Do you know what your customers' ideal customer experience would be? Are you sure? Many companies think they do, but analyst data tells us that more often than not, companies are missing the mark when it comes to living up to their customers' expectations. But before you begin to improve your customers' experience, first you need to pinpoint what their ideal customer experience should be.

Guesswork won't cut it, according to cloud-based call center solution and IVR company Angel. In a recent blog post Angel's David Toliver wrote, “Creating a memorable customer experience doesn’t just happen from having a solid brand or an outstanding product, but rather from actual insight into past customer behavior, buying habits and individual feedback on a specific solution or event.”

In other words, first you need to analyze your historical data to better understand where your company succeeds with customers, and where it misses, and this means bringing analytics into the picture. But not just any analytics solution, says Angel. One with will let you see, at a glance, a full snapshot of the customer's picture. And this means dashboards.

“A dashboard shouldn’t be a kitchen sink of all customer information,” writes Toliver. “A dashboard should offer historical and current view of business data to enable employees to quickly identify trends. Additionally, these views should offer filtering options that are meaningful and directly connected to the business goals. If the data is presented in a way that is tied to corporate, team and individual objectives – think key performance indicators – employees are enabled to not only make more data-driven decisions, but also enhance productivity and target improvements towards the [customer experience.”

By customizing an analytics solution with a dashboard you can customize and stratify to the precise views you require, you can draw more information about the ideal customer experience out of your operations than ever before. The trick, according to Angel, is to not overwhelm the dashboard with data simply for data's sake (or for the purpose of reporting), but to create a visually appealing design that will give you precisely the data you need, when you need it, in a way that's most useful to you in reaching your goals.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO click here.

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