7 types of customer insights (and how to collect them)
Collecting business data goes beyond key performance indicators (KPIs). Customer insights are equally important to success.
Production KPIs are directly in your control. If something is awry with output efficiency or your overall workflow, you can implement changes to fix it. But you can’t always predict whether customers will buy and enjoy your products. It takes time and market research to truly know how your audience feels in order to act on it.
Digging deep into customer insights provides a holistic view of your company to personalize each person’s journey and cultivate deeper loyalty.
What are customer insights?
Customer insights, a key type of eCommerce analytic, reveal your target audience’s behaviors, thoughts, and perceptions of your brand. Regardless of how simple or detailed your insights are, their utility is the same: to better understand your target audience and tailor business strategy accordingly.
Some consumer insights are binary and require simple either/or answers, such as asking a consumer if they’d recommend your brand to a friend. Others gauge consumer sentiments using a sliding scale, asking people to rate their experience from 1–10. Ask for short-form written or text-based responses to gather open-ended feedback.
The key is balance. Customer insight processes should be thorough enough to guide decision-making yet simple enough to encourage responses. For instance, few consumers will want to complete a time-intensive focus group, but more people will answer a 2–3 question survey about their experience.
The importance of customer insight
Gathering consumer insight takes the guesswork out of marketing, inventory management, and product research and development. Here’s what else it helps you achieve:
Mitigate risks
By gathering customer insights, you can align products with consumer preferences. You’ll know what offerings they enjoy and which they don’t, which helps avoid missteps and minimize financial risk. Everything you stock will be more likely to sell.
Inform decision-making
Effective insights inform nearly every decision you make — from what inventory you order to which platforms you market on. Once you know where your ideal audience is most active and how they prefer to interact with your brand, you’ll feel confident making the right decisions.
Increase engagement
Customer insights set the stage for better engagement across the board. They offer people the opportunity to interact with your brand, and they give you the insights you need to invest in the most effective platforms for your audience.
For example, if you take a deep dive into consumer social media preferences, you might find that about two-thirds of your target audience prefer Instagram to any other social media platform. In response, you could ramp up spending on Instagram and scale back marketing efforts on less popular media, increasing engagement and return on ad spend (ROAS).
7 types of consumer insights to analyze
The best way to learn what people want is to speak to them directly. But there’s more to the customer experience than surveys. Here are some examples of customer insights and how each type works.
1. Online reviews
Online reviews, negative and positive, reveal what people think about your brand, products, and customer service. While it may be tempting to focus on the positive reviews, pay attention to the negative feedback, too.
A small percentage of customers leave negative reviews, but most are based on legitimate grievances. It’s best to analyze this feedback objectively and identify what your business can do better. To show customers you’re attentive to their needs, respond to feedback and offer to remedy the situation.
2. Competitor reviews
Competitor reviews reveal patterns in purchasing decisions and customer needs. If a competitor receives many of the same complaints you do, look at this trend as an opportunity to fix your problem, set yourself apart, and encourage customers to flock to you.
For instance, if your business and several of its peers are receiving complaints about product pricing, run a flash sale to edge out the competition and gain new customers.
3. Customer feedback
Solicit feedback from customers after they complete transactions with your business. You can ask more detailed questions than the typical review site, allowing you to dig deep into consumer preferences and needs.
Just be careful not to push too hard. Completing surveys and submitting feedback needs to be quick and easy to be effective. Stick to a few yes-or-no questions and give them a chance to provide long-form responses at the end if they have time.
4. Purchase history
Purchase history data provides a wealth of valuable information about the types of products people like.
At the individual level, you can use this data to deliver personalized product recommendations and start cross-selling. And when you compile purchase history across an entire audience segment, you see which products trend upward and which are waning in popularity. Use this data to restructure your inventory management strategy and adjust stock levels to avoid shortages or overstocking.
5. Social media engagement
Social media is an excellent place to gather feedback from consumers and gauge their sentiments about your brand. You can learn more about product use cases, digest customer praise, and collect complaint data by looking at comments and tagged posts. You’ll also get a sense of what’s trending among your target audience and what kind of language they use to describe your offerings.
Don’t just rely on social media to passively gather feedback. Turn it into a powerful engagement tool by posting frequently, hosting surveys, and running analytics reports.
6. Website data
Your website is a one-stop shop for all manner of useful customer insights. You can find:
- Demographic data like age, gender, and location
- Behavioral data like purchasing habits, keyword preferences, and conversion pathways
- Time on site, which is how long someone spends on your page
- Content performance, which tells you what content drives conversions
Google Analytics (GA) is one of the best tools for gathering website data. It lets you run reports on KPIs and total web traffic, access important information about your audience’s behavior, and pinpoint which channels yield a strong return on investment.
7. Customer service data
Customer service data provides a comprehensive look at how well you accommodate people’s needs before, during, and after their purchases. Focus on variables like first-call resolution rates and common complaints — these are in your control to fix.
While you can’t prevent all customer service issues, you can respond to these sources of friction. Build a cohesive support strategy that includes well-trained agents and self-service tools. And if there’s a recurring problem, be proactive about fixing it before your brand reputation suffers.
3 ways to use customer insights
After learning how customers feel, it’s time to apply what you’ve learned. Here’s how to combine customer insights and analytics processes for better decision-making.
1. Drive innovation
In an ultra-competitive business environment, sitting still is costly. You have to continuously improve your business, product offerings, and advertising strategy to stay a step ahead of other companies vying for your market share. Customer insights help you determine where to focus your time and resources and get more bang for your buck.
If customer insights reveal that a particular product is trending in popularity and a once hot-ticket item isn’t selling, you can restructure your reordering strategy accordingly. The goal of these adjustments is to avoid shortages while minimizing the risk of overstocking.
2. Improve customer engagement
Customer insights show where your target audience is most active and attentive — and how to meet them there.
A good way to do this is by prioritizing the social media channels and content formats that align with their preferences and interests. If you find they love reading blog posts or detailed product descriptions, include those elements in your strategy instead of short-form content. If they spend all their time on TikTok, invest in video creation.
3. Customize and refine marketing strategies
Once you know what your audience likes and dislikes, you can create marketing content that speaks to their unique interests, needs, and pain points. The messaging should feel like you created it just for them. This personalizes your content to your target audience and tells them exactly why they should follow your brand.
Leverage customer insights for better inventory management
Gathering customer insights is only the first step to a successful business. Once you know what your audience wants, incorporate it into your supply chain strategy and optimize inventory management across all locations. To do that, you need an all-in-one inventory management platform like Fishbowl.
With Fishbowl, you can unlock the power of data-driven inventory management and gain real-time insights to guide decision-making. The platform also integrates with Shopify, creating a cohesive experience that combines inventory data with customer insights. Book a demo today to learn more.