Michael Epps Utley 
Are you dealing with customer service or experience issues?
You won’t be able to solve them without insights from your buyers.
This article explains what customer insights are, why they’re important, and methods for gathering them.
What Are Customer Insights?
Customer insights are the key takeaways business owners and managers arrive at after a review of quantitative and qualitative customer data. Company leaders use them to make better-informed operational, marketing, and sales decisions. The goal is to identify behavioral and other consumer trends through actual data, then use them to improve the customer experience.
Why Are Customer Insights Critical?
Businesses only succeed when they know their audience — this is what allows them to serve their customers well. An in-depth understanding of your consumers’ psychology, behavior, and preferences can help you better meet your buyers’ needs, typically resulting in increased revenue.
Leveraging data to influence your customer user experience (UX) can prevent buyers from moving on to your competitors with better offers. It allows you to get to the source of their problems with your business through their feedback. It empowers you to resolve their issues before they become too big and too many buyers become dissatisfied with your operation.
How to Come Up With Customer Insights
Here are some proven ways to learn about your buyers, their feelings about your business, and their preferences.
Collect Customer Feedback
The simplest way to gather customer insights is by asking them what they think. Information from properly structured surveys and questionnaires can result in information you can use to improve your customer service and the overall operation of your business.
This type of information is valuable. However, depending on feedback exclusively for insights can be problematic because it may not provide you with a complete or entirely accurate picture of what’s happening. That’s because many customers may be afraid to share honest opinions or they might offer minimal feedback so they can complete a survey quickly.
Check Customer Sentiment
You can get a pulse on customer sentiment through online star ratings, reviews, and net promoter score systems (NPS). When you make it simple for customers to rate how they feel, you can get a reasonably accurate read on satisfaction with any experience. Requesting ratings and reviews can be particularly effective for testing a single feature of an app or digital experience and for understanding satisfaction with sales calls or customer service interactions.
Conduct Market Research
If you don’t have significant customer feedback to base your business decisions on, you can draw insights from market research performed by larger organizations. In many cases, the insights they gather from consumers can be leveraged by smaller companies. Simply search online for studies, ensuring any insights you use come from reputable sources.
Conduct Situational Analysis
Customers may not realize that a business interaction could be better until they experience the improved version of it. This could be a bad thing for your company if a competitor makes them aware that something could be better than what you’re doing, whether it’s an improved product or service, simpler buying experience, or enhanced product and service recommendation. However, it could turn buyers into delighted brand advocates if you recognize customer service opportunities quickly and beat competitors to the punch.
Leverage in-person interviews, focus groups, and ongoing gap analyses to identify opportunities to come up with ways to improve your business proactively. You never know where the kernel of an idea may come from, but it’s always worth pursuing inspiration when it arises.
Passively Collect Behavioral Information
You can learn a lot about your customers by paying attention to how they interact with your website, product, service, and content. Electronic and digital tools like camera systems, Hotjar, and Google Analytics can make in-person and digital monitoring easier and more effective. These tools gather information, in most cases based on actual customer experiences, that business owners and managers can use to improve marketing efforts and overall operations.
Conduct A/B Testing
For apps, websites, and most digital experiences, you can gain insights into what consumers prefer by running A/B tests on various aspects of them. With A/B testing, you can watch in real time as your user base interacts with elements like copy, navigation, and button color or placement to determine which variations perform best.
Leverage Predictive Modeling
Predictive modeling, also referred to as lead scoring, is another way companies gain insights that help them make better business decisions. With machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) on the rise, it’s becoming more common for business owners to leverage algorithms and statistical models to quickly analyze large quantities of data and variables, which would be almost impossible without computer support. The insights gleaned from big data can often be used to make predictions about enhancing the user experience.
Customer Feedback: The Final Word
We all want to be liked. Of course, we need to give people a reason to like us. In today’s competitive environment, the company that delivers the ultimate consumer experience, whether in person or online, will win out. The best way to understand what buyers want is directly from them. Leverage the tactics in this guide to find out what your customers prefer and how they want to be treated.
Check out this article to find out how you can leverage consumer insights to improve your operation.
