Customer insight, also known as consumer insight, is the whole process of understanding and interpretation of customer data, behaviors and feedback. These insights are utilized to improve product development,marketing strategy, sales forecast, and customer support. Insights are actions that could be taken based on the wants and needs of customers that can be used for adding features, products and creating consumer benefits. The purpose of collecting customer insights is to align customers’ needs with a company’s business goals.
Consumer insights has several uses:
- Developing strategies for support team or help center.
- Determining types of products for developing in the future.
- Getting in touch with specific segments of customers via marketing and promotional material that resonates with the content.
- Adding new features or tools after having observed the challenges and/or issues reported by customers.
However, collecting quality customer insight is not an easy task. Here is what you need in order to properly collect and efficiently use consumer insights:
- Good data quality
Data quality plays an important role in consumer insights collecting. Low-quality data might have a negative effect on your consumer insights.
- A dedicated analytics team
If you want to understand how your customers think and behave, it is vital to acknowledge the importance of your data analytics team. If your analytics team does not go well, it is difficult to make sense of your data. If small businesses don’t have an analytics team, there are several ways you can collect, analyze and take advantage of customer data by making use of analytics tools such as Google analytics, Hotjar, Facebook analytics or survey tools to gather customer feedback such as SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Google forms.
- Consumer research
Understanding and acknowledging consumer behaviour and consumer insights is crucial. Only by this way, you can engage with your customers emotionally. Therefore, it is not advisable for you to ignore consumer research output based purely on your own take.
- Database and segment marketing
Database marketing is a form of marketing in which personalised communications is generated using customer databases, thus creating personas, different sets of audiences or segments. Due to the theoreticality of consumer insights, database marketing is needed when it comes to testing and learning. Without test actions, you can not turn insights into meaningful facts.