CI involves methods companies use to gather and analyze customer data and interactions to glean insights about their client base and improve the customer experience. It also includes the technologies teams use to gather CI, such as using a CRM to find patterns in customer interactions and behaviors.
Robust CI strategies help define a target audience’s interests, needs, and buying motivations. They give companies the insights they need to develop customer personas, hone their selling strategies, define the scope of their products and services, and discover the best marketing outreach methods to capture their audience’s attention.
How to track and analyze customer intelligence
Teams use a broad range of tools to track and analyze CI. Some of the top ways to capture CI include:
- CRM platforms: This helps businesses understand where they are generating the most leads and which outreach methods are effective. Using a CRM tool like Zoho CRM with built-in marketing tools is effective because it tracks which marketing campaigns generate the most sales.
- Customer surveys: Use surveys or feedback forms to gather feedback from your clients. Then, use a CRM tool like HubSpot that offers feedback software that can analyze the results and turn them into actionable insights.
- Social media: Any seasoned marketing professional knows customers love to leave feedback (both positive and negative) on a company’s social media channels. Smart teams leverage that feedback with social listening tools, such as Sprout Social, to organize and analyze feedback to learn what their customers love―and what they want to change.
- Customer interviews: Go in-depth with your most valuable, loyal customers to gather feedback about what keeps them coming back. Meanwhile, ask prospects who choose not to purchase your products and services why they chose to go with another company. Use this data to find patterns in what makes clients decide to do business with you.
Insights from Olivia Tapper, co-founder of Pet Portraits
“Customer intelligence is everything. You need to understand your customers to build and grow your business. One key part of customer intelligence is actually calling and talking with customers. By understanding your customers better, you improve your business, ensure a seamless buying experience, optimize your offering, and ensure efficient marketing.”
What are the benefits of customer intelligence?
There is no shortage of benefits to having ample customer data at your fingertips. Some of the top benefits include:
- Informed product and service development: Knowing what your customers want helps inform your product roadmap. This helps teams decide what to build and what next product or service improvements to make.
- Real-world example: A subscription delivery service company may think customers want automated email, text, push notifications, and phone call reminders about upcoming orders. However, through CI analysis, they discover customers want the ability to choose their notification preferences easily without being barraged with notifications constantly.
- Personalized marketing strategies: By understanding how an audience engages and interacts with different marketing campaigns, teams can decide which ones to put the most time and effort into. For example, if you use email marketing software and direct mail efforts and get three times the engagement from email, it’s a good idea to spend more on email campaigns and reduce or eliminate direct mail campaigns.
- Improved customer service: Knowing the common issues your customers have through gathering CI arms teams with resources to build excellent customer service. For instance, knowing the top concerns and frequently asked questions (FAQs) of clients helps teams create a robust knowledge base that helps customers get the help they need without talking with a live customer service representative.
- Increased revenue: Anticipating customer needs and marketing to prospects effectively fosters customer retention and loyalty, which boosts a business’s bottom line.
Insights from Rob McDougall, CEO of Upstream Works
“Customer intelligence is crucial to many areas of business success. From knowing what items to stock on a shelf (and even where to stock them), to understanding what products to build, how to sell them, and how to price them, customer intelligence is the aspect that should be driving the decisions of the business. Increasingly, business success is becoming a game of inches as consumer choice and product complexity increase. Understanding the nuances of customer behaviors is what gives the edge to the winners.”
Types of customer intelligence
The four main types of CI include demographic data, behavioral data, transactional data, and psychographic data. These components create a well-informed picture of a company’s target customer:
- Demographic data: This covers the basic data that involves the customer’s age, occupation, income level, and region they live in. This information is best gathered through surveys, web forms, or lead tracking tools that scrape social media accounts.
- Behavioral data: This involves how customers act concerning a brand, such as what pages of the website they click, the content they download, emails they read, ads they click, and more.
- Transactional data: This involves tracking the purchase history of customers. This can be found in their past purchase data, saved or wish list items or items that have been added to their cart but have yet to buy, and historical payment methods.
- Psychographic data: This tells teams about the customer’s attitudes, desires, and personality. Gather this data through surveys, customer testimonials, and reviews left on popular review sites like Facebook and Google.
The takeaway
Fostering robust client intelligence is a crucial aspect of running and growing a sales-centric business. It helps companies understand their current clients and prospects, design products and services tailored to their needs, create customized, engaging marketing outreach strategies, and improve retention and loyalty, which strengthens a business’s bottom line.