Understanding your customers; creating value from data – Brown

The understanding of your end customer that is created from ongoing analysis, enables you to be laser-focused in addressing their needs and aligning your business goals accordingly. 

In particular, it can help you to: 

Adapt to changing customer expectations – a deep understanding of your customers’ needs will help you to personalise interactions and deliver an enhanced experience that really starts to meet their expectations.  

Respond to rapid technological change – guide digital transformation and artificial intelligence (AI) adoption initiatives by revealing customer preferences and pain points from behavioural data and feedback. 

Meet your regulatory compliance requirements – customer data points support the monitoring and evaluation of your performance, improving the outcomes you deliver for your customers. Be tough on yourself when selecting these data points, though, and be sure they truly reflect the customer experience.  

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Promote a customer-first culture – cultivate a company-wide understanding of customer needs to encourage integration into decision-making, leading to a more customer-centric culture within the business. 

Improve your marketing efforts – deep customer understanding means you can segment your customer base more effectively and deliver personalised messaging that resonates. An increasingly data-driven approach will also help you effectively allocate budget and resource to maximise impact and improve ROI. 

Evolve your product offering – behavioural data and qualitative research outputs help you reveal unmet needs, new trends, or emerging segments that present opportunities for product innovation or market expansion. 

The good news for some is that there are digital platforms – often powered by AI – that can help businesses act quickly. These will collect real-time data, automate analytics, support collaboration, and enable immediate decisions, so trends can be identified and solutions implemented faster.  

However, for smaller businesses, these aren’t always accessible. 

Where should small business owners focus their efforts? 

For smaller businesses, where this may sound like a significant drain on already limited resources, a huge amount of insight can be gained from some very simple and practical steps. 

Direct customer feedback from timely surveys or focus groups can be invaluable for really getting to the heart of your customers’ experiences or perception of your business.  

Social media and review sites give timely insight into customer concerns or levels of satisfaction, which can be turned into actionable insight to drive improvement in the product or service delivery.  

Website analytics can help you understand how a customer is interacting with your site, where they might be dropping out of the journey and what draws their attention. Immediately highlighting areas in need of attention.  

Behavioural data can identify patterns in how customers are buying a product, interacting with a service or demonstrating loyalty to your brand, all essential to helping you drive ongoing growth.  

Most businesses already possess this valuable data or can implement the necessary steps relatively quickly, so take advantage of it where you can. 

Customer insight is, therefore, the transformation of data into value, shifting business models from product-centric to customer-centric. It enables smarter decisions, builds stronger relationships and helps drive sustainable growth.  

As with most things in today’s world, you can make it as complicated as you like, but start small, identify what matters most to your customers and then focus on improving or creating those things to deliver real value.