As a business owner, you can grow your business most effectively with customer intelligence, and it’s not as complicated as you might imagine.
After all, the basis of customer intelligence in business is about listening to what your customers are saying, gathering the data, and then analyzing how your customers are responding to your products and services via their actions. Given the wealth of data that you’re able to gather from customer intelligence, here are twelve ways to grow your business. You’ll also see why customer intelligence is so important.
1. Improved Experience
Customer intelligence allows you to improve the experience of your customers. You can profile your customers, determine the ways you are most effectively engaging them, and find out the factors that are adversely affecting your conversions. Then, build upon those positive responses to enhance your user experience, thereby boosting your sales.
2. Better Connections
By listening to your customers and developing upon your customer intelligence, you are creating better connections with your customers going forward. Even if they don’t buy today, you’re building a relationship with your connections. As you continue to build upon that productive and real connection, you’re giving him or her reasons to buy in the future, but also to value the relations. That also means that your connection will become a loyal follower and a likely source for referrals in the future.
3. Sales Efficiency
It’s important to spend time with qualified sales leads, but that doesn’t mean that you should waste time with unqualified leads. Customer intelligence allows you to determine which leads are most qualified, and worth the effort you will need to continue to dedicate those leads in order to convert them into buying customers. That also means that you’re saving time and minimizing unnecessary frustrations.
4. Greater Success
When you use customer intelligence to focus on the qualified leads, you are also increasing the likelihood that you’ll see greater success in the form of more sales, but also in a better overall outlook on the sales process by your sales team. For your sales team, it feels like their work is yielding positive results.
5. Reduced Costs
Customer intelligence also means that you’re spending less money on each qualified lead since you’re not wasting a ton of money on unqualified leads. That, in turn, means that you’re also making more money.
6. Competitive Advantage
As you dig into your customer intelligence, you will develop a competitive advantage in several ways. Your customers will freely give you details about their relationships with your competitors, because they have built a relationship with you, and they trust you. You also gain a competitive advantage as you focus on improving your customer’s experience, focus on making connections with your user base, and streamlining the entire process.
7. Segmentation
Customer intelligence also allows you to analyze data based on common variables, as part of a customer intelligence platform, so you can not only connect with each of your customers as individuals but also make correlations within segments.
8. Targeted Marketing
As the next step beyond segmentation, customer intelligence allows you to target your messaging to segmented groups, so you can best meet their needs. As you focus your marketing on those targeted groups, you’re also deepening your connection with your customers by offering them the products and services that are positioned specifically for them.
9. Sustainable Profitability
You don’t just want to make money right now. You want and need your business to be sustainably profitable. Customer intelligence allows you to continue to evolve in a way that is sustainable, profitable, and that just makes sense.
10. Insights
Customer intelligence offers insights via analytics. That’s real numbers, not just gut instinct. If you listen to what your customers are telling you, they will tell you what, when, how, how often, and to what extent.
11. Strategic Decisions
When you carefully analyze and continue to follow your customer intelligence, you will be able to make strategic decisions that will continue to grow your company well into the future. It goes back to the sustainable profitability, but your strategic decisions can delve into areas of your business that are outside the scope of simple profitability. You can learn, grown, and evolve as a business in a way that is healthy and productive for your team and for your customers.
12. Empowerment
Customer intelligence is empowering because it allows you to act instead of waiting for some mythical sign. Your decisions are based on solid data, but it also allows you to pivot, grow, change, or evolve. Customer intelligence is ultimately yours to control, but also to learn from. Take it as you will, but it’s also an opportunity to grow as a team and a company.
With the power of customer intelligence, you can make decisions that should continue to help you grow your company not just today or tomorrow but well into the future. For the best possible success, you must first determine how important it is to learn from and act upon what your customers are telling you.
Will you be in tune with your customers, or decide to make your own best guesses on what your customers want and need? Based on what you’ve learned with this article, you know that now is the time to act upon your customer intelligence to truly grow your business.
