What is customer insight? How to identify customer insights

To be able to offer the right products and services and an effective approach, businesses need to have a deep understanding of customer insights. However, finding and determining customer insight is not easy because it is a process where businesses need to collect data, analyze and make correct judgments about the implicit truth of customers. .

In the article below, SimERP will help you understand what target customer insight is, as well as how to properly set up customer insight.
What is customer insight?

Customer insight is the daily behavior, habits, and trends of customers based on data collected from them. Businesses must collect, research and analyze information and data about customers and the market to draw accurate conclusions about target customer insights. Based on that, the company will make appropriate marketing strategies, product changes to bring new benefits to customers, as well as improve business activities.

Characteristics of customer insights
As a result of a research process
Giving customer insight is not simple, obviously based on emotions but must be based on a research process through specific data. Normally, to clarify and identify target customer insights, businesses will have to have a separate research team to collect and research data. Based on the research results, businesses can draw customer insights and use them as “guidelines” for strategies to change products, develop markets or market new customer segments.

Given based on a variety of data
To make accurate judgments about customer insights, businesses must rely on different data. Marketers must turn these data into useful metrics, exploit and analyze them, thereby finding insights and making appropriate plans. In addition, marketers have to coordinate multiple metrics together. Currently, there are several types of information that are often combined and applied to provide customer insight such as: market trends, customer surveys, customer feedback and comments, data on consumer behavior, etc. .

Help put in place practical actions
From customer insight, businesses will know how to come up with appropriate plans to change products and better persuasion. For example, your company sells skin care products and notices that the recent trend is that female office workers over 24 years old are worried about premature aging due to a lot of exposure to computers. , work pressure, stay up late. From there, the company was able to come up with age-appropriate anti-aging products and advertise relevant to the problem this customer was having to reach this audience.

Can persuade customers to change behavior
When understanding customer insights, businesses can come up with appropriate advertising and communication content to affect the psychology and perception of customers. For example, if your business sells acne products, you can launch educational ads that briefly and succinctly explain acne and the right treatment. From there, customers understand more about acne types and choose your products to suit their skin conditions.

The role of customer insight in business and marketing activities of enterprises
Increase competitive advantage and gain priority
Researching customer insights will help businesses capture customer psychology, know future customer needs as well as market trends. Based on the results of analysis and research, the company will have a plan to exploit the market effectively. Businesses will offer suitable products, better approach and care for customers. From there, get a competitive advantage and gain priority in the market.

Enhance customer experience
When understanding customer insights, businesses will have appropriate directions and approaches to target customers. From there, customers will have a great experience when using your products and services.

For example, Wayfair, an online home appliance retailer, researched customer insights and drilled into their insights. They find that customers want products and services that work best for them quickly and intuitively. Therefore, the company has developed an application that supports the user experience, allowing customers to capture and share the products they love to recommend the company to provide more of those products. Through these data, Wayfair can completely analyze and offer products that match customer needs.

Adapt to market changes
The market is constantly changing, requiring businesses to adapt and come up with appropriate strategies. Analyzing customer insights will help businesses predict changes in purchasing behavior as well as customer needs, thereby anticipating market fluctuations and making appropriate plans to adapt. On the contrary, if the product is not changed in time compared to the market, the product becomes outdated, does not meet the needs of customers and the approach will be less effective.

How to build and create customer insights
Step 1: Build a customer insight research team
Businesses need a team of capable, specialized expertise to collect, analyze and accurately identify customer insights. In addition to the ability to collect, analyze and research data, the staff of the insight research team must have an open and highly creative mindset. Because, they are the ones who determine what important data to study, as well as have to work with customers to ask questions to collect data. Essential functions in a customer research team include:

Collect customer and market information.
Research customer information.
Analyze customer information.
Step 2: Answer questions to build customer insight
To build customer insight, marketers must answer the following six questions:

WHY – Why is it important to identify customer insights?
With this question, businesses need to clarify what the goal to implement this customer insight research plan is.

What should be the outcome of the customer insight research plan?
What will customer insights data be used for? Launch and develop products or serve to market and advertise existing products?
WHEN – When to build customer insights?
Enterprises need to develop a specific roadmap for each different work, as well as measure resource and risk factors throughout the project. From the above plan, businesses can monitor and manage projects, as well as offer solutions when problems arise. This helps to ensure that the customer insights plan runs more smoothly.

When to start collecting data? And when will the data be analyzed?
Time to complete that project?
When will the results be available to the relevant departments?
When to apply that data to Marketing?
WHAT – What kind of data to collect?
With this question, you need to clarify about the types of data to collect and analyze, and also outline the problems you have to solve, the difficulties that arise during the implementation of this project.

What kind of data do you need to collect and analyze?
What data do you need to categorize and clarify?
What are the difficulties and problems encountered when analyzing data?
HOW – How to find customer insights?
After clarifying the audience, the time taken and the type of data to learn, marketers must know how to collect and analyze customer data.

How to collect data? Where are the data sources that can be mined?
Which method to use to analyze customer data?
What tools for data analysis?
WHO – Objects of research aimed at
Companies often have many different audiences. Therefore, to ensure accurate customer insight research, businesses need to clearly and specifically define the audience they are targeting.

Who is this customer insight research aimed at?
What are the characteristics of the customer that you need to research? (Age, gender, education level, region, …)
Step 3: Build a customer journey map

The customer journey simulates the process by which customers experience a certain product or service over time, ranging from the stage when the customer approaches and interacts with the product, researches and considers that product until the time when the customer approaches and interacts with the product. buy, use and recommend them to people around.

To build a customer journey map, you need to draw a customer portrait, list the touch points and identify the elements that the business wants to learn about the customer. Currently, there are many different types of customer journey maps such as Empathy Map, Experience Map, Future State and Service blueprint, businesses need to determine which is the right map to apply.

Step 4: Collect data on customer insights
After knowing the customer journey, marketers proceed to collect customer data. There are currently two types of business data, primary data and secondary data. Primary data is data that is not available that businesses will have to collect and synthesize through surveys, interviews or experiments. Secondary data is data collected and used by researchers and market analysts for their own purposes. Businesses will search for these data sources online, research papers, in books or other documents and use them for business purposes.

Step 5: Analyze and study the data
After collecting and synthesizing data from different sources, marketers must come up with a solution to analyze the data and categorize it into groups. Performers will have to use different analytical methods and models, and use tools to calculate and illustrate data in different tabular formats. Thereby, analyzing consumer behavior and giving customer insight.

Step 6: Identify customer insights
From the results after analyzing and studying the data, marketers will have an accurate basis to give customer insight. However, it should be noted that before applying this insight to any product change, advertising or customer outreach strategy, you need to verify the results you have given are correct or not. To avoid risks, you can test this insight with smaller plans or campaigns to check the accuracy of the customer insights research results.