A clear and deep understanding of your audience is not a nice to have anymore, it’s an absolute must in an online connected world. To achieve this you need a reliable customer insights platform in your business arsenal.
Consequently, more and more companies are interested in comprehending their customers at a more detailed and granular level to optimise their offers.
As they are expected to create captivating experiences not just sell some products. And build relationships with their audience.
This customer-centricity trend has been heavily supported by the advent of social media and technological developments.
Read on to find out more about customer insights platforms, how they work, and how they can help you polish and streamline your business and marketing strategies.
What Are Customer Insights?
Customer insights are interpretations and trends extracted from data. And are a tool that brands use to learn how their customers behave, feel, think and act in relation to their products and services.
What Are Customer Insights Platforms?
Customer insights platforms (CIP) are complex tools that enable brands to identify secrets concealed within consumer data.
They collect, organise and analyse consumer data and generate useful visualisations to help businesses better understand their customers and inform their decision-making.
In a word, insights platforms are powerhouses of data. They gather data from a multitude of sources like social media posts, purchases, online interactions, customer care complaints, etc.
Then process this data to extract valuable insights and present a complete overview of customers’ behaviour.
Practically, with these platforms, you dig into the details far beyond superficial data to uncover the true emotions, sentiments and motivations that drive buying decisions.
Your business may know not just what products were bought, but also, when, how and why the acquisition took place.
Main Features and Elements of a Reliable Customer Insights Platform
Powerful insights platforms propose several features like:
Data collection and data integration
Such platforms amass data from a myriad of sources like website traffic, social media conversations, online acquisitions, customer service emails and chats, etc. And they need to smoothly integrate with a large variety of other platforms to accomplish their mission.
Data analytics and customer segmentation
Customer insights platforms have capabilities of processing huge amounts of data and detecting preferences, behaviours and trends.
Then they filter and categorise clients into small groups with similar characteristics and demeanours. For example, animal lovers and nature and hiking enthusiasts are such segments.
Predictive Analytics
Based on existing data and with the help of sophisticated AI algorithms, CIPs are able to forecast the customers’ behaviour. And provide recommendations to keep pace.
Reporting and Visualisation Capabilities
Customer insight and action platforms are equipped with features that help understand and interpret data more easily. Like visually appealing dashboards, charts, and graphs looking to enable the user to quickly grasp the situation.
What types of data collect consumer insight platforms?
They match and fit together text data from multiple sources. Such types of data comprise demographic data, behavioural data, surveys, reviews, feedback, interaction data, social media interaction, etc.
Are consumer insights platforms different from traditional analytics platforms?
Yes, they are significantly different. Traditional analytics tools present a basic picture while customer insights platforms go more in-depth and show a more detailed overview.
The traditional analytics tell what’s happening, but the CIPs provide the reasons why is that happening.
It’s like comparing a basic digital photo camera with a professional-level one.
Benefits of Customer Insights Platforms
Today the path to business success passes through a customer insights platform, among others. Check some of their major benefits:
Advanced audience understanding
CIPs offer your brand the possibility to “pick the brains” of your customers and find out their preferences, their thoughts, and how and why they act.
While analysing the vast amounts of data available you get a comprehensive understanding of your ideal customers beyond mere demographics.
You become aware of what they like, and dislike, what are their needs and pain points, what makes them churn and what makes them move.
Boost customer loyalty
By paying close attention to your customers’ motivations, preferences and pain points, you can better serve your existing customer base and work quickly to resolve issues before they irreversibly affect customer loyalty.
Build stronger relationships by understanding your customers’ needs and values. Personalise your interactions to make them more relevant to your customers and show that you care.
By comparing competitor performance you can also anticipate and respond quickly to changes in your industry to prevent customer churn.
Supercharge your marketing efforts
Create accurate buyer personas based on data that indicates exactly their interests, preferences and needs. And as a consequence, personalised marketing strategies that resonate better.
With advanced customer intelligence, you can understand different segments of your audience and refine your marketing messaging to appeal directly to each of them.
Conceive tailored experiences to show your customers you really care about them and their needs. Like sending a tailored message on a client’s birthday. That’s the power of personalisation.
