Customer intelligence (CI) is becoming a prominent competitive advantage in this age of increased competition with other organizations. We already knew that customer-centricity is critical for any SaaS company’s success. However, there are other aspects to being a customer-centric company.
Many businesses claim to be customer-centric, yet they don’t really comprehend the concept. You must have a thorough understanding of your customers in order to be customer-centric. That’s where it all starts.
What is Customer Intelligence?
Customer intelligence (CI) is the process of gathering and analyzing extensive customer data from both internal and external sources to acquire insights into customers’ demands, motivations, and actions.
Customer Intelligence helps businesses better understand their customers so they can improve interactions and provide more tailored service. It also gives businesses the data to optimize client communications through segmentation methods and campaign planning. All of this contributes to bettering customer journeys and propelling the company’s future growth.
Customer success and the role of Customer Intelligence
Customer intelligence may assist marketers in achieving a wide range of customer success objectives and activities.
Creating a devoted customer base
Customer intelligence insights aid long-term customer development. To ensure client loyalty, businesses must obtain a better understanding of their customers. This is possible when customer insights are available. What options do they have, what do they want, and how should marketers or CSMs approach them to get better results? Customer intelligence insights aid in the development of a stronger customer retention strategy and the satisfaction of customers.
Learn how to supercharge your customer advocacy
Keeping an eye on the market’s moves
Customer Intelligence data can help you gain a better understanding of the market. A lack of market awareness translates into a lack of understanding among customers. Customer intelligence is data that assists users in having a better experience. Marketers can gain knowledge about their customers and the industry. They will be in a better position to make better selections for their clients.
Increasing the effectiveness of sales
Customer intelligence is beneficial to customer retention. Because marketers may track customer and sales journeys to discover opportunities for improvement, this is the case. As a result, they will be able to improve consumer communication and engagement. Users can also be targeted for specific topics. Customer intelligence can assist enhance sales efficiency and productivity by optimizing procedures and enhancing sales efficiency.
Increasing strategic flexibility
Insights into customer intelligence are constantly changing. This implies they can assist you in changing your strategy to one that works. This contributes to the development of a variety of activities that can assist customers in improving their lives. CSMs can tailor their approach to satisfy individual needs. For example, clients can include a specific topic in their strategy depending on who is searching and how many people are searching.
Churn analysis and prevention
Customer Intelligence(CI) comes in helpful when it comes to analyzing and preventing churn. CSMs may run a root cause analysis on all churned customers and determine which KPIs have had the greatest influence on churn. They can find out what traits all those churned clients had in common.
CSMs may use a comprehensive CI management platform to analyze all data in a meaningful way to identify trends that are repeatable, allowing them to improve their customer success strategies by concentrating on KPIs that affect customer churn.
Segmentation of Customers
You may compile all of your important client data into distinct customer segments with the correct technology infrastructure. These divisions can be made based on demographics and behavior. It becomes easier to target clients for tech touchpoints and customized marketing communications after segmentation.
You can tailor your marketing materials to their preferences, such as any common sports that a group of clients enjoys. And, with the proper customer success platform, you can have your customer marketing campaign up and running in a matter of minutes.
Additional Resource: Segmentation of Users Guide
How to Improve Customer Intelligence?
Use a Customer Intelligence Platform like CustomerSuccessBox. Customer intelligence, also known as the voice of the customer or consumer analytics, is the process of gathering and analyzing customer contact data in order to learn more about their behavior. Customer intelligence encompasses technology like feedback management, social media monitoring, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and other analytics and data management tools.
The goal of Customer Intelligence is to improve customer interactions through personalization and other enhancements to the customer experience. Customer Success teams are deploying data scientists to unravel the rationale behind customer churn, but ROI is taking longer than expected. CustomerSuccessBox captures signals from product usage data and other relevant data and then uses AI/ML to determine whether a customer wants to grow or renew their relationship.
CustomerSuccessBox can help leading SaaS companies understand how their customers feel about renewing or expanding their contracts. By analyzing thousands of data points, and tracking feature events with renewal history, the platform predicts retention probability and the next best action that drives retention. Thus, Customer Success Managers achieve faster ROI and become completely data-driven.
What role does customer intelligence play in the future?
Many businesses have made substantial investments in analytics, but are just now learning that they must also engage in data governance and data management, or they risk making decisions based on inaccurate data, which leads to poor outcomes. Customers expect more automated, personalized, and predictive services, therefore businesses need a CIP powered by AI and machine learning to handle and analyze data from various disparate sources at volumes and speeds that people can’t match. For modern Customer Success teams to quickly detect and course-correct wayward consumers, deep sentiment analysis of conversations, much beyond Net Promoter Score (NPS), will be necessary. The concept of renewals will be largely abandoned in the consumption economy, compelling businesses to adopt a 4D perspective of customer health and handle it with even greater urgency.
Customer Intelligence Challenges
- Low or no human intervention: While some customer success organizations may brag about achieving 90 percent accuracy using artificial intelligence software, it is a fact that humans may outperform machines in all of these instances. Allow an intelligent model to determine whether a given image depicts an ocean or a lake, for example. Humans can almost always predict the proper output, with an accuracy of above 99 percent.
- Limited understanding: The main problem with intelligence technology is a lack of understanding. Aside from technology aficionados, millennials, and researchers, just a small percentage of the population is aware of AI’s potential. Customer Success Managers have to take up a new platform that is complex in ways they haven’t seen before. CSMs have to become data-driven and understand how each data point affects the course of action for a customer. This gap in knowledge is a big one to fill.
- Insufficient Trust: Transparency can go a long way toward restoring customer confidence in intelligence technology. The obvious secrecy of AI software can be addressed by exposing how AI algorithms use consumer data to secure their conclusions, and how the customer aids in displaying this data, allowing customers to develop trust and confidence.
Takeaway
Without extremely sophisticated data analytics software like CustomerSuccessBox, client intelligence cannot be properly leveraged. To maximize your return on investment, you must determine where to invest in your company. Customizing customer journeys, establishing consumer personas, activity-driven recommendations, and other customer intelligence examples are just a few examples that firms employ.
The days of relying simply on MS-Excel or a CRM application to extract relevant information from raw data are long gone. A smart customer success platform can provide you with the advantages of a 360-degree perspective of your consumers. And, if done right, this can help you stand out from the crowd.
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