The Role of A Customer Insights Management Tool in 2022

Use a customer insights management tool to keep up with customers’ ever-changing preferences

Customer preferences are expectations, motivations, and inclinations that drive customer purchasing decisions. Through data, customer preferences could come in the form of likes, dislikes, reshares, and comments.

The pandemic has evidently upended the way customers navigate their lifestyles. As customers supplement their purchasing habits via online eCommerce, businesses have an incentive to stay ahead of trends and pivot to digitization similarly.

As the end of 2021 nears, more significant customer and business changes are expected as international travel slowly resumes, revealing some semblance of pre-pandemic times. New, observable preferences are detected when customers interact with a brand on social media, which thereafter can be captured by businesses through offline or online sources as customer insights.

If your brand is in the business of being customer-centric and putting customers first, then staying in tune with their behavior and implementing data-driven strategies from customer insights gathered across different touchpoints would be your priority.

What Are Customer Insights? 💬

They are quantitative or qualitative customer-related data gathered from multiple sources and analyzed into actionable conclusions to make informed business decisions or to formulate sound market strategies. The objective is to spot consumer behavior trends and pivot customer-related initiatives towards success by meeting the demands of their preferences.

Customer insights sources:

1. 1. Surveys or questionnaires
  2. Interviews or Focus Groups
  3. Social Media
  4. Websites
  5. Live Chat or Messenger
  6. Forums
  7. Reviews
  8. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
  9. Point of Sales (POS)
  10. Loyalty Programs

The list and channels to gather customer insights are non-exhaustive; constant new customer touchpoints will emerge in tandem with changing customer preferences and technology advancements.

Why Brands Need Customer Insights💡

Microsoft reported that organizations that leverage their customer behavior data to generate insights outperform their peers by 85% in sales growth. Customer insights data will provide you with the opportunity to better personalize and tailor products to the needs, wants, and demands of their customers.

Customer insights have a clear impact on revenue because it drives acquisition, conversion, and retention. Up to 49% of customers would purchase additional items or services they did not intend to due to tailored recommendations from a brand. It is no surprise that top brands invest billions of dollars in acquiring and analyzing customer data and driving business growth. How is your brand managing customer insights?

Customer Insights Management Is Data And Integration Management ⚙️

There is no need to rely entirely on intuition or gathering people in a room to understand consumer behavior. Global digital connectivity and technological advancements have allowed digital marketers and researchers to get real-time data and produce meaningful reports for their internal stakeholders.

The rise of data protection policies has signaled the importance of consumer data privacy to such a degree that companies promote an angle on how they handle consumer data as a point of differentiation. According to a study by McKinsey, 87% of customers said they would not do business with a company if they had concerns about its security practices and reliability.

We now spend most of the time online, interacting with different digital touchpoints like social media, websites, search engines, etc. These digital engagements produce data that are used as customer insights for businesses. According to Statista, 74 zettabytes of data will be created in 2021, increasing from 59 zettabytes in 2020 and 41 zettabytes in 2019 (A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes).

As more and more attention revolves around virtual reality, new digital platforms will continue to emerge and capture the share of attention. That would result in an increasing variety of fragmented consumer insights data that needs consolidation to comprehend.

Businesses use an array of different customer experience platforms to collect a variety of data, which brings integration issues. You need a customer insights management tool that can integrate comfortably with your current technology stack to overcome that. The best customer insights management tool consolidates and integrates relevant data from different sources to produce easy-to-understand, and more importantly, actionable insights.

Check out how Digimind Social easily integrates with most work tools you use every day!

Social Media Influence On Customer Insights Will Continually Increase 📈

Facebook was the first social network to surpass one billion registered accounts and currently sits at more than 2.85 billion monthly active users. Other major social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok also hit the billion monthly active users (MAUs) mark shortly after. The number of users and their engagements create a tremendous amount of quality data that businesses can analyze for consumer insights, brand reputation, trend tracking, and product innovation.

Customer insights from social media come from monitoring, measuring, and analyzing their public engagements, sentiments, industry, and brand-related conversations. The continual advancement in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence (A.I), and general technologies will further improve social media data quality and efficiency for customer insights. The modern customer insights management tool should provide social listening capabilities.

Social media provides faster and real-time customer insights in comparison to traditional market research methods like interviews, surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups. Even though social media is gaining influence in the market research space, businesses should still complement social media data with traditional market research data to get a holistic customer insights view.

Customer Insights Management Is A Team Tool 👥

When customer insights data is only confined to a particular business unit, the data often produces a siloed analysis with a narrow perspective, not considering the broader organization’s needs. However, when data is consolidated across multiple business functions, it would promote healthy, cross-collaboration and improve the bottom line to a larger extent. For example, Customer insights data from the marketing team can help the product team develop customer-driven enhancements or provide customer success teams with more intelligent workflows for bridging pain points.

You need to have a team or committee of leaders from different functions cooperating to share data and set up best practices to use customer insights management for business strategy and transformation. When everyone is looking at the same dashboards and sharing the same information, every business function can be held to a high standard of accountability, leaving no room for assumptions or errors.

Leaders are expected to make tough business decisions on a daily basis. Access to a customer insights management tool with a self-service element to glean holistic insights quickly can improve decision-making incisively across the board.