Customer Insights: Definition, Types and Examples

High-quality insight into customer needs is a crucial part of standing out from competitors and ensuring marketing and customer journeys drive profits for your business. Customer insight uncovers those needs and gives you an intimate understanding of your customers. Through market research and consumer behavior research, businesses can learn what their customers are doing and why they do it.

Also known as consumer insight, customer insight marketing is composed of two types of information: quantitative data and qualitative data.

Before we go into insight examples, how to perform market research, and describe the types of insight data you should compile, it’s critical to understand how these two categories work together to develop a complete picture.

Quantitative Customer Insight

Think about quantitative market research as highly data-driven and numerical. It tells you surface-level information about customers, such as their demographic information, buying patterns, location, customer lifetime value (CLV), website traffic, and behaviors. It describes their performance as consumers, but it doesn’t describe who they are on an emotional level. The information gained from quantitative customer insight is important, but it’s just one part of developing effective customer journeys.

Qualitative Customer Insight

Quantitative insights are about the actions performed; qualitative data helps you understand the why behind the actions. This information helps marketing research yield exceptional results because qualitative insight tells you about the person behind the purchase. It explains the problems they have, the emotions that compel their shopping habits, what they want from brands, and what can cause them to churn. You’ll learn about the target customers’ needs, so you can position your business to meet them and communicate your solution in a way that resonates best with that target audience.

Note: You must combine both market research and data analytics to ensure your sales funnels drive the highest customer lifetime value.

Importance of Customer Insights

It’s important to understand why customer insights matter. Consumer insight strategy helps your business understand customer behaviors and preferences. If you don’t apply a customer-focused strategy to your marketing and sales efforts, you’ll never be able to communicate effectively with the right people.

The quality of the customer journey hinges on the user experience (UX) and its relevance. Customer insights help you create engaging, effective, and meaningful user experiences.

Without insight data, your marketing can feel flat and patronizing, and your sales funnel can trigger churn because user interfaces (UI), calls to action (CTAs), and offers don’t reflect the target audience’s personal habits and expectations. However, when detailed customer insight is prioritized, you can lower customer churn and boost sales long-term. Here’s how:

Consumer Insights Help Your Marketing Campaigns Convert Better

By understanding the emotions and experiences that influence the decisions your customers make, you can create content and campaigns that resonate more deeply. Qualitative consumer insights help you understand the exact pain points customers are trying to solve, as well as the far-reaching consequences that impact their quality of life. With this information, your marketing efforts can speak directly to those feelings and make the customer feel understood.

Customer Insights Make Your Sales Process Convert Better

Detailed consumer insights also help you create customer journeys that make customers more likely to buy now. You’ll know what appeals to them during their customer journey, how to personalize offers and upsell options, and at what price points they’re willing to invest in products or services like yours. This data makes the UX intuitive and frustration-free, which helps reduce churn.

Consumer Insights Help You Provide Top-Tier Customer Service Experiences

Customer insights and marketing research help you maintain stronger customer relationships and improve customer lifetime value. The information you collect about the emotional aspects of your customers can help service representatives communicate more effectively with them.

Help Your Business Understand How Consumers Perceive Your Brand

Customer insights and market research aren’t just about compelling more people to make a purchase. It’s also about having a clear and up-to-date idea of how your brand is performing in the eyes of your customers.

Customer insights can tell you how people feel about your customer service experience or in what areas a competitor is outperforming you. This insight data is especially beneficial to those who rely on local business, because you can ensure your relationship with the surrounding community is as strong as possible.

Your Team Can Better Identify Market Opportunities and Trends

A large part of market research and customer insight is about proactivity. When you learn about your customers from a business and human perspective, you become better at noticing market gaps you can fill and participate in trends that can boost your sales.

7 Types of Customer Insights

With the difference between qualitative and quantitative data defined and the competitive edge they give your business explained, it’s time to discuss the types of customer insights and how to effectively use them in market research.

Customer Feedback

The most accurate and valuable qualitative insight data comes directly from the customer’s mouth. Customer feedback comes in a variety of categories, such as customer reviews, customer surveys, focus groups, and case studies. Monitoring and studying this information is invaluable in your customer experience strategy.

Online Reviews

Perhaps the most common way consumer insight presents itself is through online reviews. From Google Reviews to product reviews on your website and social media, your business must make it easy for customers to share their experiences with your product or brand. It’s especially important to respond quickly and effectively to negative reviews, as this is an opportunity to prevent churn and improve customer loyalty.

