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Businesses must stay on top of their customers’ needs and expectations to stay relevant, profitable, and frankly, in operation. In today’s dynamic and digital marketplace, consumer preferences and behaviors can change very quickly, so much so that if you’re not looking, you might miss critical cues to adapt your business strategy — until it’s too late.
Understanding how to gather and use customer insights effectively can benefit your business. It can help you develop more personalized customer interactions and enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. Driving business growth and increasing your competitive edge are also positive outcomes you can realize when you know how to collect customer insights and use them to your advantage.
In this post, you’ll learn how to gather, analyze, and apply customer insights to drive business success. First up: an expanded definition of customer insight.
Customer insight refers to the understanding of customer behaviors, preferences, needs, and motivations that a business can gain by analyzing various types of data related to its customers. Armed with customer insights, businesses can more effectively tailor their products, services, and marketing strategies to meet customers’ expectations and demands.
There are four main types of customer insights. They are:
Once you know the types of customer insights that will best inform your business strategy, you are ready to begin gathering information. Here’s an eight-step guide to help you carry out a structured process for how to collect customer insights.
Decide from the outset what you want to achieve from the use of customer insights. Clearly defining your objectives will help to shape your entire research process and ensure that the data you collect is relevant and actionable.
Identify your target audience and define the specific characteristics, demographics, or segments of customers you wish to study to ensure that the customer insights you gather are relevant to your goals.
Using more than one research method provides more comprehensive and diverse customer insights. Market research can also be helpful in your quest to gain customer insights. (For an overview of seven types of market research, see this post.)
Knowing what questions to ask is crucial to getting relevant customer insight. How can you determine which questions are best to use in your process? Consider the results you want to receive. What do you want to understand about your customers’ preferences, motivations, and experiences? Is the data you need qualitative or quantitative?
When you present questions to customers, consider using open-ended questions such as, “What do you like/not like most about our product? Closed-end questions like, “Would you buy this product again?” can be useful, too. However, keep in mind that they will provide less detailed insight because they often require just a simple “yes” or “no” answer.
Supporting your process with the right technology can help you access customer insights faster and at scale. Online survey platforms, data analytics tools, sentiment analysis software, and customer feedback management systems can all help.
Whatever solutions you choose, they should enable you to work as efficiently as possible with your data. Yes, you can do manual searches, but that takes a lot of time and effort. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies like machine learning can quickly sort and analyze huge amounts of data for you in real time — and at scale. Invoca’s AI-powered conversation intelligence software, for example, tracks and records every customer phone call and provides a database that you can easily search, sort, and convert into actionable data.
Too much data is better than not enough. By actively encouraging customer feedback, you can increase your pipeline of qualitative and attitudinal data for customer insights. If your company values and responds to customer feedback and reaches out regularly to customers with surveys and questionnaires, you’ll always have a wealth of customer insights to tap.
Behavioral data should be the low-hanging fruit for a customer insights program. Make sure to consistently track website and social media analytics. Doing so will help you to identify patterns, optimize the customer experience, and allow you to make data-driven decisions.
Lastly, make sure to engage with your customers directly through focus groups and interviews. Engaging customers and listening to their perspectives has two benefits: It provides actionable data, and it helps your business foster trust and fortify relationships with your customers.
Once you have collected customer insights using the process above, what do you do with the data? Your next step is to prioritize insights. You’ll want to act first on the customer insights that are easy to implement and likely to have the most impact.
For instance, say that customer experience insights gleaned from customer feedback indicate that customers are frustrated at the hold times they experience when calling your customer service contact center. Integrating intelligent call routing in the contact center is a quick and easy solution for that issue.
Customer insight analysis might also reveal that a timed promotion is more likely to result in sales. Here’s an example: Say that analysis of third-quarter bookings to a resort in the Turks and Caicos Islands reveals a slight uptick in guests from the Boston area making reservations for February and March. Predictions for lower-than-normal temperatures in the Northeast during those months are likely a driving factor for those bookings, based on customer surveys.
The resort owner acts on that customer insight and decides to run a special promotion during the holiday season with the aim of increasing reservations. The campaign targets residents in Boston and other major cities in the Northeast and emphasizes the islands’ 82 F average temps and abundant sunshine during the winter months.
