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“Gathering intelligence” may sound deeply fascinating; like in the movies, but various marketers specialize in collecting customer intelligence. You may be thinking ‘why?’. Because at the moment it is the buyers market and the customer has become more empowered now more than ever. According to a recent study by a leading technology consultancy firm, out of the total number of individuals that have read reviews online, almost 90% of them are persuaded by the positive reviews, whereas, almost 86% said that the negative reviews did sway their decisions.
According to retail data analytics experts, consumers today are more likely to review or study the actual value of a particular product rather than relying on the words of the company. Therefore, the mantra to success in this aspect is by being proactive with your customer experience. Nowadays a business should know ample information about the customer so that they could forecast and address the issues even before they arise. The best way to get this done is by customer intelligence.
In this blog, we will discuss what is customer intelligence and how it can help businesses with retail analytics solutions.
What Is Customer Intelligence?
To understand customer intelligence let us understand business intelligence or business analytics in retail first. BI or business intelligence encompasses the applications, technologies, and practices involved in the collation and evaluation of business data or information. BI is a method of supporting better decision-making in business.
In many ways, customer intelligence is just like business intelligence, it is just that customer intelligence is for better decision-making related to marketing. In essence, it is the collation and interpretation or analysis of customer data or information through different quantitative methods such as analytics and data, as well as qualitative techniques such as focus groups and customer surveys.
According to retail data analytics experts, when customer intelligence is combined with CRM or Customer Relationship Management, it helps businesses in building better customer relationship strategies that could provide enhanced customer service which could eventually lead to improved customer retention.
How To Collect Customer Intelligence?
Online quizzes and close-ended surveys are the best ways to collect customer feedback and intelligence. When the quiz or the survey is closed-ended, this suggests that the respondent cannot provide any unique answers and they would need to select from the available options.
Finding success with effective customer intelligence
To ensure effective utilization of customer intelligence, businesses need to implement the following 3 main building blocks:
1. Businesses need to discover a method of efficiently collecting huge volumes of customer information from across several channels. Such as the activity of the customer on the website and customer purchasing patterns.
2. The business would require the technology infrastructure to assess the collated data to generate different actionable insights. Put simply, businesses should be capable of segregating the customer data into different groups depending on the different stages in their life cycle.
3. Businesses are required to optimize their marketing actions in the future, depending on the analysis of the data from different channels of communication.
How Can Customer Intelligence Help Businesses?
When it comes to effective marketing and sales, the ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘what’, hold no prominence without the specific ‘why’. The questions that need to be asked are, “Why are your customers behaving in a particular way?” “Why are your customers happy?” or “What are they not happy about?” and “Why did they stop talking shop with your company?”
According to retail market research companies, effective customer intelligence will empower your startup business to make strategically smart decisions depending on the information you have gathered about the customers and their experience while interacting or associating with your business.
In essence, customer intelligence helps boost the loyalty of customers, improves sales efficacy, and enables you to build a relatable brand image in front of the customers. When a customer feels happy with your business and has a wonderful customer experience, they engage with your brand and you become their friend.
Customer intelligence tools are a great platform for retail market research companies to analyze customer behavior and to understand their shopping patterns. This helps them offer effective retail analytics solutions to businesses to boost their sales conversions.
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