When someone asks you a question you’re not qualified to answer, what do you do? Chances are, you make a guess. Most of us are guessing all the time, from predicting the weather to betting on which team will win a sporting event. In the business world, though, guesses are more dangerous and can lead to poorly priced services and irrelevant products.
What’s the best alternative, then? Using cold, hard data in the form of customer insights. Here’s how customer insights work and why you should use them to grow your business.
What Are Customer Insights?
Customer insights refer to the interpretation of customer data and understanding of how this data affects purchasing decisions. When done right, customer insights provide a deep understanding of how customers think. According to Microsoft, companies that take advantage of customer insights outperform those that don’t by 85% in sales growth.
How Customer Insights Can Help You
The main benefit of customer insights is that they help you personalize your products or services based on the needs and demands of your target audience. Even if you have a good idea of what should be your top priorities, the best way to create a product your market truly values is to use customer insights as a key input.
Beyond product development, customer insights can help you maintain customer satisfaction. As your business grows, you’ll likely become less involved with direct customer interactions. By using customer insights, you can keep customer satisfaction front of mind and identify trends that affect it, such as the lack of employee training or performance management.
Digging into customer insights can also let you know how to improve your support resources. For example, it will be easier to identify the times of the day when you’re overstaffed and those when you need more resources. Similarly, having customers report the same issues may help you create predefined templates to reduce the time needed to service them.
Gathering Customer Insights
Now that you know why customer insights are important, how do you go about collecting them? Well, the best and simplest way to do so is to send customer surveys. They may seem a bit old-fashioned, but surveys are still efficient marketing tools. Whether you only need answers to a few questions or a dozen queries, surveys provide efficient input from customers.
Beyond surveys, you can rely on web analytics. For instance, getting a lot of user engagement on one of your landing pages is usually a good thing, but this isn’t always the case. If most of this engagement is contained before the bottom third of the page, you may want to add a CTA button before this point and make the content more compelling.
Finally, you can go the A/B testing route. This involves testing two different options on your web pages and seeing which one gets a better response. Identifying top performers is particularly important when it comes to key elements such as headlines and images.