Every business that wants to foster customer loyalty, attract prospective clients, and generate high returns on investment must invest in customer intelligence.
A customer intelligence platform provides insights into your customers' expectations, behaviors, pain points, and motivations that influence their purchasing journeys. eCommerce entities that invest in such programs will likely thrive, evolve, and build lasting customer relationships.
This article provides an overview of customer intelligence, its importance, and how to get customer intelligence data.
What is Customer Intelligence?
Customer Intelligence refers to the process of collecting and analyzing customer data to generate actionable insights. These customer insights can enhance customer experiences, productivity, sales performance, and business decisions. Core features of customer intelligence include:
- Customer data collection and management;
- Customer segmentation;
- Data analysis;
- Development of actionable insights.
Types of customer intelligence data include:
- Behavioral data: highlights what customers are doing on your website. Techniques used to collect this data type include cookies, heat maps, and market research surveys.
- Transactional data: it's based on the customer's purchase history, including key data points that relay information to personalization engines.
- Psychographics data: it's an emerging data approach based on psychology. Psychographics seeks to understand why customers make certain purchasing decisions. This data consists of triggers that influence customer activities, opinions, and interests.
- Demographic data: it consists of information such as location, level of employment, age, gender, and marital status. Demographic data is an important indicator in determining product decisions. For example, "why do certain clients prefer product A?"
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Why is Customer Intelligence Important?
Customer experience is an essential part of your business's profile, especially if you want to stay ahead of the competition. It's one of the crucial factors used to distinguish businesses making strides to meet the ever-evolving customer needs. To attain customer success, use a data platform such as customer intelligence to ensure that you meet the needs of current and prospective clients. So, what are the benefits of customer intelligence?
Attracts Customers
Customer intelligence allows you to engage and attract customers. By using real-time and historical data, you can study a customer's behavior while interacting with your eCommerce site, including past purchase behavior.
This way, you can ascertain their probability of making/not making purchases. With that knowledge, you can design a sales and marketing system that allows you to retain current customers while attracting prospective ones. Customer intelligence gives you the data you need to understand your customers' interests better.
Improves Profitability
While the goals of customer intelligence might be to understand customer behavior and experience, your business still wants to enhance its productivity because this is important for profitability. Generally, companies that use customer intelligence data platforms have higher chances of increasing their productivity, which is augmented in their marketing strategies, leading to increased returns.
Generates Better Customer Insights
Customer intelligence generates important unstructured data that highlights key customer insights. For instance, you can obtain data from social media posts regarding want customers like or want from your business. This is also one of the places where you can find complaints and unresolved issues your clients are facing. As a result, you can customize solutions that resonate with the needs of your existing and potential clients.
Promotes Customer Retention
Customer retention is one of the critical factors that define a business' success. Such a data platform allows you to identify insightful analytics that favor your business. For instance, you can keep track of your customers' behavior, purchase history, location, and buying patterns to analyze what they need from your business and then create a system that ensures their demands are met.
> Are you worried about the increasing churn rate? Discover how Omniconvert Reveal's integration with Gorgias prevents churn of high-value customers by using real-time response!
How to Get Customer Intelligence Data
Building lasting and revenue-generating customer relationships requires data. There are several ways to collect customer intelligence data, including:
- Interviews
They are essential in helping businesses understand the customer journey. If you have several questions you want to ask your clients, don't give them only questionnaires. Interviews allow you to evaluate the customer's body language and different emotions when talking about various aspects of your business. Additionally, this technique might also be beneficial in revealing your customers' personalities.
- Surveys
Market surveys will never go out of style since they focus on current customers and your target audience. They can be used in various business departments, including sales, marketing, distribution, and customer care. Surveys offer great customer experience insights that may be vital in bridging gaps. Some of the applications businesses can use to collect different customer data include Customer Satisfaction Score and Net Promoter Score.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRM is a database used to store collected data. It should be noted that the datasets can be grouped into various customer profiles, meeting notes, sales emails/calls, etc. It helps businesses know their customers base and understand targeted and segmented marketing campaigns.
- Customer Support
It's also known as the helpdesk or customer support tool. Some businesses have ticket managing systems. A customer support platform can be used to store relevant customer feedback data stemming from social media posts, emails, phone calls, and live chat.
- Website Behavioral Data
Tracking your website's behavioral data provides a more precise way of understanding your customers' needs. Analyzing this data can help you understand the possible bottlenecks and clutter that prevent higher conversion rates.
Generally, website behavioral data is considered a goldmine since you can run several experiments to determine the efficiency of your webshop to determine which behavioral tendencies and motivations perfectly suit your customers.
Regardless of the method obtained to get customer data, all information must be used for meaningful reporting. Collecting data is simply one of your business's necessary steps to clarify its future actions. Therefore, you should consider implementing a daily/weekly reporting routine you can use to manage your data across different customer segments.
> Do you know what customers feel about their latest experience? Learn how NPS software can help you measure and monitor customer satisfaction!
