What are customer insights and why are they important?

Customer insights are the conclusions drawn from aggregated customer data, data like customer behavior, interests, and interactions. Customer insights interpret this data and define key characteristics about your customer – what they like and don’t like, why they like what they like, how they feel and think, etc., and also predict future trends by projecting this historical data. 

Customer insights give businesses an acute understanding of their target audience. This information is vital to improving products or services, creating highly relevant content, marketing strategies, and advertisements, and creating a more successful sales funnel.

That being said, how can a business collect, store and interpret customer insights? That’s where customer insight platforms come in.

What are customer insights platforms?

A customer insights platform serves two main purposes – it acts as a platform or forum for customers and businesses to have direct conversations with each other and also becomes a centralized repository for all customer data and insights, aggregated from all brand channels. 

The customer insights platform becomes a one-stop-shop for all consumer information. Customers can provide feedback, raise concerns, make feature requests, and brands can conduct surveys and market research, all from one location. 

It also ties into the omnichannel brand and aggregates customer data from all company channels – website analytics, social media, email, etc.

This enables businesses to draw a complete customer profile, define their pain points, interests, and future trends, by simply analyzing the insights delivered by the customer insights platform.

What value does a customer insights platform deliver?

Improves product development and service delivery – Customers give valuable information about the product or service – what features they most like, what features or services are lacking, what they expect from the company, etc. This enables brands to improve their products and services.

Enhances UX – Understanding where along the customer journey they face hurdles and pitfalls allows you to redefine the UX and map out a more suitable buyer journey.

Enables the delivery of personalized experiences – You can deliver dynamic, personalized content to each user using AI-powered solutions that use the insights drawn from the platform.

Run successful marketing campaigns with insights – Customer insights platforms deliver two key factors that help you optimize your marketing campaigns – a complete customer persona so you know who, where and when to target, and an idea of what content they prefer so you also know what content to use for the highest engagement.

Improves the sales funnel – Knowing your customers and their preferences will help the sales team nurture future customers the right way, and use content that will engage prospects better.

Gives customers a chance to be heard and fosters loyalty – Customer feedback is not only important for business growth, but it is also important to enforce brand loyalty. A brand that gives its customers a chance to speak creates a positive ecosystem where customers feel valued.

Optimizes business operations – When you know what areas of business most affect the customer, you can assign resources the right way and avoid wasting time on operations that least affect the customer.

Customer insights use cases and examples

Retail – An e-commerce platform learns from its customer insights platform that a majority of its traffic accrues the highest session time in the shoe section. They also find out which products garner the most engagement. Through surveys, they enquire why customers who show intent are not completing purchases and they find out that the pricing is too high for their target audience. The company then creates retargeting ads to specifically target these customers and provides a one-time discount coupon on all shoes.

SaaS Platform – A SaaS platform provides its solution for free for the first 14 days and experiences a low user return rate of just 5%. 95% of users who try the platform do not return after the first interaction. Using customer insight technology, they find out that users are not able to find their way around the platform. They implement an interactive onboarding process to help users better understand the product on their first use to solve this problem.

Healthcare – a company that has developed a wearable watch to monitor heart rate is experiencing a low usage rate – users are not wearing the watch. Through customer insights, they understand that while the features of the watch are excellent, the product design is not aesthetically pleasing. They improve the design and quality of the watch to encourage more sales and usage.

Types of customer insights

Sales

Sales insights are probably the most important information you can collect – they give you a clear picture of what encourages users to purchase the product or service. You will gain insights into which products sell the most, which coupons are most used, at what times do most of the sales occur, which pages are most converting, etc.

Product usage data

Customer insights into product usage help you improve the product. Customers give you direct feedback into which features are most valuable and which ones are not delivering the expected results. You also get an idea of what features customers expect in the future. All of this helps the dev team tailor the product for the target audience.

Customer feedback

Customer feedback from testimonials, reviews, and surveys is important in understanding how your customers feel about your brand and for measuring customer satisfaction levels. Feedback helps you improve operations to better serve the customer.

Demographics

Key demographics like geography, age, gender, income level, etc., help you paint an accurate picture of your ideal user. This enables your marketing and sales teams to create content that is relevant to this demographic so they are most likely to engage with campaigns.

Interests

Understanding customers’ lifestyles and interests help you position the product, marketing campaigns, and sales conversations the right way.

Conclusion

Data is no doubt critical for any business and is often considered as valuable as gold. Data without insights, however, is just rows and columns of gibberish.

When data is converted into actionable insights, it becomes a powerful tool. Customer insights act as a map – they point in the direction you need to move in and help you clearly define the steps you need to take to get to your destination, whether that is product improvement, better-converting marketing campaigns, or successful sales interactions. Unifying data across channels and drawing useful information from this data can be done using customer insights platforms – a must-have for every business. 

About AskSid

AskSid is a global conversational solutions company that partners with retail brands to elevate shopping experiences by leveraging the power of Artificial Intelligence. Our capabilities extend beyond support automation, extending to insight extraction, analysis, and business opportunity generation, all by leveraging the power of conversational data. We combine domain expertise and cutting-edge technology to build a Retail AI Brain for our clients, that mines insights from conversational data and becomes the basis of the business opportunity creation we offer. The power of actionable customer data has allowed us to create value and bring change to global brands including AkzoNobel, Danone, Wolford, Akris, and Himalaya. AskSid has live implementations in 23+ countries and supports 100+ international languages, managing millions of satisfied customers the world over.