Insights gained from customers are incredibly valuable to your business and can help you make improvements.  Customer analytics should be a key component of your operational and marketing strategies.  But first, we have to answer the question, “What is customer analytics?”

Businesses have the ability to gather a large amount of data from their day-to-day work.  It is important that the business understands how to leverage this data so that they can continue growing and make decisions based on that data.  That being said, each business should have a process in place regarding the gathering, sorting, and filtering of the data.  In addition to that, analyzing this data regularly needs to be a priority so that you ensure you are continuing to reach your goals and meeting your business needs.

Customer Analytics – The Basics

Customer analytics gives you insight into your customers’ behaviors.  These insights help you make decisions regarding sales, marketing, and product development.  These changes will help increase customer acquisition and increase customer satisfaction, thus growing your business. Data can be collected in many different ways; software, forms, and AI systems.

Customer analytics can also help a business understand issues that they are finding within their business.  For instance, if a new product is not selling the way you think it should analyze the customer behavior.  This will be the first step in understanding what went wrong. By seeing what went right and what went wrong, you’ll be able to make better decisions going forward.

Why Is Customer Analytics Important?

In today’s world of technology, customers have a very short attention span.  Your business must be accessible at all times either with a website or social media – props if you have both!  However, with the drop in attention span, businesses only have a short amount of time to grab their attention.  With customer analytics, businesses can figure out how customers have reacted to different products or marketing tactics.  With this information, it is easier to adjust and grow your sales by changing things that your customers react to positively.

It’s true, analytics software is not a free resource.  Your business will have to invest money in order to get this type of software.  However, by utilizing the software and the analytics it provides, the amount of growth your business should see as you adjust to your customers will cover the initial cost of the software and provide a nice return on your investment.

Who Can Benefit From Using Customer Analytics?

Once upon a time, tech companies were the only ones taking advantage of the customer analytics software.  However, times have changed and just about every business with a customer base can benefit from using this.  Let’s take a look at some useful ways customer analytics can be used to adjust business operations.

Customer Service

A company that may be doing well in their retail store may not be seeing the sales they had predicted online.  Finding out what went wrong would require a form asking shoppers about the checkout process.  An example like this might show that the response time from customer service was too slow.  The customer service department can take this customer data and change their process and goals to respond within 20 minutes in the future.  Using customer analytics, customer service processes and procedures can be changed to enhance online sales. When combined with talent analytics, personnel decisions can be made to best implement the changes in process and procedure to the benefit of everyone.

Marketing

A popular hamburger restaurant in the area has noticed their sales have been declining.  The owner of the restaurant sends out a survey to customers who have recently purchased food from their restaurant.  The results of the survey show that customers are bored with the menu and they are also looking for more healthy options to choose from.  The owner decides to add a few different types of meatless burgers to his menu as well as a burger bowl that has less carbs.

The restaurant owner decides to send those that responded to the survey an announcement that lets them know of the menu changes.  He then adds a few social media posts, ads, and fliers about the additions.  Sales begin to increase.  This is how marketing can be tweaked from customer analytics.

Product Development

Using consumer data from a beta group, a business can develop just the right product for its customers.  Let’s take, for example, a company that wants to release a new granite counter cleaner.  Before releasing it, they want to know if people are actually interested in something like this.  They reach out to a random group of people and find the majority of the people actually have a granite counter.  The company invites this group of people in to test the product to get their opinion.

After testing, one of the biggest complaints people had was that although the product cleaned the countertop, it left a haze on the counter.  The company takes the product to get reworked and comes out with an amazing product that not only cleans the counter without ruining the granite, but leaves it streak-free.

Customer Analytics Keeps A Business Going And Growing

Without customer analytics, business owners are flying blind.  Understanding your customer is key to success and growth for your business.  A smart business owner understands this and utilizes the data that is collected to create a business that benefits his customers so that the business continues to grow and provide the product or service to its customers.

Implementing A Customer Analytics Strategy

1. Know Your Customer – Know who your customers are.  How did they find you, how do they communicate, do they prefer to purchase in-store or online; these are the important questions.
2. Define Desired Outcomes – Determine what you want to achieve.  Do you want to increase the sales in your company?  Are you trying to solve a problem?
3. Relevant Data – Collecting every bit of information can become overwhelming.  Only collect the relevant data to achieve your desired outcome.
4. Data Security – Ensuring your customers' data is your responsibility.  Customers need to trust you with their personal data.  Make sure to securely store the data so that you do not open your customers up to possible fraud or identity theft.