How To Activate the Customer Insights Process Successfully

Companies that invest in technologies to improve their alignment with customer insights—and use those insights to guide strategic decisions—enjoy measurable benefits and positive ROI, according to Forrester’s 2020 report, “Build A Maturity-Based Business Case For Insights-Driven Investments.” However, a successful customer insights process doesn’t happen overnight. To justify the necessary investments and maximize the benefits as an insights-driven business (IDB), company leaders should proceed slowly and methodically to build a strategy that extends beyond data collection and centers customer insights. Let’s learn how. 

Customer Insights Process

The customer insights process follows a universal principle in biological life: maturity precedes transformation. Shaping a company into an IDB is not the automatic result of applying a prescribed quantity of tools and technology. The tools certainly help, but they’re merely a means to an end. Customer insights can highlight what’s important about different datasets and what that means for customer experience.

Company leaders must first envision for themselves what needs to shift in order to renovate their brand into an insights-driven business. They can then start building maturity by ensuring every resource—including people, strategy, and data—uses customer insights to frame goals and objectives. Once these assets internalize the customer insights concept as the primary indicator of success, it’s finally time to choose the best solution for an IDB transformation. Let’s take it step by step. 

Develop Your Team

To begin, business leaders must organize a strong, competent team who will own the customer-insights process from conception to enterprise-wide activation. Team members should be able to ask strategic questions around project objectives such as:
 

• What are our top-line and bottom-line goals?
• How long will it take to implement the customer-insight process?
• Who are the key people necessary for the project’s success?
• How much do we need to invest to enable the customer-insights process?

As you develop your team, choose people who have the ability to ask strategic questions and can synthesize the team’s vision in reality. 

Define a Target Audience

The next step is to define a specific group of customers as the focus of the insights process. It’s no secret that the more precise an audience segment, the deeper the potential insights. Think of it as using a baited hook in a well-stocked lake to catch fish instead of just tossing breadcrumbs into the ocean. Below are some examples of specific audience segments:

• People who have visited the company website in the past three days
• Visitors with two or more purchases in the past six months
• High lifetime-value customers 
• Customers likely to churn 

As the customer insights process becomes more streamlined and efficient,  you can include more audience segments for broader insights.

Determine the Data

After the target audience has been identified, it’s time to think about the data that will go into the customer insights process. For example, if the customer insights (CI) team is trying to resolve an issue like high churn rate, they can focus on relevant data—like purchase history, customer service transactions, and support tickets—to determine what’s causing customer drop-out. The more related data available for analysis, the more actionable the insights will be. 

The right data can also help teams create an accurate customer journey map to understand customers’ unique needs according to their journey stages. For example, teams can analyze behavioral patterns to learn what messaging and actions best suit a new lead compared to a loyal converted customer. 

Teams can also prepare on-site and post-transaction surveys to gather direct feedback from target customers. Surveys and feedback forms elicit customers’ firsthand knowledge and experience of their journey. This clarifies customer concerns, expectations, and any pain points teams can correlate with indirect feedback for substantial insights. 

Derive and Apply Insights

Once all the necessary data is in place, teams can start using customer insights tools to derive and apply insights. The right customer insights platform enables teams to produce insights and also helps leverage them to improve marketing and drive conversion. 

Choose a customer insight tool capable of the following:

• Collecting a wide variety of customer data
• Centralizing and unifying customer profiles
• Tracking customer journeys across channels and touchpoints
• Deep data analysis to derive insights
• Activating customer insights

Having the right customer insights tool can fast-track efforts of the brand and CI team to activate the customer insights process successfully. A centralized platform also creates a single source of truth for customer data, effectively synchronizing insights-driven initiatives across departments to transform business outcomes. 

In summary, brands can build their own customer insights process by putting together a team that takes ownership of the project from conception to implementation. The CI team should define a target audience and prepare the necessary data for analysis, depending on the company’s specific goals for implementing a customer insights process. CI teams can then obtain insights from the logical extension of data trends to meet specific goals like reducing churn, fine-tuning targeting, or improving conversion. The right platform can help teams successfully activate their customer insights process and complete an insights-driven business transformation.

Activate Customer Insights With Treasure Data

Treasure Data’s enterprise-grade customer insights platform is trusted by Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies across industries around the world. See what you can do with Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud:

• Collect and centralize customer data from all sources
• Unify customer profiles using online + offline data
• Analyze customer journeys
• Derive actionable customer insights using Machine Learning techniques
• Personalize customer experience at all customer journey stages
• And more

Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud is an integrated suite of cloud-based customer data platform solutions that helps companies improve campaign performance, achieve operational efficiency, and create connected customer experiences. 

To learn more about how you can activate your customer insights process with Treasure Data, consult an expert today. Want to learn more? Request a demo, call 1.866.899.5386, or contact us for more information.