care and customer satisfaction using behavioral data:
- Protect patient data: By understanding how employees access electronic health records, HR systems, and medication systems, healthcare organizations can detect and curb inappropriate employee behavior.
- Improve workflows: Through behavioral tracking within the systems mentioned above, hospitals can also pinpoint and encourage ideal behaviors and workflows for specific departments.
- Enhance patient engagement: Behavioral analytics provides insight into how clinicians treat, interact, or communicate with patients and reveals opportunities for improvement.
- Reduce negative feedback: Providers can avoid negative patient experiences by identifying anomalies in coding, billing, and payments sooner.
- Elevate the patient experience: Predict patients’ most convenient appointment times, find their best-fit clinician, and determine the most appropriate workflows for patient care.
The Telecommunications Industry
Given the stiff competition in today’s telecom market, providers of wireless internet, phones, TV, and other telecom services have their work cut out for them. Customers have extremely high expectations and plenty of choices when it comes to telecom services. Combine that with the industry’s reputation for subpar service, and you can see why there’s an average churn rate of 30% to 35%.
For telecommunications operators to remain competitive and achieve higher retention rates, they need to repair the customer experience.
The first step is to understand why customers are leaving. Where did bad experiences originate and how can you prevent them? Behavioral analytics tools can help by combining data from multiple sources--for example, bringing together transactional data, customer journey patterns, and real-time communication streams to offer insights into customer sentiment about their service experience.
After that, telecom providers must work to anticipate customer needs and surpass their expectations. Behavioral analytics plays a key role in building a deeper understanding of customer needs. By tracking which services people use, when, and for how long, companies can tailor their offerings to better fit customer preferences.
Companies like Vodafone, Informatica, and ClearStory Data are already using behavioral data to craft more personalized data packages, relevant discounts, and highly targeted advertising campaigns that boost customer retention.
To make sense of the massive amounts of data consumers create each day, the right solution is critical. Teams should be able to collect and analyze data in near real-time. They want to aggregate and integrate multiple data sources into a single stream. And visualization is key to helping non-data scientists connect the dots without having to understand code or advanced principles of data science.
Scuba is that solution. Our customer intelligence platform empowers CX, BI, Product teams, and more to make business decisions within a single view across all departments, teams, and a variety of industries.
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