Today's business environment is now heavily data-driven, with many organisations relying on customer insights to develop tailored solutions and deliver optimum audience engagement. To get to the ‘why’ behind customer’s behavior, companies need to look beyond traditional data points and gain insights into customers’ needs. Knowing your audience better can result in better product development, improved marketing and more importantly, serve as a key driving factor to support your business growth. So how to gather and apply customer insights to accelerate your business? Read on to find out.
Understanding customer insight
Customer insights refer to quantitative and qualitative information gathered about customers to understand their behaviour and preferences, and ultimately drive better decisions for businesses. It can be used to inform business decisions ranging from product development and marketing strategies, to customer service and product pricing. By possessing a comprehensive understanding of customer needs, marketing teams can better tailor their messaging and optimise campaigns and communication. Such data-driven strategies will not only benefit the company, but also help to ensure customer satisfaction.
What is customer insight?
Customer insight is a deep understanding of the customer's preferences, behaviours, experiences and motivations. It helps businesses to identify customer pain points and design solutions that meet customer needs. It also implies the ability to anticipate customers’ desires and offer more tailored product experiences. Gathering customer insight requires a data-driven approach, taking into account customer data such as demographics, psychographics, preferences, and buying behaviours. Whether it be about a customer’s attitude towards a product or service, their preferences for communication methods or even the preferred payment options — all these data points can help to better understand customers.
Types of customer insight
Customer insight can either be quantitative or qualitative and help businesses understand their customer’s needs and how to improve their product. Here are some types of customer insight:
- Demographics: information related to customers’ gender, age and location.
- Psychographics: data points on customers’ motivations, values and lifestyle.
- Behavioural insights: this data gives an understanding of how customers interacted with the product, as well as how important certain features were.
- Attitudinal insights: this data helps to understand customer opinion and views.
Gathering customer insight
Gathering customer insight is necessary for any businesses to understand their customers’ thoughts and behaviour patterns, and create the best possible experiences for them. Here are some of the ways businesses can collect customer insight.
Define your audience
Before collecting any customer data, it is important for businesses to define their target audience and customer segments. This helps to ensure that customer insights collected is precise and useful for shaping marketing strategies. Analyse customer demographics, personalities, lifestyle behaviours and customer preferences to make sure each segment is accurately defined.
Use surveys
Surveys are one of the easiest ways to collect customer insight. It is important to make sure the survey questions are well-crafted and not too long, to ensure customer engagement and better response rate. Questions should be precise and focus on customers’ pain points, preferences, needs and behaviours. After conducting the survey, analyse the collected customer data and extract customer insights.
Analyze your network
Communication and engagement with existing customers can help businesses to gain valuable insights. Companies should analyse customer interactions from different channels such as social media, customer service and online reviews, to identify customer opinions, attitudes and preferences. It can also help to track current customer sentiment and identify customer trends.
Perform a/b testing
A/B testing is a great way to determine which different versions of a product or feature that customers prefer. Analyse customer responses and interactions towards different versions of the product to gain insights into customer preferences and opinions. For example, a business could compare customer responses to two different versions of a website to determine which one customers prefer.
Write customer stories
Writing customer stories is one of the best ways to gain insight into customer needs and pain points. It involves interviewing your customers to get a better understanding of their experiences and gathering feedback on product features and usability. Companies can use these customer stories to gain valuable customer insights and make improvements where needed.
Analyze competitors
Understanding your competitor’s customer segments and behaviours can provide valuable customer insights. Analyse competitors’ customer service, product features, pricing and marketing strategies to get a better understanding of customer preferences in the industry. This information can be used to gain a competitive edge and tailor your own products and services to meet customer needs.
Applying customer insight
So how can customer insight help to fuel business growth? Here are some tips on how to apply customer insights to grow your business.
Use insight for product development
Understanding customer insights gives a clear indication of what product features customers value or don’t value. Companies can use customer insights to develop new products or improve existing ones and create experiences that customers will appreciate. Identifying customer needs and preferences makes it easier for companies to design and launch products that meet customer expectations.
Use insight for market/brand profiling
Gaining customer insight makes it easier for companies to develop better strategies for targeting the right customers. With customer profiles and personas, businesses can craft and implement more tailored marketing strategies with higher success rates. Companies can target their campaigns at an audience they know what they want, resulting in higher customer engagement and better ROI.
Customize your solutions
Customer insight helps companies to understand customers on a deeper level, allowing them to offer more relevant solutions. Companies can apply customer insights to customize products and services accordingly, allowing customers to have a more personalized experience. For example, providing tailored recommendations and discounts according to customer preferences can help to create a more customized experience.
Set pricing strategies
Pricing plays an important role in any business, and customer insights can help to set the right prices for products and services. Companies can use customer insights to adjust prices according to preferences and find the sweet spot for pricing that appeals to customers. Knowing what customers are willing to pay for a particular product can be very beneficial for companies when deciding on the right prices.
Leverage for communications
Companies need to create the right messaging to connect with customers and drive conversations. Leveraging customer insights can help companies tailor their communications to the right audience and achieve higher engagement with the right messages. Companies can craft audience-specific communications that resonate with each customer segment, resulting in better customer relationships and increased loyalty.
By understanding customer insights and incorporating them into their business strategies, companies can deliver more value to customers and drive better business growth. With the right customer data and insights, companies can create better customer experiences and build lasting relationships.