How are customer insights set to change in 2022?
In the past five years, increased digitalization and penetration of artificial intelligence have changed the way consumers interact with a business. Consequently, this has changed the way that businesses serve content, services, or products to their consumers; what earlier relied purely on broadcast marketing is now based more on consumer data synthesis for delivering a more personalized experience.
In fact, the recent announcement by Google regarding the discontinuation of the use of third-party cookies (or the “Cookiepocalypse”, as it is coming to be known now) by 2023 has led many brands to rethink their consumer insight strategies and policies. Forrester predicts that the brands seeking zero-party cookies (consumer-volunteered information) would double in 2022, owing to this Cookiepocalypse; brands would now be more proactive in seeking the insights they need from the consumers rather than relying on cookies.
Another finding has come to light in the same report by Forrester. The existing AI systems follow a more “opaque” nature; it is often hard to truly understand the way AI learns and produces the recommendations that it does. The future, according to the report, holds Consumer Insight pros seeking a more explainable AI solution that can be picked apart and looked into, to search for insights that may have missed the algorithm altogether.
All in all, 2022 is set to witness a paradigm shift in customer insights. Let’s learn about customer insights in detail.
What are Consumer Insights?
Consumer insight, or customer insight, is an interpretation of consumer data that helps any business gain a better understanding of what their audience is thinking of, how they feel about the brand, what they would like to see and buy more, etc.
It is often a collated dataset of consumer behaviour, feedback, experience, etc. with a brand. Consumer insights are utilized by businesses to formulate marketing, personalization, and sales strategies that are more effective and rewarding.
Consumer insights help businesses get a holistic view of their consumers to craft better experiences for them online and in-store.
And many more. Let’s understand the types of consumer insights that businesses work on, before going on to the way AI is changing them.
Types of Consumer Insights
Business evaluation for strategizing sales and marketing should be based on accurate data. Classifying your consumer insights based on the following types helps to keep the data as precise as possible for reporting further.
Usage Customer Insight
The parameters that tell you about the way and frequency that your product is being used is called usage customer insight. The easiest way to collect this insight is to directly ask your consumers for it through surveys or quick feedback, usually with multiple-choice questions to save time. Artificial intelligence-powered consumer insights help a great deal here.
Customer Loyalty Insight
If your customers are loving your products and brand as a whole, the customer loyalty insight is going to show great numbers. Tracking the Net Promoter Score – the likelihood of your consumer base promoting your brand to others – defines how happy your customers are with your brand.
Competitor Insights
Knowing where your competitors stand also helps you create your unique position in the market, according to what the customers are thinking and willing to invest in. This insight is indirectly related to your consumers – in knowing what your competitors are doing that is swaying the audience in their favour. This is an important insight for strategizing.
Customer Service Insight
This insight directly reveals how your support crew is handling customer queries – whether it is making your consumers happy with your services or not. It is an indicator of what needs to be improved or polished to make the customers happier.
Firmographic Insights
This insight is specifically targeted towards B2B businesses. This insight lets you know in what way other businesses are utilizing your products and services. It helps to create targeted, focused pitches for any B2B initiative. Based on firmographic insights, you can plan effective pitches for businesses and include high-value propositions.
Artificial intelligence today is impacting how consumer insights are created and presented to viewers. Let’s see which insights have the maximum exposure to AI and how.
How AI Impacts Consumer Insights
Businesses need a way to thrive in a world where data is inundated at colossal rates every single day. Artificial intelligence is emerging as a great tool to help businesses sort through this data and look for the needle in the haystack, and generate useful insights. The following use cases demonstrate beautifully how well artificial intelligence helps in generating consumer insights that matter.
Social Observation Opportunity
Social media has rapidly become the most happening hub of consumers – it is abuzz with data that businesses love to capture and assimilate to improve their services. However, amidst the noise, filtering out the useful data becomes quite difficult. To keep track of a particular trend and cohort it geographically, for example, is a nightmare for analysts. Artificial intelligence, thankfully, assists with locating and tracking the right data and deriving useful insights from it. To be able to create meaningful marketing campaigns using these consumer insights is a big leap towards achieving sales targets.
Predictive Analyses
Artificial intelligence is set to assist businesses in their strategies as well, with its analytical, predictive, and forecasting capabilities. It is now possible to gather data on an audience and evaluate which products and services they are seeking out the most. Artificial intelligence maps consumer preferences over a wide range of parameters on which your marketing teams can base meaningful decisions. Additionally, predictive analyses help to streamline inventory by forecasting demand fluctuations, effectively managing and maintaining inventories, and maximizing business efficiency.
Creating Feedback Cycles
The best way to know what your consumers feel about your brand is to ask them about it. However, it isn’t simple to initiate an interaction directly. With artificial intelligence reinforcing a conversation or initiating a survey, there is the benefit of user history to drive relevance into the entire interaction. It is a great way of delivering personalized experiences.
Conclusion
Artificial intelligence is setting new benchmarks in the customer service industry by helping businesses derive important information from a ton of data dump. Creating thorough reports using custom KPIs and parameters pertaining to a specific purpose has become simpler and easier to achieve than ever before using artificial intelligence – especially in the customer insight niche.
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.