I’ve always championed going beyond customer satisfaction to achieve customer delight. When we try to become genuinely irresistible to our prospects, magic happens. Harnessing the power of customer insights and analytics is an effective way to go the extra mile—here’s what you need to know.
What Can We Learn from Customer Insights?
The most obvious way to learn what our customers want is to solicit feedback, but while feedback is an essential tool, it’s not foolproof. Customers don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say. For example, many customers say they value sustainability, but their purchasing habits show that they prioritize affordable prices over sustainable options.
Key consumer insights and analytics can give us hard data on what works and what doesn’t, rather than simply relying on self-reported preferences.
You can collect analytics from social media platforms, your email newsletter platform, your CRM system, and websites such as SEMrush that will track visitors to your website. This data can help us fill in the gaps between customer intent and consumer behavior.
How to Use Customer Feedback
When used in conjunction with qualitative feedback, quantitative customer insights and analytics can give us the information we need to truly meet the needs of our prospects. If you’re ready to take a deeper look at what your customers have to say, here are five steps to start incorporating customer feedback into your business.
- Define your goals. What are you hoping the data will help you achieve? What areas of your business need improvement? Create a few specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals to help direct your search for data.
- Collect the data. To gather customer feedback, consider reading your online reviews, conducting surveys, examining recurring themes in your support tickets, and looking into what people say about you on social media. Once you have all this information in one place, it’s time to pull analytics on your marketing channels and website.
- Analyze the data. When you’ve compiled your customer insights and analytics, look for trends and patterns that give insight into your customer’s experiences with your organization. See where customer feedback, both positive and negative, overlaps or contradicts the data you have on actual sales behaviors.
- Implement changes. Based on the information you collected, what aspects of your process could use fine-tuning? Instead of implementing changes immediately, experiment with A/B split testing where relevant to see what approach helps the most.
- Track results. After making changes, check in with your feedback and analytics regularly to see if you’re getting the desired results in your goals. You may need to make additional tweaks along the way.
Once you’ve made changes based on feedback, let your audience know. This transparency creates trust and lets customers know that their feedback matters, making them more likely to contribute in the future.
Using customer insights and analytics combined with feedback from reviews and surveys is the best way to get a holistic overview of what your customers want. By combining the two, you can be sure you’re basing your business decisions on the whole picture, not just one piece of the puzzle.
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Coach Dave
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