How to Get Maximum Value from Your Customer Insights

Your guide to getting the most from your consumer data

We live in the Age of Information—a time where data is all around us. As a business, your customer data is like gold dust, if you know how to manage it effectively.

By working with the right data and managing it with complete efficiency, you will meet your customers’ needs head-on, accelerating your business growth in the process.

In this blog we look at how you can squeeze every last drop of value and push yourself ahead of the pack from your customer data from a marketing, sales, and customer service perspective.

Marketing

First we look at effectively managing your customer data from a marketing perspective. The right data will give you in-depth insights about your customers, leads, and prospects and their wants, needs, preferences and behaviour – allowing you to create marketing campaigns that are engaging, inspiring, and offer genuine value.

Segment your audience

Using your data to segment your audience into different groups, you will create a sense of order while creating a framework that will empower you to deliver the right messaging to the right people at the right time.

Audience segmentation will help you give your customer data shape while increasing your sales. To understand your customers on a deeper level, you should arrange your data by:

• Demographics such as gender, age, , job title, industry sector etc.

• Behavioural insights, including social media preferences, interests, and browsing or buying habits.

• Attitude-based data that drills down deeper into personal interests, beliefs, and brand preferences.

• Geographic metrics based on the location of your audience. You can arrange this data by region, county or by specific postcodes if you want to get especially localised with your marketing content.

See who’s interested

In addition to segmenting your data, you can also use your customer insights to see who will most likely engage with or buy your product prior to a launch or a new campaign. Based on your segmentation data, buyer profiles, and purchasing behaviour, you will be able to create a list of customers most likely to convert and take action.

Once you’ve identified which customers are likely to respond to your new product, you can send out personalised communications via email, SMS, or social media and incentivise them to make a purchase.

Use targeted content & mapping

Expanding on the last two points, by using your data to segment your audience and analyse buying behaviours, you will gain a deeper understanding of your customers’ interests, preferences, and pain points.

Armed with this knowledge, you can create targeted content including articles, videos, email messages and infographics across touchpoints to spark engagement and earn conversions.

Smart mapping will help you to enhance your content marketing efforts. For instance, by using a digital mapping module, you will be able to see where to promote or share locally targeted content and invite the right customers to product launches, events, or workshops.

Timeliness, relevance and personalisation can become the norm in everything that you do, driving greater outcomes and better ROI.

Sales

Next we move on to sales. Marketing and sales are closely connected, and by managing your customer data effectively across both workstreams, you will improve brand awareness, increase your commercial reach, and ultimately, boost your bottom line.

Make valuable introductions

Drilling down into your customers’ purchasing history and preferences, it’s possible to examine the items your customers like and spot buying trends.

Doing so will give you the tools to reach out to your customers with personalised recommendations based on previous purchases. This data-driven technique is especially effective for cross-selling and upselling.

Leverage the RAG approach

When dealing with a raft of customer data, the ‘Red, Amber, Green’ (RAG) approach will give your insights direction while knowing when to engage with your prospects.

Based on satisfaction levels, if a customer is ‘green’ all is well; if they’re ‘amber’, their satisfaction levels are dwindling; and if they move into the ‘red’ zone, there is an issue that needs solving.

Using the RAG approach, you can reach out to customers when they enter ‘amber’ or ‘red’ status and nip any issues in the bud. Doing so will increase customer retention which, in turn, will boost your long term sales figures. This approach also applies to customer satisfaction levels, which brings us to our next section.

Customer Service

Last but certainly not least, we look at data management from a customer service perspective. Customer service is vital to how people perceive your brand and will influence your sales and marketing efforts, so getting it right is essential. Here’s how.

Get to the root of the problem

Analysing your service levels is an effective way of benchmarking your performance, but by looking at common consumer issues, you can get to the root of problems that will help you improve customer satisfaction and brand reputation across the board.

For example, suppose you discover that a large segment of your audience is dissatisfied with your online chat response levels. You can then drill down into the issue and either invest in a better chatbot or train your customer service reps to manage the channel and increase efficiency.

By adding this level of data to your product roadmap, it’s possible to discover common trends or issues and provide a solution for all. In doing so, you will build customer trust, enhance satisfaction levels, and accelerate your business growth.

Assign customer-centric duties intelligently

Looking internally, focusing on customer service rep performance data will provide the intelligence you need to optimise your team for success.

For instance, suppose you discover that one of your reps is showing excellence at creating strategic resolutions to product defects or return issues. In that case, you could put them in charge of product resolution strategy. Or if one of your reps is performing consistently well with a particular client, you could make them the head of service for that particular account, and so on.

The point is: by managing your staff data effectively, you will be able to utilise certain strengths or talents that will improve your company’s customer service offerings, significantly.

“The world is now awash in data and we can see customers in a lot clearer ways.”— Max Levchin, PayPal co-founder

We hope these tips give you the insight you need to squeeze every drop of value from your customer data.

Note to Workbooks: link to new cross-selling and upselling post here