Today, most organizations are curious to include customer intelligence in their business but do not know how to make the most.
You might have the customer data, but are you using the siloed data and insights into practical actions that help you grow your business and brand equity?
It is about time that we started listening to our customers. Your marketing, IT, and customer experience teams are already doing that by accumulating customer data from social media, surveys, websites, and even sales transactions.
But in an organization, the biggest challenge is that siloed teams cannot communicate effectively, disjointed systems do not connect, or a lack of strategy support from support.
All these things can limit an organization from effectively utilizing the data.
But now, with the help of customer intelligence, it is possible to understand your customers from a deeper level and enhance your business sales growth and bottom-line using customer intelligence.
Before proceeding to the different ways to master customer intelligence in 2023, it is time to learn the definition of customer intelligence.
What exactly is customer intelligence?
Customer intelligence is gathering customer data and information and analyzing it. You need to find insights that help further growth. This information can be psychographic, demographic, transactional, and behavioral. Customer intelligence will help understand more about the customer and their data. It includes data from all aspects of the customer-
- Touchpoints from the customer journey
- Time instances
- Customer data technology
This creates chances for better business decisions, analysis, and insights on behavior patterns.
Different ways customer intelligence can help your business
Customer intelligence helps understand customers better- their preferences, attitudes, beliefs, and motivations. This can change with time. So, customer intelligence will help create strategies that adapt to the changing market. You can target an audience with customer segmentation. You can personalize strategies to increase customer loyalty and customer satisfaction.
2. Helps in predicting future customer behavior
Customer intelligence helps answer certain core customer questions- who, when, where, what, why, and how. This will help engineer smart customer campaigns, create better decisions, and improve targeting. Tracking customer behavior is useful in the long run. This will help create proactive campaigns for that.
Customer intelligence helps discover new facts about customers, improve and maximize areas of change. You can optimize operations and handle problems in the customer journey. You can reduce waste and improve strategies to handle problems proactively. An informed decision can help strategize better and enhance customer loyalty.
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Ways to master customer intelligence in 2023
Mastering customer intelligence is important in 2023. A remote work culture now dominates the world, and customers are globally looking for solutions. In this period, one needs to master customer intelligence. Here are five ways to master customer intelligence and align with the people, technology, and processes framework for better efficiency.
With products rapidly improving, it is tough to keep track of all relevant feedback from customers. This feedback can come from multiple channels, markets, products, or services. Customer intelligence tools can help track customer activity, interactions, history, browsing behavior, and more. This can reveal their views, beliefs, preferences, and other characteristics. You can attract and retain customers, gain a competitive advantage, and increase revenue consistently.
2. Invest in the right technology
Marketers can use customer intelligence tools to respond rapidly, pinpoint success, react to negative feedback, and make plans. You need to assess the digital expertise and gain access to seamless technology platforms. This technology is a powerful system to monitor customer data, channels, and data in real-time. You can handle customer behavior modeling, forecast, segmentation, and predictive analysis. The technology needs to be scalable and be a source of strength.
3. Accumulate data from customers by tracking reviews and online discussions
It is necessary to improve targeted communication. Strategies are required to help solve customer problems and communicate value better than competitors. Customer-centric organizations can help customers get the best of their products and reduce problems. New reviews from social media sites will help understand concerns, questions, and doubts about the company. You can learn a lot from online discussions on Reddit, Quora, Twitter, and other forums.
4. Accumulate case studies and white papers (B2B)
Customer insights help companies improve how competitors are winning more customers. Marketing content is needed to make customers know more about the product or service. Customer intelligence helps make that communication and content better. You can strategize plans that meet customer needs. You can also see how competitors are doing, engaging with customers, and the customer response levels.
5. Act on the insights obtained
Customer intelligence helps build better sales processes. You can create a better message, improve products or features, monitor customer journey, and hence act on the insights from customer intelligence reports. You can tailor and customize marketing content and help your sales team find tactics to improve growth. With customer intelligence, you can build loyalty as customers know better. You can build a brand persona, optimize marketing campaigns, and enhance customer experience.
Concluding Thoughts
Organizations might be using many consumer data platforms (CDPs) to handle customer data. This can come in handy when a single team employs it. Customer intelligence is key to understanding a lot about the customer- their aims, intentions, personality, and profile type. It can be helpful to plan and create strategies in the long run.
The customer intelligence platform (CIP) is the next level of CDPs. In 2023, we will see most B2B SaaS organizations using CIP to utilize customer intelligence in their business effectively.
We hope the different ways we have enumerated above help you master customer intelligence in 2023. To get more such information, keep following this section.
Dattatraya Shetty is an IT Professional with 2 Decades of experience in areas of Product Development, Implementation & Service Delivery Management. As the Head of Implementations and SOC Compliance in Smartkarrot he is on a mission to provide relishing customer experience.
Published January 07, 2022, Updated May 05, 2023