What Are Customer Insights & How Are They Used?

For your company to maintain a sustainable level of success—and hopefully grow—your customers’ needs must be top priority. By gathering qualitative data to better understand your customers’ goals and priorities, you’ll have the customer insights you need to create the products and experiences they most want and need.

One common customer insight definition is this: the analysis and extrapolation of human behavior in an effort to increase the value of a product as well as increase the sales of a company. Simply put, customer insight is gained by looking at data collected from customers’ interactions with—and feedback about—your brand. It also includes projections for potential customers you may bring on in the future.

It is critical to align your company around the importance of customer insights for decision making: it will help your team understand whether or not your product, and the marketing surrounding it, are aligned with your target audience. It’s easy to follow your gut instinct, but without empirical data, you’re shooting in the dark. By understanding customer insights, you’ll be able to hone in on what your customers need in order to have an exceptional experience with your brand. And, as we all know, your customer experience IS your brand.

What is Customer Insight Analysis?

Customer insights represent the data collected from measurable research regarding your customer’s interaction with your brand or company. When it comes to customer insight analysis, you’re adopting a holistic view of your customer and their needs. Through analyzing the data you’ve collected about your target audience, their interactions with your products, customer service experience, general buying behaviors, and verbatim feedback, you can begin to understand what they need out of your product, and more importantly, why and when they need it. You can then respond with product and marketing strategies that align with this analysis.

By establishing a company-wide approach for gathering customer insights, you can begin making more informed decisions on what to build and how to grow. This data provides teams with a deeper understanding of what customers are really looking for in products and services, ultimately leading to better decisions and greater returns.

What’s the Difference Between Market Research and Customer Insight?

You may believe that customer and market insights are synonymous. However, market insights tend to focus on a broader view of the target demographic, the market trends, and the market size. Market insights will have some crossover components with customer insights, but in terms of purpose, customer insight roles focus more on customer journey and buying behavior. 

The end goal of unlocking customer insights is to improve communication between a customer and a brand, and to increase customer satisfaction—and sales—through an understanding of the customer’s needs and goals.

Market research and customer insights both have a place in your company, as one will tell what is happening in the market and the other will tell you how your customers are behaving, and why.

How Insights Can Amplify Your Marketing Efforts

Customer feedback and insights are everywhere, the sheer volume of which can be overwhelming. But AI-powered text analytics and sentiment analysis can help you measure customer insights at scale. The plus side of bringing all of this data together is that you’ll gain a complete view of how customers are talking about your product, especially in comparison with similar products on the market.

Deeply listening and understanding what customers are saying about their experiences with your products and services, as well as competitors, will provide your team with a clearer direction of the offers to create and the messages that will resonate. Not only will this give you ideas about how to proceed with your own product, marketing, and experience strategies, it will give you a look at your competitors, so that you have a better view of the landscape as a whole, and where your product fits in terms of what customers most want.

Improving the Customer Journey

A customer’s journey is unique to each individual interaction with your brand. However, there are common trends that can be identified and acted on to improve your average customer’s experience. Again, this is where you’ll want to turn to customer insights. When it comes to the customer journey, these insights will let you know what’s working, what’s not, and where the gaps are in your current customer journey experience, from awareness to advocacy.

Customer Insights and Personalized Marketing

A common trend in marketing strategy is to ignore segment differences and focus on mass appeal, otherwise known as mass marketing. The basic idea was that If you want to increase your sales, you need to reach as many people as possible with a message that might apply to some of them.

However, the times are changing: there is more need than ever to personalize your approach. By focusing on a personalized message, you can increase your chance of communicating and differentiating your offer in a meaningful and effective way. You’ll be more likely to gain and retain customers with a message that speaks to them, rather than a generic message that aims purely for scope.

Once again, to know what to put into your personalized message, you’ll need to understand the “why” behind your customer’s behavior and feedback: you’ll need customer insights. By using customer insights to understand what customers really need — and adopting the voices of your customers — you can start creating marketing campaigns that speak to them directly, and drive more results.

Gathering Customer Insights Using Loop

Loop is here to help your team identify, understand, and act on customer insights. By bringing together all of the channels where your customers are providing feedback on a daily basis — like online reviews, NPS feedback, and win/loss notes — you can begin to understand what customers want and where the greatest risks and opportunities are for your business.

With Loop’s voice of the customer software, you’ll be able to collect accurate, meaningful feedback data and align teams around customer and business priorities. Try a free trial with Loop today to see for yourself how customer insights can help your team shift to Customer-Led Growth strategies.