Lights, Camera, Customers: How Customer Intelligence Steals the Show

Nowadays, customer service and how businesses interact with their customers are more crucial than ever. To remain competitive and succeed in the modern economy, a business must make use of data-driven customer intelligence. This helps identify trends, which enable the prediction of services to offer to ensure top levels of satisfaction.

This Love Bytes post sheds light on why becoming an intelligent organization is becoming increasingly vital and how collecting meaningful customer data can help improve business operations. So, let’s dive in!

What is Customer Intelligence, and How Can It Benefit Businesses

In today’s dynamic business landscape, companies must deeply understand their customers to stay ahead of the competition. Enter customer intelligence. But what is it? Simply put, customer intelligence is the art (and science) of collecting and analyzing data to gain meaningful insight into customer preferences and behaviors.

Businesses can make informed choices about everything from product development to marketing strategies by leveraging data to drive their decisions. Customer intelligence is also an effective tool to help companies identify otherwise hidden growth opportunities and improve pain points in business areas that need attention.

Incorporating customer intelligence into your business strategy can yield significant benefits such as improved retention, loyalty, growth, and customer value.

What Types of Data Should be Collected, and How Should it Be Used

When it comes to data collection, various types of data can be gathered. Some examples may include demographic data such as age, gender, and location and behavioral data such as purchasing habits and issue resolution touchpoints. The magic happens by understanding the interaction between behavioral and demographic customer data. Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario: 

Let’s take a B2B company with two key customer segments. Customers in segment 1 are on a subscription model, and customers in Segment 2 are on a pay-as-you-go model. If a customer in Segment 1 is “behaving” the same way with product usage as a customer in Segment 2, one of those customers may be in poor “health.” The customer in Segment 1 may not be getting optimal value out of the product for what they are paying and become a churn risk. Conversely, it may be more economical the customer in Segment 2 to change to a subscription plan. This is a hypothetical example, but I’ve seen this dynamic play out across multiple industries. 

Understanding the interaction between behavioral and demographic data can provide more comprehensive insights than either one alone. This level of understanding, combined with the ability to measure customer health, can be used to inform product and service roadmaps tailored to specific customer segments. This type of analysis allows companies to target the right customers with the right message at the right time, leading to increased engagement and reduced pain points for your customers. 

Challenges Facing Companies Without a Data-Driven Strategy

Let me break it down for you – companies that still need a data-driven strategy are in for a rough ride. Modern business operations are complex, and without real-time insight, non-data-driven companies will struggle to keep up with their competition. By effectively engaging with their data resources, businesses can unlock their full potential. On the flip side, data siloes create inconsistencies and lead to inaccurate decision-making. With data-driven decisions, companies can make informed choices backed by solid evidence. This gives them an edge over their competitors and allows them to stay competitive and sustainable in the long run. In short, businesses that fail to embrace a data-driven strategy could face dire consequences in today’s digital age.

Solutions to Overcome These Challenges and Create a Successful Customer Experience

Nowadays, customers wield more power than ever. They have countless options for whatever they need or want, and hence, their expectations are soaring. For businesses to create a winning customer experience, they have to tackle numerous challenges.

But not to fret; it’s totally doable! Companies can invest in a few things to help keep their customers healthy: 

1. Define Customer Health. Simply answer the question: how does a healthy customer behave with my product or service. Do they stay longer? Upgrade after a certain milestone? Refer colleagues to your business? 
2. Measure Customer Health. If you can define it, you can figure out how to measure it. For example, if you defined health as customer loyalty, then Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is probably your north star key performance indicator (KPI). Once you have that, you can get to work identifying Level 1, 2, and 3 metrics that impact your NRR. 
3. Customer Segmentation. What are the key demographic features that impact your customer journeys? Size? Product Tier? Location? Use those to identify key customer segments.  
4. Customer Journey Mapping. After all, how can you tell if your customers are healthy and happy if you haven’t defined what healthy and happy looks like for them? Map out your key customer journeys. If you don’t know how to identify your journeys, ask: What moments matter for my customers? 
5. Feedback Loops. Create listening posts for your customers to provide feedback. Some of these listening posts may be surveys to assess transactional or relational customer sentiment. But you can also create passive listening posts. For example, perhaps you can stand up a quality assurance metric to track error rates in the first 6-12 months after onboarding or measure deflection rates in your sales funnel. Are there any trends that indicate the process could be improved? No matter how you collect feedback, the key is to ensure you create closed feedback loops across the business. Customers don’t mind giving feedback if they trust that you will use it to take action to improve their experience. 

And the effort is worth it- after all, happy customers are more likely to come back for more!

And if you find yourself saying, “This all sounds great, but I don’t have the resources to do all of this,” not to worry, we’ve got you! Reach out to The Data Love Co.; we’re happy to help!