5 Customer Analytics Case Studies

5 Customer Analytics Case Studies

Overview

Customer analytics is a subset of business intelligence that provides insights to help the business better serve its customers.

Ultimately, many customer analysts start in business intelligence or data analytics and build domain knowledge in customer strategy. Customer strategy knowledge is then assessed during interviews with a customer analytics case study. If you’re interested in a customer analytics role, here’s everything you need to know about landing a customer analyst job:

What Is Customer Analytics?

Customer analytics is the measurement, collection, and analysis of data related to customers. The customer data may include demographics, psychographic segmentation, behavioral data, or customer feedback. Businesses then use the data to make marketing investments, operations, product development, and planning decisions.

Customer analytics relies on data from various sources, including website traffic data, Customer Record Management insights, and transactional and behavioral data. These data offer insights into a variety of business processes. For example, businesses can use customer analytics to:

  • Identify opportunities for product/business development
  • Minimize customer churn/predict churn
  • Personalize product, service, or marketing offers
  • Optimize pricing or product performance
  • Improve customer experiences

Churn analysis, for instance, is a high-value-adding customer analytics problem. Businesses use it to identify customers most likely to churn from their platform or service. These insights can personalize the product, develop a new offer, or other strategies to improve retention.

How Does Customer Analytics Work?

Customer analytics relies on various data sources to answer important customer questions like Who are my most valuable customers? What strategies are most likely to increase conversion rates? What strategies are most likely to reduce churn?

Therefore, customer analytics can touch all business areas, from reducing acquisition costs to providing insights that increase retention and build loyalty.

Customer analysts must be proficient in data processing. Often, they are required to build complex datasets - both structured and unstructured data - to analyze customer behavior and product performance. The most common data sources used by customer analysts include:

  • Social listening data
  • Customer survey data
  • Website traffic data
  • Marketing analytics data
  • Social media data
  • Customer Resource Management (CRM) data

Customer analytics tools. Customer analysts must be proficient in various tools and have a strong sense of data processing techniques. Standard tools include analytics platforms like Google Analytics and CRMs like Salesforce, Tableau, or the Acquia Customer Data Platform.

Customer analysts must also have strong SQL skills to query data and pull customer insights, data visualization skills, analytical skills, and data sense.

What Is a Customer Analytics Case Study?

Interviews for customer analyst roles typically include one or more customer analytics case studies. An interview case study is an open-ended discussion question that asks the interviewee to solve a real-life customer analytics case. These questions assess a wide variety of skills, including:

  • Technical - SQL, data modeling (in some cases), A/B testing, and statistics
  • Data Sense - Ability to pull valuable metrics, data processing and metrics, and ability to generate insights
  • Behavioral - Communication and adaptability are assessed, as well as your problem-solving ability creatively.

For example, the interviewee might be asked: “How would you measure the customer service quality of a chatbox feature?” In addition, the interviewer would likely give a dataset for analysis.

As an interviewee, you would then need to propose a solution and perform an analysis to develop a solution for the problem.

Interview Prep: How to Solve Customer Analytics Case Studies

To answer a customer analytics case study, you should use a framework to organize your response. A framework that includes asking for clarity, making assumptions about the case, gathering data and analysis, and ultimately proposing a solution will help you best communicate your ideas.

The most common steps we recommend for answering data science case studies include the following:

1. Clarify

Before you jump into an answer, you want to gather additional information. Data and insights about the customers are intentionally left out with analytics case study questions. Therefore, you must dig in and fill in the gaps in the provided data. Some questions to ask in customer analytics case interviews include:

  • Who are the customers?
  • What are the customer’s needs?
  • How does the product/service align with these needs?
  • Make Assumptions

At this stage, you can propose hypotheses about the case question. This stage shows your ability to develop customer insights. Remember always to communicate your hypotheses to the interviewer and walk the interviewer through your line of thinking.

2. Make Assumptions

At this stage, you can propose hypotheses about the case question. This stage shows your ability to develop customer insights. Remember always to communicate your hypotheses to the interviewer and walk the interviewer through your line of thinking.

At this stage, you might make assumptions about the following:

  • Customer segments - What segments/demographics are most likely using the product?
  • Customer desires - Why do customers buy the product or service? What are some reasons they might churn?
  • Customer insights - How might you go about generating insights from the data? For example, what metrics would you investigate if you wanted to reduce customer churn?

3. Propose a Solution

In this step, you want to establish a hypothesis, which you will investigate. However, there isn’t one correct answer to this type of case question. Instead, these discussions are used to assess your ability to wrap your head around a problem quickly, your thoroughness in getting started, and, ultimately, how you generate insights from the data.

One tip: Your hypothesis is a refined version of the problem that uses the available data to support or disprove the hypothesis.

4. Provide Data Points and Analysis

The fundamental goal in this step is to choose and prioritize a key metric. This metric will allow you to work through the hypothesis and analyze different case solutions that will help you validate the idea.

In addition to performing analysis and gathering data, remember to discuss trade-offs. Your approach may have potential limitations, and incorporating these in your answer will show your thoroughness and ability to be proactive rather than reactive in assessing case studies.

Sample Customer Analytics Case Study Interview Questions

As you prepare for a customer case interview, you can practice with these examples, including a range of customer analytics cases, analyzing churn behavior, identifying new customer outreach opportunities, and analyzing customer acquisition.

One thing to note: Customer analytics questions typically overlap with marketing analytics questions. Therefore, you might look at things.

How would you determine the best business partners for a credit card company?

More context: The company has a list of 100,000 small businesses but only has the human capital to reach 1,000 of them. How would you determine the best 1,000 businesses to reach out to?

This business case question is customer-centric; therefore, you could draw insights from existing business partners to determine the best new customers to target. You can follow along with this mock interview for this question:

What metrics would you use to determine the value of a marketing channel?

See the video solution here: