Are you looking to improve your product offerings, start a new business, or get your failing business back on track? It would be best to equip yourself with customer insights to know where to begin.
When you study your customers, you identify your target market and can get to know and understand your potential and existing customers more deeply.
Customer metrics can show you what they want, what influences their purchasing decisions, their behavior, lifestyle, and more.
These customer insights will help you make smart decisions, improve what your brand offers, and in the end, shape your business’s future.
In this blog, we’ll talk about why understanding your customers is so important, how to do it right, and how it can lead to success for your business.
What are customer insights?
Customer insights are conclusions derived from a thorough analysis of consumer data. These insights help businesses enhance customer service and make decisions for business growth.
Companies can get this information by looking at how people interact with the company and its website online, what they buy, their feedback, etc.
Types of consumer insights
For any business to succeed, it is important to know its customer base. This list looks at different types of customer insight that help organizations better understand their target market:
- Personal interest and lifestyle: This is when you find out what your customers like to do in their everyday lives. It could be their hobbies, activities, values, and preferences. Knowing this helps you customize your product or services to fit into their lives better.
- Demographic insight: This is when you find out the distribution of your customers across categories like age, gender, how much money they make, and where they live.
- Feedback and sentiment analysis: Here, you see what customers think about your brand, products, or services. This can mean overall satisfaction, things they do and don’t like, and the kind of people for whom they perceive your offerings to be intended.
- Sales trends and purchase history: This is a type of consumer insight where you spot any purchasing patterns that might help you predict what customers will buy next.
- Behavioral insights: This is an understanding of how customers use your products. Where did customers hear about you? Are carts abandoned at the same spot in the shopping process? Knowing these sorts of things will help your company improve.
Where to get customer insights
For a company to succeed, it has to be well informed about its target audience. The following methods can help you gather data for powerful customer insights.
Collecting customer feedback
Ask your customers about their experience with your brand. While reviews are often submitted by customers with either exceptionally great or exceptionally awful experiences, this direct feedback can still let you understand your customers better.
Online reviews
According to research by Luisa Zhou customer spending can rise by 31% as a result of positive ratings.
Most customers will look up customer reviews online before they interact with your website or make a purchase.
Read what people say about your product or service online to understand the message potential customers are getting. This also helps you understand how customers use your offerings.
Analyze activity data from purchases
Analysis of this sales data can be used to identify purchase patterns and determine what customers buy and when. This tells you what to market when and to whom.
Social media
Keep an eye on what people say on social media. This tells you what they care about and informs your response strategies in order to more carefully craft your brand image.
Website data
Organizations can use tools such as Google Analytics to monitor the activity of consumers on your app or website.
Analyze data like page visits, bounce rates, and conversion levels to learn more about how users engage with your online services.
Competitors’ reviews
Other sources of data useful for analysis are ratings, comments, and feedback on your competitors’ goods and services.
These can offer insight into consumer preferences, satisfaction levels, and opportunities for growth in your sector.
Businesses can analyze these reviews:
- To improve their products or services to suit customer needs and preferences better.
- To learn more about what customers like and dislike about comparable offers.
- To spot market gaps and chances for unique selling points.
Tips to create a customer insights strategy that works
The following are the customer insights and best practices to help you make business decisions.
Identify the specific data you need to collect and analyze
The first step is to identify the exact information you want to gather and examine that answers questions about your clients’ demands, tastes, and behavior.
State your goals and the reason for needing customer insights.
The data may differ depending on:
- Company goals
- Target market
- Industry
- Market trends
- The questions you have
This helps you focus your analysis to answer the questions about your customers most useful to your planning.
Define the methods and metrics you need
Figure out what data you have already, and what data you need to start tracking. Make a plan that specifies the methods you will use to gather and analyze customer data, such as website data or surveys.
Choose the metrics you will track. For instance:
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey results
- Customer retention scores
- Net promoter scores (NPS)
Decide how often you need to review these metrics and make a schedule.
