A powerful 6-step customer insight framework for your business
A customer insight strategy (or framework) isthe game plan your business develops for collecting, understanding, and interpreting customer data, for create better and more relevant products and services.
A great know-your-customer strategy enables you to successfully communicate and engage with your target customers, so you can:
Understand customer wants and needs
Allocate better time, money and energy
Prioritize projects with high ROI
Create marketing materials that reflect the needs of your customers
Personalize customer communication
Take a customer-centric approach to updating and improving your product
Use the steps below to inspire and complement your customer insight strategy and create the products, services, and experiences that matter most to your users:
1. Embrace cross-functional collaboration
It's not just up to your customer service teams to collect and analyze customer data or trends in customer behavior, as relying on just one team can lead to lost information or opportunities.
Instead of,Marketing, sales, customer service, product design, development, and leadership teams must leverage their own customer encounters and experiences to gain more robust insights.
Why not use the gold mine of information you already have at your disposal as part of your customer insight strategy? see how to hugcross-functional collaborationcollect customer information and improveCustomer experience(CX):
Use a unified CRMfor company-wide insights into customer interactions and experiences, customer profiles, and purchasing behavior. Use this information tocreate detailed user charactersand improve product design and inventory management.
Keep your knowledge togetherin an all in onepanel, so your teams can easily visualize the customer experience and quickly identify customer responses to product changes or potential issues. That way, each department can act quickly, without waiting for support tickets, to help improve the user experience (UX).
Establish simplified communication channels:using work-based messaging platforms likeday offhelps disparate or remote teams stay up to date on critical customer information
Find your champion:If you're a large company, assign full-time representatives from each department to collectively collect and review customer insights. If you are part of a smaller company, you may benefit from selecting one person to lead the initiative with input from different departments and teams.
2. Define the objectives of your strategy
A solid strategy is only as effective as its objectives. that's why you needIdentify your specific business and user goals and determine how they relate to the different types of customer information you want to collect.
Answer the following questions to find outbecause,OMS,when, miThatof your strategy:
Know your why:What do you want to learn? Understand the logic behind your strategy by asking yourself why you are collecting this insight and what business goals you are trying to achieve.
Find out who it is:What customer segment are you targeting or trying to learn more about? For example, if your e-commerce business sells hats, you might want to know more about customers who collect hats versus customers who buy hats for practical use. It can then collect information specific to that type of customer (ie browsing and purchasing behavior) to understand their browsing habits and collection preferences.
Know when:What is your timeline for collecting and analyzing customer data? When and how will you share your knowledge with stakeholders? When will you use your knowledge to map key actions?
Know what:What data do you need? What is the best way to share this data with your team? Thatcustomer insight platformsyou will need? What are the constraints of your project regarding scope, budget, and schedule? How will your knowledge be affected?product portfolio management?
3. Map the customer journey
creating acustomer journey mapShowcasing the key touch points in a user's journey with your product and brand is crucial to developing a strong customer insight strategy.
It helps you understand all the touch points a customer has with your brand and where to look for valuable customer insights.And as more customers experience different things throughout their journey, you'll start to identify trends (or insights) related to different customer outcomes—i.e. buy your product or abandon—so you know what to focus on and improve.
Customer journey maps also help you better determine customer pain points, behavior, and favorite channels, and identify opportunities to improve your messaging. So how do you make customer journey mapping part of your customer insight strategy?
Identify your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP)based on the characteristics and buying behaviors of your ideal customer. Keep user personas in mind when mapping the customer journey to better identify what customers are feeling, thinking, or doing as they search for a solution. For example, if a SaaS startup's ICP often searches for bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) content, such as customer testimonials and case studies, you can create content that is better suited to your users' search journey.
List of channels and contact points:Create a catalog of all your business channels, including social media platforms, websites, ads, face-to-face interactions, or apps, and drill down on potential customer interactions on those channels. Use your catalog to choose which touchpoints and channels to collect customer information from.
Mape a jornadausing tools likeParadigma VisualoSmaplyand visualize the customer experience throughout their journey. Use it to identify areas of customer churn or engagement opportunities.
(Video) Strategic Customer Insight: 5 Key Questions You Need to AnswerExperience the journey first hand:validate the customer journey map by experiencing it yourself. assistuser session recordingsto see if your trip accurately reflects the customer's planned route, and if not, refine it.
Part of analyzing and sharing your insights is understanding how trustworthy your data sources are, or how loyal your customers are, depending on the medium or platform you're using.
When analyzing and sharing customer information, take a holistic approach to understanding what influences that information. For example, you may notice that customers give you positive feedback on your B2B product, but decide to cancel it anyway. Customers don't always know the logic behind their choices. So consider the big picture behind your data, rather than basing your product decisions on one source of truth.
Here are some ways to analyze and share data and insights in your business:
Use the Google Analytics Goals Funnel Tool:In addition to using GA to get quantitative customer insights, track customers through the buying process with your Goal Funnel tool. identifieswhencustomers abandon their purchase on a specific page, making it very useful for eCommerce companies and marketing teams.
Educate teammates on how to interpret the data:If you're using specific tools or charts to display your data, make sure all relevant parties know how to read and understand your visualizations.
Make it easy for all teams to access important information:if you are usinghotjar highlights, you can see all your meaningful insights in one place by creating 'Collections' and sharing key snippets of user behavior across teams to validate your assumptions and spot product issues.
Hotjar highlights help you filter out the noise and share important information with your team
6. Refine your process
Due to the variety of data available and the increasing number of channels and touch points where you can collect it, it is important to remember thatYour know-your-customer strategy is an ever-evolving process.
You needConstantly evaluate your business goals and how they relate to the customer insights you collect.That way, you stay on top of customer needs, while allocating your resources to gather the most relevant insights.
How to refine your process and gather the right insights for your strategy:
Update customer journey mapregularly to identify new touch points and determine if they are a potential source of new insights
Perform an audit of your technology stackto determine which tools really help you gather information and better understand your customers.Sometimes too many tools or data sources can overwhelm your data and confuse your efforts..
Research your customersand ask them about anything that might be missing from the product or customer experience. or manageproduct suitability surveys for the marketto assess whether your product still compares to competitors and meets user needs.
Use an NPS survey with additional questions to discover the reasons behind user scores.
Customer Insights strategy: the best way to meet the needs of users
A strong customer insight strategy helps you make more informed product improvements and product roadmap decisions, and meet changing user needs.
Understand your customers and what parts of your product or service really work, andbecause— a central part of your strategy tocreate new and better products that meet real world needs. And with a technology stack that includes customer data and Product Experience (PX) insights, you can be sure all your information is up-to-date and in one place, so you can easily share it with your team and take action. .