“When collecting customer insights, every question should be connected to a potential action.”
What are Customer Insights?
Customer insights, apart from market research and customer experience, is a terminology that one is accustomed to these days. The term is equally important as the others as it helps companies prioritize their business goals. In addition, the same data can help get the maximum customer satisfaction out of business.
Research done by Microsoft reveals that those companies which understand consumer behavior and use it to leverage consumer insights solutions outperform their competitors. These customer insights help you know how you can improve your service and have smooth customer experience management.
Customer insights are valuable bits of information a business gathers about its customers. These insights help them understand the people’s needs and sentiments about what the company offers. With more profound research on their customers, businesses can improve the quality of their products and services.
What improvements can customer insights bring to the company?
One can easily derive the best information from customer insights using the right tools. Therefore, companies should get a suitable CXM suite that meets their business objectives. In addition, most software suites collect data for active and passive insights; you can learn more here.
Furthermore, most AI-enabled tools can help in getting customer insights. But do insights make such a huge difference? The four significant improvements that they can bring about in an organization are:
1. Improved products and services
This is the ultimate goal of all customer experience teams, to have better products and services. The insights you collect from your customers can help you determine the needed and not needed features in your products and services.
At the next level, one should also treat customer service as a product in the modern market. Once your customers have better and improved services, you will see an improvement in the overall customer experience. This will result in having more loyal customers in the long run, as people like to be associated with those brands with which they seem to have a connection.
2. Better personalized marketing
Having proper knowledge about your customer is the ultimate business advice. Customer insights can help shape your product and teach you more about your customers. In addition, you will be able to meet your audience’s expectations quickly once you know about the customer segments and their buying habits.
3. Informed business strategy
Letting customer insights lead your business decisions can help your company stay ahead of the times. Insights in the form of pricing and roadmap can benefit you more than you have thought. But it is equally important to have the most accurate data guiding you as you make some long—term decisions.
4. Reduced churn
Customer experience is on its way to becoming the topmost differentiator between businesses in the global market. Hence, there is an increased demand for Customer Experience software suites that help retain loyalty and goodwill in the market and reduce churn. This will, in turn, produce greater profits and build a more positive brand image. So, listen to your customers, and you will continue being prominent in the market.
Seven methods of gathering customer insights
Interacting with customers will help you determine the methods that work for them. Here are some ways to gather customer insights and use them for your benefit:
1.Feedback questionnaires
Surveying customers to get feedback is the best way to collect data and insights. These insights are more focused on the quality aspect of your company and its performance. These questionnaires can be customized as per the need using an online form builder. As a result, you can get deeper insights into your overall performance or narrow it down to a specific category.
2. Reviews
It has become easy for customers to share their opinions in the form of reviews about a company or its products and services. It is again a qualitative method of getting data from your customers. Therefore, companies must track reviews on online sites and social media platforms. If you ignore these reviews, you are not only missing a chance to interact with the customer but also ignoring valuable data that can save your reputation.
3. Customer sentiment surveys
Customer sentiment surveys are not as detailed as questionnaires. They are designed only to judge the overall feeling of your customer base. Different formats such as likes, dislikes, emoji faces, and star ratings can be used to ascertain your customer’s emotions. A new feature, Net Promoter Score(NPS), can be implemented as it asks customers how likely they are to recommend the brand to others.
4. Behavioral data
Behavioral data is the data you collect regarding your customers’ behavior when purchasing your products and services. The easiest ways to gather this data are through your website or by implementing social media analytics. You get to understand those things that trigger your customer to convert or drop off. Additionally, you get information about the roadblocks in the customer journey that prevent your potential customers from buying.
5. A/B testing
If you are still deciding on the features that will work best or where to place critical elements, there is no better way to figure this out than by testing them in real-time. A/B testing is where you release two versions of the same thing and get half of your audience testing model A and the other half testing model B. You can determine which model is successful by collecting data from the model with maximum conversions.
6. Social listening
Social listening is the method of using tools to track key conversations that relate to your brand. You can do this by following industry-related keywords, brand mentions, and competitor tags to see what your audience is talking about concerning the industry you’re in. You can then use the data collected to provide specialized services.
7. Chatbot data
Most companies implement a chatbot to address the queries and concerns of customers when a customer executive is not around. Instant chatbot replies can influence customer experience. You can also monitor the issues that arise in the data provided through interactions.
Five ways to use customer insights to improve customer experience
1. Streamline the journey of your customers
By collecting data and feedback, you can figure out those elements that turn away potential customers during their customer journey. Then, you can use the insights to optimize the buying process and streamline the customer journey.
2. Improve product functionality
Customer insights are always a valuable source of information in case you want to improve certain products’ functionality. By figuring out what your customer wants and asking them for input on how the products can be made better, you can develop the best products/service. This will appeal to newer audiences and keep your business ahead of your competitors.
3. Optimize the quality of a product or a service
While functionality deals with the capabilities of your product, quality is about its performance. Direct interactions and reviews can help you determine the quality of your company’s offerings. For example, creators can use tools like ConvertKit to interact with the audience and improve the product/service based on their feedback. Although ConvertKit is preferred for digital product sales, the best ConvertKit alternatives cater to all types of businesses and audiences.
4. Improve customer experience
Customers now have high expectations from the brands they use and are most likely to share their previous experiences. If you don’t match up to their expectation, unless they are unrealistic, you are at the risk of losing your reputation via reviews. However, the same reviews can help you interact and resolve any impending issues with customers.
5. Develop new products and services
Once you start listening to your customers, you will get an idea of how you are solving their problems and how you are not. While a product may address a problem, there may be unforeseen problems that aren’t being addressed. Therefore, with customer insights, you can improve and introduce newer products and services that fix most of your users’ issues.
Summing up customer insights
Customer insights are your secret weapons to improving customer experience and business performance. Your overall business plan will only be as good and accurate as your customer insights are. From simple steps such as customer feedback to advanced methodologies in the form of data analytics, customer insights can help in a plethora of ways.
By B Naomi Grace
