Customer Insights

What are customer insights?

Customer insight involves paying attention to customer data, behavior patterns, and feedback, understanding it, and drawing conclusions from that information that you can use to improve your products, your customer support, and your marketing efforts.

It involves analyzing data about your customers, their needs, wants, challenges, goals, behaviors, demographics, etc., and even using predictive behavior modeling to gain insights about your customers, create products that they actually want, send marketing messages that they can relate to, and support them in the best way possible.

Customer insights are all about interpreting data, especially behavioral trends in order to improve the product or service, enhance the customer experience, and boost the company’s revenue.

You could essentially say that customer insights are basically interpretations derived from quantitative and qualitative data that is collected from customer feedback and other informational sources. These insights are later used to inform and drive business decisions. Your aim when collecting customer insights is to improve your offering, marketing, sales, or service.

Here is how customer insight is defined:

"A non-obvious understanding about your customers, which if acted upon, has the potential to change their behavior for mutual benefit."
-Paul Laughlin

Why are customer insights important?

Customer insights are extremely important because they help your business understand your customers, their needs, challenges, and motivations to a deeper extent. 

It helps you create more personalized experiences for your customers and helps you get an idea of how your customers feel about your products and services and the experiences that you create for them.

Understanding customer insights helps you give your customers what they truly want, rather than just shooting blindly. It helps you create products that they will actually want to use, craft marketing campaigns and messages that resonate with them deeply, and curate experiences that they will enjoy.

Analyzing and interpreting customer data will also help you be more empathetic towards your customers and leads. That would result in increased conversions, higher retention rates, and more opportunities for cross-selling and upselling, leading to higher customer lifetime value.

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What are the advantages of customer insights?

Here are the most significant advantages of customer insights:

• Helps you identify buying patterns and use them to manage inventory levels, promotional campaigns, etc.
• Improves your understanding of your customers’ needs and strengthen your relationship with them.
• Helps you to identify areas of improvement in your product.
• Guides your marketing team in creating highly relevant and effective campaigns, thus increasing conversions and revenue.
• Helps increase customer loyalty and customer lifetime value.

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How to identify customer insights?

Here are a few ways to identify and gather CX insights:

1. Interviews and focus groups

This is the most common way of gathering customer data insights. But it may not be the most effective method because what your customers say may not match what they actually do.

2. Observe actual buying behavior

Customers may not be honest in focus groups and similar settings. You need to observe how they actually make purchase decisions. This may mean observing them in actual physical stores or observing and analyzing their behavior on your eCommerce portal, giving you far better customer experience insights..

3. Understand your competitor’s customers

Interview your competitors’ customers to see what they prefer and dislike about your competitors. You should also use this opportunity to understand their needs and why they believe that your competitors fulfill those needs more effectively than you do.

4. Social listening

Listen to what your customers and the market is saying about you, your competitors, and the offering in general. This becomes even more effective when paired with sentiment analysis, allowing you to perform customer insight analysis.

5. Customer feedback

This might be the easiest way for you to gather customer insights - all you have to do is ask your customers for feedback. Send out surveys and questionnaires asking customers how they feel about your offerings and your service. These surveys can fetch you some really powerful and actionable key consumer insights. 

The drawback is that you might not get the entire, comprehensive picture by just looking at what you get from customer feedback. A lot of your customers might just not share their actual, true feelings with you, this could be for multiple reasons and might occur more often when the feedback is not anonymous, or there are other people around them when they are providing feedback.

6. Third-party data

If you can’t gather a lot of primary data, you can choose to pull consumer insights from market research undertaken by bigger organizations that have a more vast audience, especially if those audiences closely resemble yours. This helps you understand customer trends in your industry and get an idea of the issues your customers are dealing with, their pain points, and their problems, helping you create better solutions that serve them more effectively, This also helps you craft marketing campaigns and messages that resonate better with your customers, and it even gives you customer service insights that can help you level up your customer support.

7. Predictive models

A lot of companies are making use of predictive modeling to glean insights about their customers that can guide them and help them make better decisions. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence allow companies to employ statistical models and algorithms to scan through and analyze vast amounts of data in a far quicker and more effective manner than anyone could do manually.

This can be used to make predictions about customer insights and the future behavior of customers on the basis of their past behavior.

8. Real-time user testing

If you run an app or an online business, you can learn about your customers’ and audience’s preferences by conducting A/B tests on specific elements of the online experience. You can observe your users and visitors in real-time as they interact with the elements on your website or app. You’ll be able to figure out what works best for the majority of your customers, back it up with statistical proof and then run with it.