In business, an outside-in analysis is also known as “customer-centric” or “market-oriented analysis“. It is a process where you put yourself in your customer’s shoes and try to understand their world, their needs, and how your product or service can help them. This type of analysis is crucial for making informed decisions about everything from product development to marketing strategy.
In this blog post, we will discuss what outside-in analysis is, and how you can use Symanto NLP technology to conduct your own thorough analysis.
What is an outside-in analysis?
Outside-in analysis is a business decision-making technique that puts the customer first and takes into account customer or user data in order to make better decisions. The main idea behind outside-in analysis is that by looking at data from the perspective of your customers, you can gain insights that would otherwise be hidden when looking at data from the perspective of the company.
By contrast, inside-out analysis looks at data from the perspective of the company itself. This means that crucial insights may be missed.
Consider the following scenario: Imagine you run a catering business. You want to impress your clients and their guests so you make the best dish you know how to make – a 5-layered beef lasagne with almond flour bechamel sauce. But you haven’t asked your clients what they or their guests like to eat. As it turns out, half of the guests are vegetarian, others have a nut allergy, and the client was expecting elegant finger food. The lasagne was a hit with about 25% of the guests, but with a little extra research and consideration, you could have pleased everyone.
This is an example of how an inside-out analysis can fail you. An inside-out analysis starts with what you have to offer and tries to find the right match for it. By contrast, an outside-in analysis starts with your client’s needs and works backwards to provide a solution that meets those needs.
Benefits of Using an Outside-In Strategy
Outside-in analysis has several key benefits, including:
- Allowing you to make decisions based on customer needs and wants, rather than just what is best for the company.
- Helping you to identify areas where your company is falling short and making changes to improve the customer experience.
- Giving you a better understanding of your customers so that you can target your marketing and sales efforts more effectively.
There are several scenarios in which it makes sense to use an outside-in approach:
- When you are starting a new business and need to understand what potential customers want and how best to reach them.
- When you are launching a new product or service and need to ensure that it meets customer needs.
- When adding features to an existing product or service, outside-in analysis can help you prioritise which features will have the biggest impact on your customers.
- When making decisions about pricing, outside-in analysis can help you understand what price point is most likely to be acceptable to your target market.
How to Conduct an Outside-In Analysis with Symanto
Historically, outside-in analysis has been conducted through surveys and focus groups. While these methods can still be useful, they are time-consuming and expensive. Additionally, they only give you a snapshot of customer opinion at a single point in time on a relatively small sample size.
Fortunately, nowadays all of the useful data you need to conduct an outside-in analysis is already out there, freely available and with the right tools, it’s quick and easy to process.
Identify useful data sources
Every time a consumer leaves a review, comments in a forum or has a conversation about a product or service on social media, that information is rich in useful data about their needs, wants, opinions and even their psychographic makeup.
Turn data into actionable insights
With Symanto’s text analysis technology, you can use this data to discover the main drivers and pain points affecting customer opinion, find out which aspects most impact customer loyalty, and discover the personality traits of your most valuable customers.
Symanto uses natural language processing (NLP) technology to turn unstructured, textual data into actionable insights. By extracting and processing key information from reviews, social media posts and other unstructured data sources, you can quickly and easily get a clear picture of what your customers are saying, identify areas for improvement, and make decisions that will have a positive impact on your business.
Go beyond sentiment analysis
With Symanto’s cutting-edge technology, insights are more accurate than social media listening tools. Symanto doesn’t just offer sentiment analysis (positive, negative, neutral), which can sometimes lead you to a misguided impression of consumer opinion. It also looks at the emotions and the level of emotionality in the text to discover what really matters to your customers and impacts their loyalty.
Stay on the pulse of customer opinion
Additionally, because of the relative speed at which you can gather and process large amounts of data, you can keep on the pulse of customer opinion and make decisions that are responsive to changes in the market.
Market insights
Because of the nature of the data source, with Symanto you can run a like-for-like analysis on other companies within the market. Find out which of your competitor’s products and services are most talked about, what features are most important to customers and how you can improve your offering to win market share.
Make better business decisions
Ultimately, outside-in analysis with Symanto provides you with the insights you need to make better business decisions. With a clear understanding of customer needs, wants and opinions, you can prioritise your efforts to have the biggest impact on your business.
Get Started With Symanto
If you’re ready to get started with outside-in analysis and begin making better business decisions, our team of experts are on hand to help. From our suite of tools we’ll find the right solution to help you achieve your goals.
We’ve worked with a wide variety of high-profile clients, and have created solutions for a variety of industries and use cases. Get in touch to find out how we can help your business today.
