The combination of the features of a brand and interests of the consumers can be termed as Customer Insights. These insights allows the businesses to understand the reasons for which customers like their brand, which may include their mood, mindset, desire, motivation and ambition that encourage them to buy it.

Consumer insights can also be defined as the compilation, use and understanding the information to permit a business in obtaining, developing and maintaining their customer base.

Methods of Analyzing Customer Insights

While analyzing consumer insights you will have to start with auditing of the data collected to completely understand the opportunities and type of data involved in them. One can analyze these insights in a number of ways after fully understanding this information.

Impact Assessment: It is one of the methods of analyzing these insights as it helps in understanding the affect of the actions taken by the company on the behavior of the customers. It also helps in predicting the reaction of the customers on the changes proposed by the company.

Customers as Assets: It helps in evaluating the duration of the loyalty of the customers for the brand. Businesses can also evaluate certain other factors like rate of return and cost of their acquisition by considering customers as assets.

Propensity model: The future behavior of the customers can be predicted on the basis of propensity modeling based on their previous responses. It also helps companies in understanding the ways they can adopt to mould customer behavior in a particular manner.

Cross-Sell Analysis: It is another method of analyzing customer insights as it identifies their relationship with the products and services of a company to find out the most popular combination of products among their customers. This relationship identification can be used in future in up-sell and cross-sell the products and services.

Critical Lag: This method of insight analysis permits a company in delivering customer specific communications on the basis of their earlier purchasing style to improve the retention of the customers along with increasing their loyalty.

Social media: Many businesses are presently using social websites like Facebook etc. to know the reviews of their customers on their products and services as they can directly communicate with them and get their insights in this regard.

Customer panels: Customer insights can also be obtained through traditional method of interacting with customer panels in which a group of customers discusses with the company about their interests and expectations from the products and services provided by the company.

Survey: It is another traditional method of obtaining insights of the customers as they can help in analyzing the information obtained qualitatively as well as quantitatively. These surveys can be conducted online as well as offline to get information not only about local customers but the reviews of remotely placed customers.

Factors Affecting Customer Insights

Understanding customer insights can help in improving the sales and profits of a company by improving loyalty of its customers. These insights allow a business in understanding the needs of its customers alongwith the time taken by them in taking decisions to buy their products and services. Complaints of the customers, their reviews on your products and your ways of doing business are some of the ways you can get the insights of your customers.

CRM systems: A business which delivers better customer services on the basis of the information collected regarding consumer insights through surveys and social media can improve the loyalty of its customers as it listens to their requirements.

This positive response ensures the return of the customer for purchasing company’s products and services but the reputation of its products and loyalty of the customer mainly depends upon the spreading of their words.

Speed of response: In order to build customers’ loyalty the company has to analyze their response speed. Normally in the field of customer services it greatly affects the business as internet helps in sharing the experiences of their customers throughout the world within few minutes. But it also helps in improving the sales of the company.

The conversion of prospective customers into sales or losing them mainly depends upon the time taken in gathering the responses of the customers and fulfilling their requirements. The negative response of the prospects or lost customers can also influence the purchasing decisions of the other people.

Use of latest technology: A business can obtain a number of benefits by using latest technologies for collecting customer insights and other information. A company can provide more personalized customer experience by integrating its data collection process into sale presentations. They can gather information about the preferences of their customers, criteria of their purchases and various other points in a very humble and natural manner. It will help in improving their customers’ loyalty.

Propagation of information: The consumer insights information collected by using latest technologies can also help in the actual inclusion of the customers’ data into the systems used by the company for reporting as well as spreading the leads like CRM system etc.

The complete information collected through these methods including the preferences, decision criteria of the customers can be quickly provided to the distributors and sales agents of the company to tackle the customers accordingly and improve sales by satisfying them.

Regular communication with customers: The opportunities of cross-sell and up-sell for a company can be improved by particularly communicating with its customers regularly on the basis of customer insights collected through various means. It will not only improve the loyalty of the customers, sales and profitability of the company but also reduces the cost of acquiring and retaining the customers.

Discover market trends: The trends of market can be discovered in the basis of the information collected through surveys and other resources. A company can know about the changes in customers’ tastes and market trends by conducting surveys regularly and frequently. This information can be used in developing the products and services according to the requirements of the customers. It will help not only in improving the profitability of the company but also in ensuring the availability of the products as per the customers’ needs.

Thus customer insights greatly help in improving the business opportunities in this competitive market trend.