Social Media Data

Tracking your social media performance and engagement offers great insight into how your brand-awareness strategies perform. Social media is a powerful way for customers to connect with your brand, for your team to collect market research, and for you to acquire assets like case studies, User-Generated Content (UGC), and social proof.

Website Data

Your website analytics can tell you a lot about demographic and behavioral consumer insights. You can find out where the most traffic is coming from, where high conversion rates happen on your site, and if there are areas in the experience that are causing customers to churn.

Customer Service Data

Your customer service team is core to customer satisfaction. They’re also a great source for customer insight because the customer directly shares feedback about issues with the product or service. Supply your customer service team with surveys and a centralized platform for customer insight data, so you can then use that customer experience insight to make improvements in conversion rates.

Competitor Reviews

Analyzing competitor reviews can reveal market gaps and opportunities that your business can solve. When you conduct market research into how your target audience feels about similar products and services, you can create marketing campaigns and offers that can compel consumers to switch.

Purchase Activity Data

Quite straightforward, insight data into the purchasing habits of customers helps you see which of your products or services are generating the best profits. This data helps you identify products that may not be performing well and whether that poor performance is a product or marketing issue.

5 Consumer Insight Examples

Now that you know where to look for high-quality customer insights and market research data, the following strategies explain how to use that data to develop stronger marketing campaigns and a more resilient brand presence.

Get Customer Feedback Often

Customer insight data is only as good as its relevance. Markets, trends, and consumer needs change, which is why customer insight strategy should be ongoing. Use customer surveys, customer interviews, and focus groups, and start meaningful conversations to maintain up-to-date insight for consumer research.

Use Feedback To Set Goals

Use the consumer insight you collect to define marketing and conversion key performance indicators (KPIs). Setting goals based on your customer information is a great way to set realistic expectations and give your conversion strategies a higher chance of success.

Monitor Social Media Feedback

Another method to keep consumer insight data up-to-date is by monitoring engagement on your social media networks. Followers love to share their thoughts with their networks, so implement social media listening tools for real-time insights.

Encourage Compassion and Empathy

When dealing with frustrated customers, it’s tempting to just solve the customer’s problems as quickly as possible to improve average handling time (AHT) rates. However, creating human connections goes a long way. Aside from training your customer service teams on policies, empower them to show compassion and empathy when dealing with customers at any stage of the customer experience.

Collaborate Across Departments

Your customer experience suffers when your communication and collaboration is disjointed. Introduce processes and tools that promote clear communication across all of your departments. When everyone on your team can access customer insight, they can create consistent and high-quality customer experiences at every level.

4 Customer Insight Tools

With insight examples to guide us, it’s finally time to discuss the tools most commonly associated with acquiring consumer insights, analyzing consumer behavior, and organizing customer demographic, experience, and churn data.

Google Analytics

Holding one of the top spots for web analytics tools, Google Analytics uses machine learning (ML) to help businesses track the performance metrics of their website and use automation for better customer insights and optimized market research.

Social Listening Tools

You can enhance the quality and relevancy of your customer insight by implementing social listening tools like Sprout Social and Podium. By centralizing all customer feedback in one easy-to-manage place, your brand is always one step ahead when developing great customer experiences.

Survey Tools

Available on most website-building platforms and as third-party software, survey tools help you collect insight into your customer experience. One of the best aspects of implementing survey tools is their accessibility. There are plenty of free or affordable survey apps that integrate with your websites and landing pages—making consumer research more efficient.

CRM Systems

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms help businesses organize and analyze data from consumer research and customer communications. Many CRMs even offer built-in customer journey map features that help you translate consumer behavior and customer insight data into a solid plan.

A key component of customer insights is communication. You need a way to track what your target market is saying, understand their pain points, and manage online reviews on customer touchpoints. With Podium’s CRM system, your business can manage all customer communications in one place while our powerful AI Employee effortlessly ensures 24/7, immediate responses to your customers.

Customer Relationship Management Thrives With Podium

Gaining deeper customer insight is necessary to create a business that can leverage what customers want to make more sales.

Schedule a demo today to learn how Podium’s CRM software for small businesses uses advanced AI to manage customer data, reviews, payments, and customer feedback all in one easy-to-use platform.