.png)
Is your business making the most of your data? What insights do you extract from your customer information? If you can’t answer these questions, you are probably missing on one of the most critical factors of your product that can directly impact your customer base and revenues; and i.e., customer intelligence. Today’s customers have lots of options.
Unlike a decade ago, most of the customers are smart, and adept at using latest technology and enables them to search about their desired products and services before making a buying decision. Social media as well as an increasing number of online review sites offer them a megaphone to exhibit their feelings and opinions about brands. This makes customer intelligence critically important. It gives businesses the most accurate understanding of their customers and helps maintain better communication, while enhancing marketing strategy and efforts to develop personalized products and services.
Customer Empowerment & Loyalty
Today’s customers are more empowered in terms of options and technology, which is making them more demanding and less loyal. Brands are more fragile now than ever before since customers are highly well-informed, and far more likely to examine the real value of the products than to trust logos. Customers are no more considering only brand’s name and image to determine the product’s value.
If customers are unhappy with your product or experience, they will tell so and expect a response. Businesses neglecting to engage with such customers are at risk of public relation disaster.
Understanding customers is like understanding the complex psychological factors that make their minds. In the era of empowered customers, businesses are moving ahead of conventional market research and adopting customer intelligence to make intelligence and effective business decisions.Rising trend of Customer Intelligence
Rising trend of Customer Intelligence
Gathering customer data, interacting with customers, specifying who your customers are, isn’t enough. Businesses must develop insights that tell why customers behave the way they do. Insights are taken from deep understanding of the customers. These insights can be used to develop niches or more specific customer segments. Insight, which is based on the deep understanding of the customers, is obtained by gathering, scrutinizing and synthesizing customer intelligence. Insight leads to better business decisions and results.
To get customer intelligence, a business needs to get data from numerous sources and evaluate it at the pace of business. This intelligence leads decision-makers not just Who, What, When and Where, but Why. It’s the information regarding why customers act or behave as they do that enables businesses to adapt to changing customers’ expectations and demands. Good customer intelligence not just informs, it advises and guides the leaders since they are required to make real-world business decisions.
The outcome is a holistic picture of the customers that’s more about real people than graphs or pie charts. Customer intelligence is also critically about action.
Where to Start?
Understanding customer needs is the basis for an effective growth strategy. To begin:
Explore your customers. Be keen to know what they think, what they do, how they do, how they make decisions and what influences them.
Fall in love with their issues and problems. Segment customers having similar needs together. Then define the problem they want solution for and how they would determine the success i.e. customer value.
Exceed your customer expectations. Beat customer expectations by designing and delivering enhanced customer experiences.
Businesses often develop segments or personas based on factors like demographics. Now this is valuable for marketing teams to mark and promote the solution to the customer, but it does minimal for your solution teams to know where to discover them. Solution teams must understand them profoundly, build customer empathy and make solution experiences that can add customer value, as per the customer expects it. In the absence of needs-based segmentation, the teams end up making features that customers either don’t desire or value.
Final Thoughts
Empowered businesses know their customers well, and make smart decisions based on what they know about their customers and market. Customer intelligence helps them make more informed decisions, connect better with audience and generate more revenue. It’s important not to just gather and examine customer information once, but to take it is a continuous task to be creative and innovative. This is the only and the best way to compete in the competitive markets of today.
— -
Ravi Daparthi,
Entrepreneur, TEDx Speaker, Economic Times Global Leader, IIMB & IISc Alumnus, T-Hub Mentor, Investor
Comments