As an customer-centric employee, you may have heard the buzzword “insights” thrown around quite a bit. But what exactly are insights, and why are they important? In short, insights are a deep understanding of your customers’ needs, wants, and behaviors that can inform business decisions and strategies. In this article, we’ll explore how you can develop new customer insights and why it matters.
Data, Analytics & Insights
Data, analytics, and insights are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Data refers to raw information, while analytics is the process of analyzing data to find patterns and draw conclusions. Insights, on the other hand, are the actionable and valuable discoveries that come from analyzing data and drawing conclusions. Insights are the key to understanding your customers’ needs and motivations, which is essential for creating effective sales campaigns and building successful sales relationships.
So where do insights come from? Insights come from a combination of sources, including industry trends, consumer behavior, and competitive analysis. The process of developing insights requires a deep understanding of your target audience and a willingness to observe, research, and analyze data. When Coach Margrete Chadwick works with clients who want to study customer purchasing drivers, they explore what it takes to help customers emotionally connect to products and services. This could involve digging into what makes the customer feel safe, comfortable, authentic, powerful, and even accomplished by making a decision to purchase from you, and your company. Seeking deep understanding beyond the surface of what customers initially share is a skill that can be mastered.
Tips for developing new customer insights:
Research Your Customer
To develop new insights, you need to obsess about your customer – going deeper and farther than you have before. Start by exploring the industry and understanding their competitors, industry trends, regulations, and industry inflection points. Dig into their financial and annual reports – they can give you a better understanding of your company’s priorities and direction. Next, analyze your customers’ communications. Using tools like artificial intelligence or search tool analytics to analyze their social media posts, press releases, and marketing collateral can help you uncover consistent themes, topics, and pain points. This can help you understand what your customers are truly trying to communicate, and what they actually care about.
Get Close To The Consumer
To truly understand your customers, you need to get out in the field and observe how they act and behave in front of their customers. This could mean visiting their physical locations or attending industry events. Use common design thinking tools to get a deeper understanding of their customers. Coach Margrete also suggests mastering the art of asking powerful, open-ended questions. When done well and paired with reflective listening, this can create a level of trust by helping the customer to feel validated about their desires and needs to be met by purchasing from you and your company.
Co-create Solutions With Customers
To develop new insights, you need to ask your customers new questions that challenge their thinking. Offer to co-create new solutions to sticky problems. Engage in focused brain-storming or problem-solving sessions or utilize new digital co-creation tools to collaborate with your customers in real-time. This can help you build stronger relationships with your customers and uncover new ideas and solutions.
Conclusion
By obsessing about your customers, getting close to them, and co-creating solutions with them, you can gain a deeper understanding of their needs and behaviors. This, in turn, can help you create more effective marketing campaigns and build a stronger business. Developing new insights can help solve problems for your customers, create new business for you, and strengthen their loyalty to you in the process.
If you would like to explore how a coach can help you build customer insight skills, call Coach Margrete Chadwick or any of our TaskHuman coaches to book a session.