Armed with solid insights delivered by your customer insight and action platform, your brand is enabled to target the right client, with the right message and at the suited time.
This tactic is very powerful and will boost engagement and uplevel conversions. Plus, minimise the costs and maximise the efficiency of your campaigns.
Predict consumer behaviour
Predictive analytics based on their embedded AI algorithms examines past customer behaviour, identifies patterns and is able to make predictions for the future.
Thus, you will have a pretty good idea of what will happen next and can prepare accordingly, if it’s a spike in sales or if they are on a descendant path.
Spot early trends and patterns for a data-backed decision process
CIPs have capabilities that process and analyse large amounts of data and discover trends and patterns that otherwise would have been skipped.
The main benefit of these insights is that your business’s decision process improves significantly and has a higher favourable impact.
Anticipating and preventing churn
Consumer insights platforms have the capacity to identify churn signs early.
And offer your business the possibility of acting proactively and intervening in due time. By proposing tailored solutions to keep clients happy.
Improve products and drive innovation
Innovation is based on advanced knowledge. It’s about what are your clients’ exact needs and pain points.
CIPs are the tools capable of helping you polish your products and services and tailor them to the customers’ desires. Knowing what you have to do saves effort, time, and resources and avoids potential mistakes.
Gain a competitive edge
Get a clear understanding of your unique value within the market. Have a detailed grasp of the competition, and identify the weaknesses of your main competitors to target their churning customers.
Customer insights platforms are transformative catalysts, as they allow you to know better your brand’s most precious asset – your customer database.
Fully Leverage Customer Data with Symanto AI
Analyse rich, consumer-generated data
Who is better placed to tell you how your customers feel about your brand, your products and services than the customers themselves?
The richest and most valuable data generated by your customers comes in the form of reviews and customer feedback in social media comments.
Symanto technology is primed to mine and analyses written text from review sites, social media posts and comments, chatbot transcripts, customer emails and much more.
Greater data accuracy
Inaccurate data will at best skew your insights and at worst render them completely useless.
Using the most advanced natural language processing (NLP) technology, our text analysis AI can accurately analyse even short excerpts of text such as a Tweet. Plus, it can also understand complex phraseology.
Unique psychographic insights
Understand your customers like never before.
Our psychographic technology can distinguish between those talking positively about your products online and loyal customers with an emotional connection to your brand.
This is an important distinction when it comes to, for example, measuring a campaign‘s impact.
While more basic customer insights platforms will tell you that your latest campaign had a high level of positive engagement, our AI will tell you how your campaign resonated with your most loyal customers.
Like-for-like competitor analysis
Symanto makes it easy to mine, consolidate and analyse publicly available data from social media and review sites.
Within minutes, you can run a comprehensive competitor analysis using like-for-like data to benchmark your performance and identify your company’s unique value.
Get Started with Symanto
Discover more about our advanced and agile customer insights AI-powered platform. Our technology has vast applications across your business from marketing to HR. You can even integrate Symanto AI into your existing apps to amplify their capabilities.
Get in touch or book your free personalised demonstration to find out more.
Customer Data Sources
Insights platforms collect data from a large variety of sources. The main are:
- Demographic data – personal details like age, gender, profession, geographic location, etc. This is the basic data that defines who’s your ideal client.
- Website traffic and app usage data – page views, clicks, time spent on the site or the app, navigation patterns. It indicates the audience’s interests.
- Social media interactions – comments, mentions, likes, and shares on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok. They reveal the engagement and sentiment related to your business.
- Transaction history – acquisitions record and spending habits. Uncover the audience’s preferences and her purchasing behaviour.
- Customer care tickets – interactions with customer support via chat, email or phone. They highlight pain points, problems, weaknesses and client satisfaction.
- Surveys and feedback – clients’ straightforward feedback provided via reviews, ratings and surveys. They deliver valuable insights into customers’ needs, their recommendations, and desires.
A word of warning. Not all data is equally useful.
You want to make sure that the customer insights platform you use doesn’t only look at vanity metrics, such as social media engagement. Thus, choose a platform that can go deeper and tell you more about the motivations of the customers and the reasoning behind their engagement.