How to Use Customer Intelligence
When consumers visit an online shop, a customer intelligence data platform will identify their unique techniques. It will then supplement the obtained customer analytics with relevant information obtained from external sources. This will help the retailer understand who the customer is, even before making their first purchases. But how can you use this program efficiently?
After conducting comprehensive customer research, you will obtain several data points that perfectly represent your eCommerce's target audience. Additionally, you will also have multiple profiles within it. To obtain the vital result relevant for customers based on your niche, you need to turn that data into intelligence. This requires integrating the data points to get a greater and better context. Examples of these data points that can be obtained from hundred website visitors include:
- Browser: chrome
- Device: MacBook
- Location: Los Angeles
- Referrer: Instagram
- Micro-conversions: clicks on a product with a "discount" badge and "only two products remaining."
From the above example, most website users visiting this retail shop use chrome browsers and MacBook devices. Besides that, most of these referrals come from Instagram, and shoppers are motivated to make purchases on products that have the "discount "badge or those with only a few items remaining.
Of course, you can create another customer segment for various channels to analyze customer behavior and use the obtained information to improve user experience and build brand loyalty. Such an intelligent insight helps to ensure that your business's general message blends with the target audience. Companies need to understand the context of customer purchase decisions by using omnichannel insights that lead to better conversions.
While using customer intelligence, you can also maximize it by:
Designing Your Customer Intelligence Strategy
Every business has its goals and target audience. It's, therefore, important to develop a customized customer intelligence strategy that suits your brand's specific needs.
You can create several departments within your business and merge their roles in a central unit to analyze the obtained data. This way, you will easily identify gaps in different areas and design mechanisms to close them. Understand that the best way to get the most out of your customer intelligence is by using an intelligent platform such as a Customer Data Platform or Customer Relationship Manager.
Use Smart Digital Analytics
eCommerce makes use of digital tools, and that's why any business that wants to make appropriate advancements that will lead to conversions and foster customer loyalty should use digital analytic results obtained by smart tools.
This is important in ensuring that you obtain the relevant customer data on time and use the information to build a comprehensive customer picture. After that, the business should consider using a top-down mandate to make crucial decisions that will create a shift in the company's operations.
Get an Intelligent Technology
This is a straightforward process, simply get the appropriate software and then use its features to maximize your business's potential. The best way to get the optimal return on investment is to improve the customer experience. To do this, you should invest in customer intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is essential for enhancing return on investment since it uses machine learning functionalities to improve customer experience and refine data insights. With AI, you can improve your business's strategy by implementing new purchase strategies that consider the shoppers' experience. This way, you will have a better competitive advantage over others by delivering outstanding customer experiences.
Use your Data to Generate Important Insights
This is usually the most challenging part of customer intelligence. So, after you have obtained the data, how do you use it to design actionable insights? Your data needs to highlight important aspects such as profitable products, customer segmentation, and preferences. This way, you can use different datasets to create customer-centric analytic models.
Understanding customer behavior through data analysis is important for the growth of your eCommerce. REVEAL by OMNICONVERT allows you to unlock data-driven growth by analyzing your customers across several channels and helps you understand how you can acquire, delight, and retain them while increasing Customer Lifetime Value and reducing your CAC. REVEAL provides comprehensive and essential insights, making it possible for you to treat your customers on every channel differently.
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Conclusion
Customer intelligence is currently one of the most important factors determining eCommerce's success. It allows retailers to gather and analyze customer data and turn the results into actionable insights. When we truly understand what our customers want, we can both talk in the same language. Customer intelligence is beneficial because it operates different customer segments based on behaviors, interests, and demographics. By using it, you can acquire more clients, ensure that current and new customers remain loyal to your business, and then generate more sales and revenue, leading to maximized profitability.
Frequently asked questions about Customer Intelligence
A: It's a new program that enables marketers and merchandisers to understand their markets and how they can use customer data to develop actionable insights that improve customer experience. eCommerce Intelligence is powered by deep machine learning software that customizes and optimizes every customer segment, leading to a better on-site shopping experience.
A: The best customer intelligence techniques include data collection across different channels, data segmentation, smart metrics, meaningful reporting, and acting on insights. The bottom line of these techniques is to implement a suitable customer intelligence strategy that will enhance sales, foster brand loyalty, and improve customer relationships.
A: This is the next phase of customer data management that links business users in commerce, service, sales, and marketing. As a result, it seamlessly links these business users to billions of data points to uncover insights vital for decision-making and improved customer satisfaction. A customer intelligence platform leverages machine learning and AI.
A: It involves using a customized strategy that suits your eCommerce profile. To do this, you need to expand your data collection strategy by considering both first and 3rd-party data. After that, you can decide which customer data points are important to get a data analysis team to handle your backend data analysis before investing in the relevant customer experience strategies and solutions.
The post Customer intelligence: How to get & use customer data in eCommerce appeared first on Omniconvert Ecommerce Growth Blog.