What is customer intelligence, and how can you use it to grow your business?

Learn what Customer Intelligence (CI) is, how you can gather it, and what benefits it can have for your company.

What is CI?

Customer Intelligence is the process of collecting, analysing, and leveraging customer data. Leveraging CI will enable you to craft a better customer experience for your clients. In fact, using the insights derived from customer intelligence and letting it drive your business strategies is one of the most effective ways to grow your business!

The concept of customer intelligence isn’t complex – it simply means listening to what your customers say. Collecting and analysing that data will help you understand how your customers interact with your brand – and we live in a digitally transformed world where there is a wealth of data to collect.

Smartphones and the Internet power huge chunks of our behaviour. This gives businesses who use CI access to a potential treasure trove of information about customers’ needs, motivations, preferences, and likes and dislikes. Tapping into this customer data is the best way to gather the insights and knowledge necessary to create personalised customer experiences.

How Customer Intelligence can benefit your business

Improve your customers’ CX

With unified customer intelligence you can immediately improve the interactive experience your customers have with your business by employing the magic of machine learning. By allowing you to identify the psychographic and behavioural profiles of customers, agents can proactively interact with customers who are likely to churn.

On the other end of the scale, it allows agents to engage with potentially high value clients and give them special treatment. Profiling customers helps your agents to engage them more effectively, thereby improving customer experience and boosting sales.

Build better connections

By employing insights derived from customer intelligence, you are building better connections with your customers for the future. They may not buy today, but because they’ve had a positive customer experience, they are more likely to become loyal customers who will give you positive reviews generating more future business.

Create greater sales efficiency and reduce costs

Spending time on sales leads is important – but so is knowing which are qualified leads and not wasting time on unqualified ones. Customer intelligence helps you determine which leads will most likely convert into buying customers.

Focusing on qualified leads will generate more sales, which will in turn motivate your sales team by feeling that they’re achieving positive results. It will also mean that your costs are reduced because you’re wasting less money on unqualified leads.

Utilising CI gives your business a competitive edge

Building a better connection with your customers and improving their CX allows you streamline and improve your interaction with customers. This will have a positive impact on your customer retention and loyalty metrics.

According to Forbes, 58% of businesses saw a significant rise in customer loyalty after they started implementing CI strategies.

Businesses that employ customer strategies that implement insights from customer intelligence gain a significant advantage over their competitors.

CI helps you develop personalised and targeted marketing

The insights from customer intelligence allows you to target and connect with your customers as individuals. You can therefore personalise your messaging. This strengthens your connection with your customers by offering them services, promotions and products that are pleasing to them.

CI helps you sustain profitability

Customer intelligence makes it possible for you to evolve long-term business and customer service strategies that are sustainable, viable and profitable. CI offers you insights through analytics that deal with real numbers.

Listening to and acting on your customers telling you what, where, when, how, how often and how much, you’ll be better equipped to make strategic decisions to help your business grow dynamically into the future.

CI builds better customer service teams in customer-centric businesses

The insights derived from CI enables you to better train and empower your CS team to do a better job. Ensure that the CI data and insights are integrated into the software tools your customer service agents use, as well as into the rest of your customer experience and marketing stack.

This will result in happier and more confident agents, and happier and less frustrated customers. As you make customer service decisions based on trustworthy data and motivate and equip your agents accordingly, your CS team and your business will be fully in tune with your customers – to the mutual benefit of both.

How to get started? Consolidate your customer data

Customers interact with brands through countless touchpoints – apps, websites, chatbots, virtual assistants, live chat, phone calls, email, etc. Of course, this means that customer data is often stored in many different places.

Your first step must be to unify all your customer data into meaningful reports that allow you to spot trends, address weaknesses, and get deeper insights into your customers.

When you outsource your customer support to Digital Customer Care, in-depth customer reports, as well as expert advice and guidance, are all part of the package! Find out more.