Converting Raw Data into Valuable Insights
Extracting actionable insights from data implies high-level technology, know-how and a mix of advanced tactics. The process includes the following stages:
- Data cleaning
- Data collected from multiple sources needs to be cleaned to retain just the relevant one.
- It implies removing errors, duplicates, in a word the noise, to ensure the accuracy of the analysis.
- Data processing via AI and machine learning algorithms
- Algorithms have impressive capabilities for data processing, they learn and adapt.
- They reveal trends and not-so-obvious correlations present in the database.
- Behavioural analysis and pattern identification
- Comprehending the “why” behind customers’ actions.
- Such analysis aims to study the behaviour patterns and uncover routines, preferences, and what makes the clients act or churn.
- Customer segmentation
- Categorise the client database into smaller groups that have the same characteristics and interests.
- Particularly useful in marketing to craft personalised strategies and campaigns.
- Forecast the future
- Predictive modelling’s purpose is to preview what’s next for your business.
- Considering past patterns the algorithm is able to predict future behaviour, allowing your brand to act proactively.
One of the most important benefits of such insights is access to the whole picture ahead of time. And the possibility of profiting from each opportunity that presents itself.
How to Select the Best Customer Insights Platform for Your Brand
Picking the right customer insights platform will have a large influence on your business’s future success. That’s why is important to make the best possible choice.
To achieve that consider the following:
Clearly define your business goals and needs in terms of consumer insights.
What exactly do you need to achieve with a consumer insights platform? Make a list of the features and capabilities you require, but pay attention to align them with your business goals.
Ensure a smooth integration with your existing technology stack
Your new platform should cooperate with your other tech applications without causing trouble. Check the integration with CRM systems, relevant software for your business, marketing automation platforms, etc.
Look for a user-friendly interface
Your new customer insights platform must display an intuitive interface, in order to facilitate its adoption and shorten the learning curve.
Search for a scalable and flexible solution
Ensure your insights solution is capable of managing higher data volumes without affecting the quality of its output. And is flexible enough to sustain your business evolution.
Pay attention to the price
Cost is one of the main factors to consider, not just the initial investments, but also the costs of implementation and maintenance. Assess the value that a CIP will bring to your business.
Customer support
No matter what solution you choose, check the level of their support. Technology, no matter how powerful most often needs support. Select a platform that is known to have responsive support and learning resources.
Customer Insights Platforms Success Stories
Here are some examples that show how your business might profit from an effective insights solution:
Medical Devices Provider via Symanto
This is a case study of Symanto’s when using a sophisticated consumer data analysis – deep analysis of the end-to-end journey – valuable opportunities for growth were discovered. (opportunities that otherwise would have passed unnoticed).
For a due diligence process, Symanto was hired to analyse in detail how consumers/patients were experiencing their journey. Including the retail store franchise network that comprised over 150 shops.
To be able to detect the specific sentiment of a particular topic and the behavioural aspects of the customer journey the team used the store reviews.
Surprising insights were identified and revealed:
- Customer satisfaction was negatively affected by the fact that clients did not ask for specialised advice before acquiring their medical devices.
- A competitor experienced better results and happier customers because they involved healthcare practitioners early in the customer journey.
- The network of franchise stores provided high-quality service and had quality staff. This insight was the foundation for the acquisition decision made by the private equity company.
Amazon
The personalised recommendations issued by their engine are based on a powerful customer insights platform.
Amazon via their customer accounts track their shopping behaviour, browsing history and past acquisitions. This data is the fundament of Amazon’s recommendation engine – it proposes offers personalised by clients’ own preferences.
This personalised journey is a strength of Amazon, as it builds customer loyalty and simultaneously increases the volume of sales per client.
Sephora
Unique customer experiences are built based on the insights delivered by data. Sephora insights’s platform empowered them to craft a tailored beauty journey for their customers.
As it deeply analyses the beauty profiles, previous purchases and consumer preferences.
And delivers personalised beauty product recommendations that enchant their audience and enhance their engagement.
Take Away
As outlined above CIP is one of the forces behind a business’s success. It enables the company to create tailored experiences, reinforce audience loyalty and strengthen their market share.
A customer insights platform is more than an ordinary tool. It’s a strategic asset aiming to drive your brand to new levels of development. And strive in a world where customer-centric excellence becomes the norm.
