How to Leverage Customer Insights to Improve Your Business

Have you used our proven tactics to gather insights about your consumers?

Maybe you’re not sure how to leverage these insights to improve your marketing efforts or broader business operations.

Here are our favorite ways to effectively put customer insights to good use.

Check That You Got Things Right

It’s great to make changes to improve your business based on feedback from your customers gathered through surveys, focus groups, online reviews, or other sources.

The issue: How do you know the changes you make are actually improving your customer experience and not introducing new issues?

The answer: When you make a marketing or organizational change, go back to your customers (ideally those who provided the original feedback) to find out whether you made things better.

For instance, let’s say a survey reveals that you have a customer service issue when people call your company. You attempt to fix it by implementing a new call flow. Make it a point to continue to survey people after they call your company to see if you fixed the problem and didn’t unintentionally introduce new issues.

Or, if your customer data reveals you have an issue with your website, consider A/B testing possible solutions to ensure changes deliver better results. This testing approach allows for apples-to-apples comparisons between two online experiences, the original and a new one; it reduces the risk to your business of switching to something that may provide an inferior digital experience.

Another example: Conduct a focus group or workshop on business changes you are considering with representative consumers to gather their feedback prior to launch and see whether they have better ideas.

Bottom line: Go back to the source of negative customer feedback to ensure your solution is satisfactory.

Monitor Metrics and Return on Investment (ROI)

The surest way to know any aspect of your business is working is to track metrics. If your numbers improve — and more money flows to your bottom line — it’s likely the result of a better customer experience.

For instance, if you discover that visitors aren’t checking out enough content on your website and you update your navigation and linking strategy to address the issue, watch Google Analytics starting day one to see if people are visiting more pages and spending more time on your site. If not, it could be time to go back to the drawing board to come up with another solution. In this case, you may need to add tracking software like Hotjar, which will allow you to go beyond data tracking, and provide you with user recordings and heat maps that can help you pinpoint the issue.

Bottom line: Numbers don’t lie. Leverage all the data available to you to ensure any customer service enhancements you make are performing as intended and driving more dollars to your bottom line.

Create a Feedback Loop

Getting and addressing customer feedback isn’t once-and-done. You don’t merely solve a problem, and all is well with the world. New consumer experience issues can happen all the time. Innovations, new technology, and better products, services, and experiences introduced by competitors can leave buyers with a negative impression of your business.

That’s why it’s critical to create an ongoing feedback loop for your organization. Leverage the proven tactics in our companion piece.

Be mindful that depending on only one or two tactics could put your business at risk. For instance, basing your customer service decisions exclusively on numbers may make it difficult to identify the root cause of an issue. Relying solely on customer ratings and reviews carries its risks, too. Typically, only the most satisfied or dissatisfied customers tend to respond, potentially obscuring subtle areas of dissatisfaction or emerging problems.

Bottom line: The opinions of your customers are the only thing that matters when it comes to the success of your business. Make it easy for them to express them whenever they want to and make it a point to take action on them.

Need help gathering the right customer insights? Drop us a line. We have mastered the art of data collection and we offer custom analytics dashboards to help our clients understand their customer insights and how well they are meeting their goals.