What are customer insights and why are they important to your business?

Knowing what your customers want from you, how they feel about your products and services and what they would like them to look like in the future are all customer insights. Having those insights readily available helps you make informed decisions about your products and services.

This feedback can be gathered in a number of ways, both qualitatively and quantitively. So, you could collect qualitative data through customer interviews, satisfaction surveys and focus groups. Or you could gather quantitative data through tools such as Net Promoter and review sites and services.

There are many benefits to collecting this data including understanding how to develop your products and services, how to improve customer communications and how to develop your brand positioning. This data can lead to new business opportunities.

The process of gathering customer insights can also have some other unintended positive outcomes. These include giving your customers a voice so that they are heard. The very act of proactively reaching out and listening to customers can be perceived as a very positive experience – customers appreciate it. It can help identify brand advocates and the insights can be used to create testimonials and case studies, which are high value outputs.

Customer insights can also help an organisation align its products and services with the changing needs of customers. Technology and political, economic and environmental factors are speeding up change for organisations and their customers. Customer listening helps generate continuous feedback that can help organisations make better decisions – on business strategy, product and service strategy and on marketing and communications strategy.

Customer insights underpin the most successful companies – think Jeff Bezos at Amazon and his relentless focus on the customer.

No one would argue with the logic here – a successful organisation understands what its customers want from them, or they would not be in business. And who wouldn’t want continuous business improvement?

Here’s a couple of examples of how customer insights have helped our clients. Both wanted help with their marketing communications. We did some customer interviews to understand the value and impact of our clients’ work. This input is critical for building compelling brand marketing and communications.

However, what came back from the customer insights interviews provided much deeper and richer feedback on products, services, markets and brand development. As a result of the insights, our customers were able to make significant business decisions that transcended their marketing. This included targeting higher value work and targeting a niche market rather than marketing to a broader audience. The latter strategy is now having real success.

This approach can be adapted to target specific customer groups and products and services. What matters is that there is a deep consideration of the questions that are asked. Good, open questions are key to unearthing valuable insights and that is why the question design phase of our four-step process is so important.

Our backgrounds in journalism help us design effective questions and ensure the questions are answered. Being independent is also an important factor – as independent researchers, our interest and focus is on the questions and answers only, not the working relationship. This is a small but significant factor.

Our clients appreciate that we have a deep understanding of the learning, HR and talent markets. This means we are credible in the interviews – we understand the nuances, know when to delve deeper and can relate answers to broader themes and trends.

Our experience shows that the only factor that slows down the customer insights process is the time it takes to organise calls – customers are busy, after all.  That’s why we have evolved our Customer Listening Programme into a six or 12-month offering.

If you are interested in finding out more email martincouzins@insightsmedia.co.uk

Picture credit  Couleur https://pixabay.com/users/couleur-1195798/