Don’t restrict the process of gathering customer insight to just one team or department in your organization. Silos are myopic. Sharing data throughout the enterprise, and encouraging open communication, will help to generate farsighted and innovative, customer-centric ideas that benefit your business.
Remember, new product development does not always come from the research and development team. Sometimes, a salesperson or customer service specialist identifies a customer need that the company can address. By maintaining a collaborative approach to your customer insights, you can stay agile and competitive.
What are customer insights used for? Customer insight can be a powerful ingredient in your business decision-making, and you can use it strategically to do the following.
Customer insights enhance market research and help enterprises tailor their marketing initiatives to a target audience. A greater understanding of the customer enables effective personalization of marketing messages, identification of the best marketing channels, and compilation of campaigns that resonate with target audiences.
So, if you are relying on customer insights purely from digital interactions, you are missing key marketing insights. According to research from Invoca, more than two-thirds (68%) of consumers prefer to communicate with businesses via phone when making big-ticket or complex purchases such as health insurance, mobile phone plans or when researching medical services like elective surgery. That makes phone data more prevalent than email (55%), in person (40%), live agent chat (33%), and chatbot (13%).
Invoca’s conversation intelligence platform collects data from 100% of phone calls. Your marketing team can train Invoca’s AI to look for key topics in those calls so it can quickly identify, sort, and analyze data to deliver real, actionable customer insights. These insights help your business target customers more successfully through personalized ads and campaigns based on actual customer input.
Here’s an example of what that can look like: Invoca’s AI detects a trend of customers calling an insurance business to inquire about automobile premiums but not signing up for a policy. In much the same way as an auto supply store can retarget customers who leave goods in their online shopping carts, an auto insurer can use phone-based data to create a personalized email campaign, such as a special promotion including reduced premium offers, to retarget those callers.
Customer insights relate specifically to the customer experience (CX). Focusing on CX is never a bad decision. Data captured from digital interactions, customer surveys and conversation intelligence can provide valuable customer experience insights you can use to develop customer service and sales scripts to address callers’ questions and concerns.
What a customer doesn’t say about your business is also a source of valuable customer insight. What is your business not providing that the customer craves? Do they need more convenience? Or do they want something different from a current product or service?
Customer insight data can help business development teams and marketing identify opportunities for new offerings. Look at the rapid rise of grocery delivery and curbside pick-up in response to changing consumer preferences. Use of grocery delivery services rose 56% in 2024, and curbside pick-up grew 100% over 2022. Grocery stores have identified and are filling a convenience need for their customers.
Customer preferences and behaviors are constantly evolving. Even if you have a three-year business plan, chances are there could be a major shift in customer behavior at least once in that cycle. (Use a 10-year business plan and a shift is virtually guaranteed.) With a strong focus on gathering and acting on customer insights, you can stay on top of changes and adapt your business strategies and products accordingly.
Customer experience insights help businesses personalize customer journeys, streamline processes, and deliver effective customer service. And when it comes to enhancing the customer experience, even little things can have a big impact.
For example, when you use a tool like Invoca PreSense, you empower your call center agents to provide a stellar customer experience before they even pick up the phone and say “hello” to a caller. It bridges the gap between online customer interaction and the customer reaching out to your business by phone.
PreSense gathers data from the customer’s online journey and delivers it to the contact center agent to provide insight into who is calling, why they are calling, and what they are calling about. This empowers the agent to be able to greet the caller by name and let them know from the outset that they understand why they’ve reached out, setting the stage for a more efficient but personalized interaction.
Invoca’s conversation intelligence platform powered by AI provides an end-to-end solution for businesses that want to develop a complete picture of their customer base. It begins with call tracking and recording every phone call handled by your business but doesn’t end there.
Invoca’s AI can be easily trained to dissect data from every call and capture whatever insights you deem most valuable to your business. In fact, Invoca Signal AI can capture insights about competitors, product reviews, the user-friendliness of your website, and how well your contact center converts callers to customers.
This data can provide customer insights that can help you drive business success, whether it’s through improved ad targeting, optimized digital marketing campaigns, a better customer experience in the contact center, new product development, or entry into a new market. The possibilities, like customer insights themselves, are almost endless.
If you want to learn more about the art of gathering customer insights for business improvement, these resources from Invoca can help:
You can also book a demo today to find out how Invoca’s technology can help you gather customer insights to improve everything from ad targeting to customer experience.
