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Make Customer Intelligence your Biggest Competitive Advantage

Author's avatar By Content Partner 19 Sep, 2018
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Does your business have what it takes to make the customer-centric shift?

To be a market leader, customer-centricity needs to be embedded within every facet of your organization. Modern companies need to truly understand what their customers and prospects expect, so they can deliver a customer experience that meets, and ultimately exceeds these expectations. The highly fluid nature of interactions across online, mobile, in-store, and customer service channels makes understanding customers more challenging than ever, yet vital to effective customer engagement.

With new market entrants disrupting the landscape every day, companies need insights in real-time to capture the constantly evolving needs of their customers, and be able to accurately predict what they'll ask for next. The pace of innovation needs to be accelerated in order to outperform and differentiate yourself from your strongest competitors.

Understanding the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’

Therefore, you need to go beyond transactional data and unlock the attitudes, emotions and intent of your customers. It is no longer sufficient to know that a small subsection of your customers are happy (or unhappy), you need to understand the why, or the context. This context is essential in understanding and identifying specific customer pain-points, addressing them, and feeding back to customers that their opinion directly influences your success roadmap.

Access to ongoing, actionable customer insight is becoming more difficult to access, particularly in light of GDPR. Ad-hoc surveys and focus groups are inefficient, time-consuming, and only reflect a very small percentage of the opinions that matter most. According to OpinionLab, 80 percent of people abandon a survey halfway through. In a world where customers are demanding to be listened to by the companies they interact with, ad hoc surveys do not yield meaningful enough insight.

Customer insight does impact the bottom line

Many companies also fail to make the connection between customer insight and revenue. Powerful customer insight fundamentally impacts customer engagement and loyalty, which in turn contributes to the bottom line. In order to target customers at scale with contextually relevant and personalized content you need to have an in-depth understanding of customer behaviour over time. A deeper understanding of customer behaviour is proven to increase metrics such as response rate, average order value, business revenue, and ROI according to Forrester.

Insight driven businesses

Transforming into a customer-centric organization requires a shift in your brand’s DNA. This means always being willing to listen to customers and adapt accordingly at every stage of the buyer’s journey; from awareness to post-purchase. Your company needs to adopt a core philosophy of ‘good for our customer, means good for our business’, and align corporate culture with this message across every department.

Vision Critical’s annual flagship event is a great opportunity for you to hear directly from industry-leading brands such as Twitter and Etsy on how they continue to deliver a superior customer experience using ongoing customer intelligence. You will walk away empowered to make better, more customer-centric decisions for your organization.

CIN-London

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By Content Partner

This article is contributed by a Smart Insights Content Partner. To find out how you can become a regular contributor and share your knowledge and experience with our readers, please see our Content Partnership options.

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