One of the most valuable resources that you gather in your marketing efforts is customer insight. Through things like in-market testing, customer feedback questionnaires and support tickets, reviews, behavioural data, and similar research, you have the ability to act on consumer insights to make your products and services better; more attractive and appealing, more cost-effective, and so on.
Not every business really takes full advantage of the customer insights that their marketing efforts generate. Below are some tips on how to really get the most out of these resources.
Tip 1: Make the Customer Journey Shorter and/or More Seamless
Here’s a reality booster — modern consumers are impatient and don’t like anything to take long, and are increasingly unwilling to wait for good results. In every retail experience, customers want things to happen quickly, easily and seamlessly. A few pushes of buttons is about all they are willing to accept online, and in person they want to pick up, bag, swipe and go.
Using customer insights and feedback, you can find where along your business chain things are slowing down or getting difficult. It could be a problem on your online platform, or that there are too many forms to fill in, or perhaps that there are too many options to look through. You can take action to streamline the process and make your customer’s experience painless and enjoyable.
Tip 2: Boost Function of Your Products or Scope of Your Services
Quite a common feature of customer reviews is where people voice their wishes for additional features or functions on whatever product or service you’re selling. If you have a physical product, you can enhance the product and schedule a new release, or even recall product if it’s a serious problem
For online and digital products and services, you can make changes and update your customer’s experience without them having to re-purchase. That’s a nice feeling and the customer even feels empowered and respected to have contributed in this way. Equally, you can remove products that get less positive feedback, diverting resources to enhancing popular lines.
Tip 3: Work on Customer Service Quality
Your customer insights may reveal holes in your customer service process, or weaknesses in your customer service team members. Using this feedback, you can implement training to boost the team’s performance, and/or find ways to make the process easier such as opening more phone lines for customer support, having a dedicated email ticketing system to get to people’s email complaints faster, and so on.
Tip 4: Develop Brand-New Products and Services
Customer insights don’t just reveal how you can improve on your existing product line, but also can give you ideas and direction on how to develop totally new products and services that your customers clearly want. It’s one thing for one person to say that they want something new, and you can likely ignore that. But, when you have more than 75 percent of your customers saying that they wish your line contained C, D, and E, as well as the existing A and B, then you have good reason to look into new development.
Tip 5: Identify Weaknesses in Overall Strategy
Finally, while customer insights are terrific for looking into the specific matters of importance that we’ve mentioned above, they’re also indispensable in your efforts to improve the overall strategy and direction you’re taking in your business. Without these insights, you might pursue a fruitless direction for months or even years without realising your own mistake before resources run too low and it’s too late.
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