How to Center your Business Around Consumer Insights

With consumer expectations on the rise, it’s more important than ever to structure your organization around creating amazing and engaging customer experiences. Godin put it best when he said, “You don’t find customers for your products. You find products for your customers.”

Here we discuss some practical approaches to deepening the engagement between you and your brand community, and how having the right technology solutions in place helps you put your customers at the heart of everything you do.

Open the Dialogue to Deepen the Value Exchange

An important place to start is to first open up a dialogue with your customers on how they experience your brand. It’s not enough to simply send the occasional email survey, or only ask consumers to answer an automated service recovery questionnaire at the end of a customer service call.

It’s crucial that customers understand the benefit of voicing their opinions. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways – you can offer discounts, deliver premium content, or loop consumers into new product innovation discussions before they even hit the market. The latter is also a great way to beta test new product features. Whichever direction you take, it’s important that your customers feel as if their time and opinions are valued.

A Customer Insights Platform makes it easy to facilitate a two-way conversation. The end game here is to create more engaged customers and develop a more meaningful value exchange, by giving your customers a role in co-creating their own experience with your brand.

Centralize your data

Most businesses have a range of customer data coming from disparate sources; your browser activity might be telling you about online purchase behaviors, your DMP tells you what ad creative performs the best, and your CRM data shows you who your most engaged buyer personas are. But all this data sits in its respective platform, accessible to only very specific stakeholders, and valuable insight is wasted by looking at only one part of the entire picture at a time.

To achieve a single customer view, it’s crucial to centralize a continuous feed of real-time customer data and insights. By putting the right structures in place, your customer data is easily visible and actionable across the entire organization.

You have now put your business in a position where you can listen, understand and respond to the evolving needs of your customers.

Empower your teams with a continuous loop of customer insight

Many organizations miss the mark when deciding when to ask for customer feedback, with the vast majority of businesses asking for feedback only at the end of the purchase, if at all. As best-practice, customer feedback engagements should be personalized, progressive, and feel organic within the existing experience.

The insights learned should empower your marketing and customer service teams to provide the best possible experience. This will ensure that you’re constantly building rich profiles of real people, who keep coming back to your business.

Because you know as well as your customers do, that there’s nothing more powerful than feeling heard.