A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.
Michaell LeBoeuf
Running a successful business highly depends on having a deep understanding of customers. The better you are at identifying the needs and expectations of customers and delivering value to them, the more success you will have in your business.
There are various ways to identify these needs and expectations and you should definitely take every necessary step to have enough data about customer insights.
What are customer insights?
Customer insight is having a deep understanding of your customers. This means that you have to understand their behaviors, their needs, and their preferences. After you collect the necessary data from them, you can communicate with your customers on a more personal level.
This data encapsulates more than you might initially think. In order to have a good dataset, you might need their browser history, patterns of purchase, returns, patterns of responding to campaigns, and demographics.
What is Customer Insight Marketing?
Customer insight marketing is based on the mere fact that you evaluate data and take steps according to your evaluations. These steps can be campaigns, promos, and ads that will hit the home for your customers. This, in the long run, favors your business with profit and more loyal customers.
Why do customer insights matter?
This is somewhat a rhetorical question. Customer insights matter simply because understanding your customer base equals success. By knowing how your customers feel, what they want, and why they want it, you can gain the sympathy of your customers.
Different types of Customer Insights
It is quite a bit perplexing to see customer insights come in different types. However, it is of high importance to learn these types so as to shape your evaluations according to your business type. There are five different types of customer insights, these are;
- Firmographic Customer Insight. If you are a B2B company this is what you should pay close attention to. Firmographic customer insight will tell you the attributes of the companies that benefit from your service or product. This insight includes the industry of the company, the size of the company, and the location of the company.
- Usage Customer Insight. This insight will show you how people are using your product and how often they use your product. So to say, people might use your product on a weekly or a daily basis.
- Customer Loyalty Insight. This is an indicator of how happy people are with your product. A great KPI to see this is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) – which shows how much of your customer base promotes you. You can send your customers a questionnaire including questions based on how likely they offer your product to other people.
- Customer Service Insight. It is a pretty straightforward one. This data highly concerns your support team – to be specific, the quality and the context of customer interactions. This data will show you what your customers say, want to know, and their levels of pleasure.
- Competitor Insights. Positioning yourself according to your competitors is important. This insight is about that. You will know how your competitors run the business and how you can stand out in the competition.
How to Gather Customer Insights
Of course, if you are to investigate your impact on the customers, you have to gather data. This is pretty obvious. Now, we shall dwell on the topic of how you can bring customer insights together.
1- Feedback Surveys
Sometimes, directly asking your customers what they think about your company can be the best thing to do. According to a recent Hubspot report, 56% of the companies get feedbacks by doing so. Since they let you get qualitative feedbacks, surveys can be a great way of checking your brand quality.
Also, you can ask questions on a wide range. This means that your questions may concern the overall performance of your company, or for example, the performance of your customer service.
2- Reviews
According to the same report, companies get a new review every ten days. So in a year, you get 36 qualitative customer insights. However, only 52% percent of the companies care about the reviews. You don’t want to be one of the rest.
Simply because reviews are not only about the product quality, they also present you with a chance to interact with your customers. And sometimes, these reviews can be harmful to your brand’s reputation. It is a chance you shall not miss.
3- Customer Sentiment Surveys
These surveys are not exhaustive as general surveys. They are used to help you understand how your customers feel about your product – are they happy or are they disappointed? You can use Facebook-like reactions or simply like and dislike buttons to understand how they feel. Also, NPS can be integrated here, too!
4- Behavioral Data
Behavioral data is the data you collect from your customers based on how they behave while using your product or service. The most common way to gather this data is to look at your website or use analytics for social media. You can use this data type to understand what makes your customers adopt and abort your product.
5- A/B Testing
According to Amplitude’s Product Intelligence Report, 57% of businesses claim that customer reviews have a significant impact on the choices they make. If you are such a company, A/B testing will come in handy for you – due to the fact that A/B testing is focused on proposing two options and asking people which option they think would work best.
6- Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is the process of using tools – generally artificial intelligence – to see how your name is used on the internet. With this technique, you can track keywords related to the industry, brand names and mentions, and competitors. Thus, you can take steps to catch up with trends and make people happy.
7- Support Tickets
The final way to gather customer insights is to use support tickets. Your customer support team deals with the tickets every day. Amongst these tickets, you have to find a common pattern or theme. Then, you can resolve the issue and see what customers are thinking about your product.
6 Effective Ways to Utilize Customers Insights
It has been somewhat vague as to what you can do with customer insights. Of course, it will eventually result in more customer satisfaction and more profit for your company. However, what can you do to get to that phase? Let’s see them!
1- Customer Journey
There is a chance that you might not know why your customers abort using your products and services. By analyzing your customers’ data and reviews, you can understand why they are stopping using your product. This way you can optimize the customer journey in order for it to be a more customer-friendly process and experience.
2- Product Functionality Improvement
Customer insights are one of the best ways to understand your product’s functionality. If you are to improve the functionality, figuring out how your customers use your product will point out the areas you can work on. This way you can eliminate competition and attract new audiences to your brand, as well as, enhance the user experience for your existing customers.
3- Optimize Quality
We are moving from what your product can do to how well your product can do. You can learn how efficient and how effective your product is simply by talking with your customers, reading reviews, and sending them surveys. Customer insights should be your go-to source when you aim to improve the quality of your product.
4- Enhance Customer Service
It is a well-known fact that customers’ expectations keep getting higher and higher. This is especially true for customer support. Plus, they talk about their experiences of customer service in daily conversations. If your customer service is marked bad by your customer base, you will start to see reputational damages.
In this regard, you can enhance the customer service experience with the help of customer insights. For example, they might say that waiting time is too long to endure and you can start taking precautions to eliminate this problem.
5- New Products
Customer insights show whether or not you are successful with regard to solving your customers’ problems. This means that there is a chance of your products and services solving some problems but not addressing others. If you listen to your customers you can extend the capacities of your product and services, and maybe create new products across industries.
6- Marketing Strategy
While you are evaluating customer insights, you will see the common patterns amongst your customers. This information can be used in order to create trends for your marketing campaign. This will result in an excellent user experience for your new and existing customers from beginning to end.
So, you should be enlightened now. Customer insights are the most important data if you want to excel in your industry. After you gather the necessary tools and find the perfect dataset, you are guaranteed to be one of the major players in your industry.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I get customer insights?
You can use different methods to get customer insights. For example, you can create a survey and send that to your customers to get customer insights, or you can visit review sites to see what people are thinking about you.
What is an example of customer insight?
Imagine that you are designing a new product and want to add features to it. However, you can not choose between two designs proposed to use with that feature. You share a post on your social media account to see which one your customers will choose. This is an example of customer insight.
