Every marketing professional in the retail and e-commerce space think they know what their customers want: their job keeps them so close to the market that they develop a lot of instincts about what the customers are looking for. But that’s not enough! If these instincts are not backed up by the right data, they can turn into useless clues over time.
Capturing the right data at the right time will determine how smart the product strategies can be. It’s especially relevant if one is facing long development cycles. Data defining the customer requirements, what they want and why they shop a certain way may also impact greatly how brands decide to talk to their audience.
Consumer data needs to be turned into marketing insights to help marketers imagine their next move to meet the market’s demand, and elaborate the most effective communications strategies.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at relevant customer insights and how to measure their impact on your marketing strategies and customer experience.
What Is a Consumer Insight?
Customer insights refers to all the data a company has about its customers, usually aggregated in one view. We can distinguish different types of customers insights and in particular:
- Sociodemographic data, which allows to know the objective characteristics of its customers: name, first name, age, gender, country, region, city…
- Transactional data, that is to say all data related to customer purchases: date of last purchase, average basket, number of purchases… Tell me what you buy and how you buy, I will tell you who you are: transactional histories are a gold mine for companies keen to push personalized offers to their customers.
- Navigation data, generated by customer or user interactions on the website or mobile application. The bulk of what is known as behavioral data is browsing data. With the rise of digital channels, behavioral data has taken on tremendous importance.
- Interaction data, i.e. all the customers’ touch points with your brand: social media engagement or messages, email interactions, customer service, refunds, etc.
The goal of all this data is to gain a better understanding of its customers and to be able to answer those questions: who are they? What are the needs of my clients, their expectations, their areas of interest, their objectives, their motivations, their level of satisfaction, their preferences? In other words, what are their personas?
Customer insights can also refer to the strategy itself of gathering customer data and all the processes put in place by a company to enrich, organize and prepare this data:
- The collection of customer data via the various sources and points of contact of a company.
- The organization of this data, their centralization in one or more databases. When the data sources and tools used by the company are numerous, it is ideally advisable to set up a single customer repository, that is to say a reference base that centralizes, standardizes, and deduplicates all customer data in order to have a unique consolidated customer view.
- Preparation / processing of customer data for use by marketing, customer service, CRM, etc. (segmentation, scoring, etc.)
- Business intelligence (BI), which aims to identify patterns and generate insights from the analysis of customer databases available.
An essential Practice For The Success of Omni-channel Marketing
Consumer insights aims to strengthen the performance and quality of the company’s marketing & CRM actions. Customer segmentation and the scoring systems that make it possible to adapt the offers and their content, but also to trigger activities upon customer profiles, levels of maturity, needs, expectations, and motivations.
Consumer insights is key for a smart personalization and targeting of the customer relationship, as opposed to traditional mass marketing-which consisted in distributing the same campaigns, the same messages, the same offers to the same people and at the same time.
They play an essential role in the construction of relational programs & scenarios. By relying on consumer insights, you’ll be able to set up a more relevant customer dialogue, to adapt the messages, the moments and choose the right channels for the dialogue to take place with each customer. This will result in a much better customer experience generating greater adherence to your brand, more retention, longer lifetime and customer satisfaction.
That’s why customer knowledge must be a priority. And this is especially true in the case of e-commerce businesses where digital channels are at the fore to promote and deliver the message and the service.
On the one hand, unlike offline channels, online channels make it easier to collect more customer data – in particular the behavioral data we were talking about earlier. On the other hand, the possibilities for personalizing campaigns, messages and offers are greater on digital channels.
BI Can Help Making Sure You Are Doing It Right!
Getting better consumer insight is a great way to improve future customer experiences as you’ll get a better understanding of what matters most to them. That’s the impact that we will focus on.
Customer experience is the impression you leave on your customers, which translates into how they perceive you as a brand, and which ultimately creates brand loyalty.
Let’s go over the top metrics you can use to measure your customer experience and how much your consumer insights have impacted the picture.
4 KPIs to get meaningful customer insights & improve customer experience
1. The NPS Net Promoter Score
One of the primary methods of measuring customer experience is the calculation of the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
The Net Promoter Score is a customer satisfaction criterion that measures the likelihood that your customer will recommend your business to a loved one. Your NPS lets you know the percentage of customers who like, are neutral, or aren’t fans of your brand.
To calculate this percentage, you will send a survey to your customers and ask them how likely they are to recommend you to a friend, on a scale of 0 to 10.
With this score, you can instantly tell how many customers are happy enough with their experience to become your brand ambassadors. Once you have this information, you can work to improve the customer experience for those who are passive or detractors.
2. The termination rate
The termination rate is the percentage of your customers or subscribers who cancel or do not renew their subscription during a given period. While termination is inevitable, it is important that you know why it is happening in your business so that you can reduce it as much as possible.
Termination rate = Total Customers Acquired / Total Customers Lost x 100 (during a specific period of time)
It is essential to do a regular analysis of your lost customers to determine if the attrition rate is increasing or decreasing, the reasons why customers did not renew their subscriptions or continue to buy your products and the measures that your team may take in the future to prevent a similar customer from walking through the door.
This metric should help you determine the reasons why customers are leaving. It is also a good way to measure the customer experience: is it because of a lack of commitment? Bad user experience? Bad customer experience? Or maybe it’s a lack of customer support?
Either way, measuring and analyzing your attrition rate should help improve your customer experience.
3. Trends customer service logs
Another metric that can help you learn more about your customer experience is the evolution or trends of customer service logs.
Are there recurring issues that annoy and tire your customers like delayed delivery, or unavailable products? If so, try to resolve them as they arise. You can take immediate actions on your website, with your suppliers or with your store managers to fix the issues and turn unhappy customers into delighted consumers!
Additionally, other trends in customer support logs to analyze are the time it takes for a customer to get a response from customer service team or the average processing time. These indicators can help you measure and improve the customer experience from a customer support perspective.
4. Customer satisfaction score
One of the easiest ways to measure your customer experience is the Customer satisfaction score. It measures customer satisfaction with a business or purchase.
To calculate it, all you need to do is send a survey immediately after a purchase, in-store visit or interaction, depending on your business. This survey can ask the customer to what extent he was satisfied with the outcome of their purchase or their visit in your store.
This indicator is the average score of this survey. Customer satisfaction is a great way to get immediate feedback on whether a customer has enjoyed their experience. If your customer satisfaction score is low, you can start to implement a strategy or immediate actions based on their feedback to improve your results.
Final Words
Customer experience may seem like an abstract concept to some. But while it may seem difficult to measure, metrics like brand loyalty or those mentioned above can help make its abstractness more understandable and concrete. Plus, you won’t be able to decide or learn how to improve your customer experience until you start measuring it.
Turn your customer data into meaningful and actionable insights with ClicData’s business intelligence platform. You can learn more about our product or book a demo with our team and see your customer satisfaction KPIs turn green!
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