Customer Insights and Customer Data Platforms
Your CRM data can often work alongside other data sets about the customers you serve. By unifying and structuring this customer data, you can unlock further insights about your audience in order to better understand them, their experience with your brand and to personalize your offering.
Whilst there are incredibly powerful customer analysis tools available within CRM dashboards tailor made for sales, marketing and service teams aligned with their KPIs, a single customer view provided by a CRM is just the start in understanding customers.
The two disciplines of Customer Insight and Product Insight work together in order to interpret the behaviors of customers when they interact with your brand throughout the customer journey in order to refine provision of products and services over time. The benefit to the business is increased loyalty, engagement and sales; whilst the benefit to the consumer is a deeper affinity, sense of understanding and less need to switch.
What is customer insight?
Customer Insight is an evolution of market research, combining the interests of the entire company including R&D, marketing, sales and service in order to reach a deeper understanding of the customer experience. It is not a one-off activity at a point in time, of a feedback form, a focus group or a consumer survey but a continual and combined analysis of the customer’s interaction with a brand. What are their underlying motivations that trigger their actions with a business, how do they feel and how do these affect a response?
Research tells us what is happening; consumer insight tells us why it’s happening.
Because of the holistic and continuous nature of Customer Insight, from awareness through to advocacy, it can provide actionable insights to help a business not just develop products and services, but to improve their communication strategy in order to propel a customer through a journey and increase revenues.
How does customer insight help a marketing team?
- Lead generation – increase conversion by focusing on the best prospects for a company; enrich customer data with external data such as brand affinity or preferences to better predict which prospects are most likely to convert
- Campaigns and segmentation – create more accurate and micro-targeted segments to better reach prospects and customers; automatically send segments to your CRM for campaign execution; use a combination of events, location, user profile attributes, and historical data to deliver personalized information, content and offers
- Website and content personalization – surface personalized and relevant content to develop an authentic and emotional connection with customers through digital channels in an agile and dynamic way
- Product recommendations – provide customers with sophisticated recommendations for complementary products or services instead of just the things the customer has already browsed or bought
- Pricing – gain a deeper understanding of price sensitivity and interest in product or price bundles and other offers
- Next best action – surface the next best action for sales team members so they can engage with confidence and efficiently manage their pipeline with shorter sales cycles
How does customer insight help a sales team?
How does customer insight help a service team?
- Proactive, empathic omni-channel support – a 360-degree customer view enables the agent to make calculated exceptions for high-value customers; by using rich and robust customer profiles service agents can deliver personalized, consistent interactions which leave customers with a sense of being valued and understood
- Cross-sell and up-sell – recommend products and services that are a better fit for customers
Key ingredients in developing customer insights
- Centralized, mapped and quality data. Delivering personalized experiences depends on unifying and understanding customer data with synergies across the business. Whilst the majority of your data is held within a CRM, what other data is held that will give you a true single 360 degree customer view? Ensure the data is able to be segmented in order to allow your business to target, test and refine as your consumer insights develop over time.
- Hearing the Voice of the Customer (VoC). Ensure there are mechanisms in place to continuously ingest and act on consumer feedback throughout the customer journey, with automated workflows and alerts related to the insight as you go. VoC doesn’t mean a one-off survey but bite-size feedback that can be taken on board so the customer sees improvements quickly.
- Map the customer journey. A customer journey is not linear in time, but typically follows stages of awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. Within these stages are multiple touchpoints where data is generated and can be analyzed as part of your Customer Insight approach. So it is important to map your entire customer journey and structure the analysis; this way the company can highlight gaps, challenges and opportunities in order to develop an action plan to improve each area of the customer experience.
- Assign resources. Customer Insights practice works across the whole company but a specific team needs to be responsible for developing your strategy and implementing the activities. Typically, a Customer Experience or CX Manager may be driving the program working with data analysts and with key stakeholders across marketing, sales, service and senior management. The technology used within a customer insights program will help map, analyze and suggest actions – this is where a Customer Data Platform is a key resource to use.
How a Customer Data Platform (CDP) will help customer insight
A CDP is a platform to help bring together transactional, behavioral, demographic data to create multi-dimensional customer profiles. Look for the following features and capabilities:
- Data ingestion and standardization (including customer voice (VoC) data for ongoing feedback)
- Profile unification and cross-channel analytics for a single customer view
- Capture customer sentiment
- Customer journey timeline
- Data enrichment with 1st and 3rd party data
- Profile search and discovery
- Ability to develop segments and business measures
- Analytics to discover customer segments, lifetime value, reduce churn and other risks, identify up-sell and cross-sell opportunities
- Next best action suggestions
- Look out for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning templates or custom models for predicting customer needs and behaviors
How does Customer Insights via CDP software integrate with other key business areas?
- Discover more about CRM software for your marketing team
- Discover more about CRM software for your sales team
- Discover more about CRM software for your customer service team
- Discover more about CRM for your field service team
