Customer Insight refers to the understanding of your customers derived from a strategic analysis of varied qualitative and quantitative data. Time and time again, customer insight has proven that it is very useful and even vital in almost any form of business – including yours. It is best to fully recognize the potential of good customer insight, and how big of an impact it can have on your system of marketing.

Surprisingly since the creation of business and strategic marketing, there is no concise definition of a good customer insight. Hence, we will break this into four technical areas to define a workable and fool-proof customer insight that will navigate your business through greater heights of success:

Consumer Research

Consumer research has played a crucial role in the maturity of marketing for the past 50 years. Although there is great power in being able to spot patterns in a customer’s actions or to predict their response, all of these will be void if there is no understanding of the customer’s perception of their behaviour. In short, it is not just enough to know how customers behave, you have to go beyond that and question why they are behaving as such. This is one of the biggest secret to uncovering the fullest potential of consumer research, and yet a lot of companies neglect the customer’s perception of their behaviour as well as how they may actually be making choices. Effective marketing communication requires both accurate targeting and designing which engages a customer emotionally and accessibly.

Data Quality

Without knowledge of how to fully manage the data gathered, the process of gathering it will not be useful. Customer data management is a vital requirement to the whole process of customer insight. All the quality of behavioural analysis, predictive analysis and database marketing/targeting are dependent on the quality of data gathered. Therefore, the existence alone of the data will be unproductive if you get bad data. From targeted samples to data capture, the quality of data is the pure foundation of what is within customer insight.

Database Marketing

This is one of the underdog skills of customer insight; database marketing is viewed as some sort of direct marketing because of its history of enriching direct mails and catalogue of companies. Database marketing brings the scientific method to bear on customer insight work. Because in the culture of business, test and learn became a given phenomenon wherein analysis and research when converged reveals an accurate understanding of customers. Without a robust way of testing hypothesis, everything aforementioned will remain theoretical.

Analytics Team

It is important to know that a team of proficient employees are required to tackle this sort of strategic marketing. This kind of work requires IT skills, SQL programming and statistical skills. The role of data analytics team is essential to understanding how your customers are behaving and how they might behave in the future. Finding out the demographic and behavioural profiling is very important to increase customer understanding.

Since today’s consumers have changed dramatically in how they choose to work with the companies and brands they patronize, constantly updated customer insight is vital. Learning to utilize customer insight to its full potential is likely to greatly benefit your business.