In today’s customer-centric world, enterprises around the globe are putting an emphasis on providing a positive omnichannel customer experience to gain a competitive advantage, enhance customer loyalty, and improve profitability. With the proliferation of the internet and smartphones, humans are buying more than ever.
Tapping into this behavior and being cognizant of your customers’ needs can prove highly worthwhile for your business. That is where Customer Intelligence comes into the picture. In this blog, we will delve into what Customer Intelligence is and how your organization can leverage it to grow your business.
What is Customer Intelligence?
Customer Intelligence is the process of knowing your customer base better to serve them better and to improve customer relationships. To know your consumers better, Customer Intelligence allows leaders to dig deeper into their shopper persona by gathering and analyzing data from multiple sources and touchpoints.
Leaders use this data to make insight-backed business decisions. This analysis is not only about finding what your consumers’ goals are but also for businesses to understand their customer journey and continuously optimize processes to make customer experience exceptional, for one and all.
Buyers are consistently becoming more open to safely sharing data with businesses to help them, help them better. When done right, this data is a gold mine for companies to know consumer’s demographics, interests, needs, purchase habits, and a lot more.
How Customer Intelligence can benefit your business?
Now that we have an idea of what Customer Intelligence is, let us look at how adopting Customer Intelligence might prove beneficial for your business.
1. Grow Sales with Better Forecasting
One of the key reasons why successful companies are adopting customer intelligence is to grow sales. Because at the end of the day, being profitable is the ultimate goal of any organization, deciphering current and future customers’ likes and dislikes can help enterprises provide better products and services, promoting business growth.
2. Know Your Customers
Another critical reason why Customer Intelligence is gaining popularity is because of how it helps businesses really apprehend customer analytics. Moving beyond sales, customer intelligence also helps marketers and businesses understand what is resonating with their customers, allowing them to prune their market research and marketing efforts, messaging, supply chain, social media initiatives, etc.
3. Promote a CX Culture
Again, while sales are a very important aspect of running a business, no organization can escape from not providing your customers with a smooth and comfortable customer experience. Global leaders are promoting the CX culture throughout the departments and putting customers before anything else. Customer Intelligence helps organizations understand and optimize their end-to-end customer journey.
4. Drive Decision Making with Data
One of the important but often overlooked reasons to use Customer Intelligence is to promote Data-Driven Decision Making (DDDM) within your teams. Nothing speaks louder than hard facts. Companies are often guilty of making business decisions on gut feelings but with the current competition, informed strategic decisions need to be made to really stand out.
Getting Started with Customer Intelligence
Now that we’ve understood how Customer Intelligence can transform businesses, let us look into how organizations can get up and running quickly to successfully integrate it into their business strategy.
1. Customer Data Collection
One of the first steps to get started on the Customer Intelligence journey is to identify the sources from where you’d like to collect and analyze data. While some organizations get it from a single data source, more often than not, you’d find valuable information hiding away in multiple systems and surveys. With the right data management, the aim of this step is to centralize your customer data on one platform.
Some of the most common systems where you’d find very insightful customer information in the raw form are – CRM (think Salesforce), Ticketing systems like HappyFox Help Desk, Call Center system like Aircall, Chatbots, CSV imports, etc.
2. Choosing the right infrastructure
Choosing the correct platform to analyze data is just as important as making strategic decisions. With the boom of AI-Driven intelligence, businesses can no longer do with massive excel sheets.
A robust system like the HappyFox Business Intelligence software comes with powerful integration with equally powerful customer-centric systems to allow companies to collect data at a central repository to form a single customer view. With the break down of data and system silos, organizations can understand their customers better, across the complete spectrum of their journey – on a single platform.
3. Draw Customer Insight
Now that you have your platform and data from all the sources in place, it is time to see what insight can be extracted from the raw data. The goal of this step is to understand what your data says about your customers. A data-driven overview of all customer interactions with the business allows stakeholders to engage with customer data at every stage of the buyer’s journey and make quick and efficient alterations.
AI-driven business/customer intelligence platform like HappyFox Business Intelligence can help you synthesize billions of data points to uncover actionable insights to highlight important information like customer segmentation, profitable products, etc.
4. Continuously Tracking Metrics & Refining
Drawing a conclusion from your metrics is a continuous process. Keeping a check on your metrics and KPIs on a regular basis is vital for the success of customer intelligence strategy. As your business scales, so should your strategy.
Investing in a system that can scale with your business is important. And with the scaling of businesses, your metrics and goals ought to change too. To promote brand affinity, continuous improvement helps business to change as the needs of the customers change.
Customer Intelligence KPIs & Visualizations
Here is a sneak peek into some of the most powerful KPIs our customers swear by. Metrics like these can help you have a strong hand over your internal processes and practices, which further would monitor all channels, data, and customers in real-time.
Customer Support Insights
Visualizing and analyzing data from the Help Desk can help businesses gauge how their products and services are doing. With a deeper understanding of this, they can position their product offering better to their customers and allot resources to streamline their customer’s presales and post-sales processes.
Tracking KPIs such as Average Response Times, Support Channels, Tickets across Product Categories, and Customer Satisfaction (CSATs) can help them make necessary decisions with customer service efforts such as investing in Chatbots or better resource allocation and staffing.
Transactional Insights
Data from a CRM like Salesforce can help businesses understand what is selling and what is not. What are the customers liking and what are they disliking? This data is helpful in understanding leads and prospects and even past clients to sell more effectively. Segmenting your customers by their Sales numbers or product interests can lead to better customer relationship management and exponential growth of revenue.
Conclusion
Leveraging technology for improved customer experience is key to making more profits and customer retention and multiple other use cases. Companies are heavily investing in systems that can make it easier to understand customer behaviors.
With artificial intelligence and machine learning backed powerful system like HappyFox Business Intelligence, gaining insight into your customers and optimization is now easier than ever. To know more about how we’ve helped companies find deficiencies in their processes and helped uplift their customer experience strategies, reach out to one of our product specialists today.