Focus on customer relationships
Other kinds of insights come from tracking your relationships with clients over a long period of time. This includes tracking their choices, previous transactions, and interactions with your company.
When it comes to the latter, especially for companies with fewer clients, keeping written testimonies of clients’ interactions with your customer service team can give insight into their issues later.
You may understand their needs more deeply when you give them personal experiences and make notes.
Ask your support team about their customers
One of the most effective ways to get valuable consumer insights is to ask your support staff about their customers.
Members of your support team often interact with consumers in person; they are very familiar with their needs, tastes, and problems.
You may learn a lot about common issues, customer behavior, and areas for growth by often asking your support staff for input.
Practice active listening
Active listening is more than simply hearing what your consumers are saying; it’s understanding what they’re saying. It’s asking for clarification.
You can discover much about your consumers’ wants, needs, and pain points when you listen carefully to them.
Why is customer insight important for business success?
When you understand your customers well, it sets a strong foundation for your company to succeed.
Make smart decisions
Customer insights help organizations to make more informed decisions on issues such as:
- The best marketing strategies to adopt
- Product improvements to prioritize
- Pricing optimization
- Resource allocation
- Expansion opportunities to consider
- Ways to avoid or reduce risks
Customer insights enable businesses to be customer-centric, give them a competitive advantage, and ensuring their continued growth.
Improve customer experience
When you know what your customers need and fix their problems, their experience improves.
If the customer experience at your company improves, customers will stick around and recommend you to others.
Customize your marketing
Customers will likely stick with your brand and spend more money when they feel understood.
According to research by Mckinsey, 71% of customers want businesses to provide them with personalized experiences. And when this doesn’t occur, 76% of them become irritated.
Insight into who your customers are and their preferences guides your marketing team as to which channels to concentrate on and which features to promote.
You’ll know where they spend time online, what they value most in your products, and the kind of ads to which they respond best.
Make customer journeys better
If you use customer insights well, you can keep customers happy from the start of their journey to the end.
Businesses can customize experiences, anticipate needs, and speed up operations using customer insights, which shed light on customer wants, habits, and preferences.
By utilizing these insights, companies can build smooth experiences at every touchpoint and increase customer satisfaction.
Real-life examples of using customer insights
Brands worldwide gather customer insights and use them to fit their products and services better to their customers. Let’s look at some examples.
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola is an American corporation founded in 1892. It is one of the largest soft drink brands, holds the largest market share in the world, and sells its products in over 200 countries.
The company’s extensive customer research, including surveys, market studies, and others, has helped it stay relevant.
Coca-Cola’s dedication to using customer insights has allowed it to maintain a strong connection with its consumers. For example:
- Coca-Cola Zero Sugar was introduced in response to consumer demand for fewer calories.
- To build customer loyalty, they have engaged with them on social media and quickly reply to their reviews.
KFC
KFC, an American fast-food restaurant specializing in fried chicken since 1952, is another excellent example.
Through the years, they have stayed relevant in this competitive sector by using consumer insights wisely:
- To improve and quickly address consumer issues, KFC continuously seeks out and listens to customer input through social media, online surveys, and customer service interactions.
- Based on what their consumers like, they have consistently added new menu items and promotions, such as the Famous Bowl and the Double Down Sandwich.
- With the use of digital technology, KFC consumers can place online orders, use self-service kiosks, and order delivery services that are tailored to meet changing needs for ease and flexibility.
Invest in customer insights for your business growth
Customer insights help you know your customers better and effectively meet their needs and wants.
Collect feedback, listen to what customers say, especially through your support team, and use that information to create marketing strategies.
Utilize BoldDesk to gain valuable consumer insights that can fuel your business growth.
You can explore its capabilities with a free trial or schedule a live demo. BoldDesk’s customer support team can provide further assistance if required.
We hope this blog post about consumer insights was helpful. Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences in the space provided for comments below. We value your thoughts very much!
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