77 Kellogg Insight COMPANIES ARE INCREASINGLY TURNING TO data science to better understand how customers interact with their products and services. And with good reason. A 2018 survey sponsored by SAS, Accenture, and Intel found that 58 percent of responding business leaders said that using cus- tomer analytics significantly increased customer retention and loyalty, and nearly half associated analytics with significant revenue growth. “It’s important to know if you’re providing the experience you want customers to have and making it better,” says Joel K. Shapiro, a clinical associate professor of data analytics at Kellogg. “To do that, you need to measure as much as you can about what happens to them.” But according to Shapiro, far too many companies are ignoring some of the juiciest data around. These are the data that induce head-scratch - ing, the measurements that don’t quite fit the existing models. These are the outliers. And they can highlight your product’s or service’s greatest weaknesses—as well as where it has the potential to truly shine. Companies can and should use this knowledge to optimize the custo- mer experience. “The mere presence of outliers in customer-experience data means that really good or bad things can happen to customers,” says Shapiro. “Maybe you can move that [experience] toward something that either increases the number of positive experiences or doesn’t detract from them.” Keep Your Outliers When data scientists come across an outlier, their first inclination may be to discard it in favor of “cleaning” or “smoothing out” the data. After Based on insights from Joel K. Shapiro