What is customer analytics?
Every business is different—from the smallest mom-and-pop store to the largest multinational conglomerate, companies and organizations cover the full range of industries, products, services, and goals. But there is one thing that unifies every business under a common banner: the need for customers.
And along with that, the need to address the needs of customers.
Customers are the lifeblood of your entire business. And whether you operate within the B2B or B2C markets, building your brand and growing your business means meeting the needs of your customers better and with more consistency than your competition. Unfortunately, there’s a difference between understanding the importance of customer satisfaction and knowing how to make it happen.
To understand who their customers are, what challenges they face, what they expect in terms of service and products, and what their overall customer experience entails, successful businesses make customer analytics a top priority.
What are the benefits of customer analytics? Possible advantages have the potential to affect nearly every aspect of your business—customer facing and otherwise. This is because a deeper understanding of customers and their buying habits allows you to predict the future of your business more accurately. And the more detailed and successful your analysis, the better prepared you will be to address upcoming trends and deliver relevant interactions at the right time to drive business.
More specifically, the benefits of customer analytics include the following:
- Improved customer retention
It is always more cost effective to retain an existing customer than it is to attract and nurture a new customer through your pipeline. Customer analytics helps businesses understand their buyers' pain points, challenges, and needs, so that they can provide the right resources and support at exactly the right times. This results in more repeat business and fewer clients leaving to investigate their other options. - Reduced customer acquisition costs
Every dollar you spend acquiring customers is a dollar that must be compensated for elsewhere. Customer analytics allows you to focus your finite resources on the channels and strategies that are proven most effective for your audiences, ensuring that the money you spend on acquisition isn’t going to waste. - Improved effectiveness of customer service
Customers are busy people who value their time; the more effort it takes on their part to interact with your customer service solutions, the less satisfied they will be. Customer analytics helps you streamline your service options for improved efficiency and effectiveness, providing more consistently satisfying outcomes for your customers while demanding less effort on their part. - Increased revenue
In nearly every case, the success of a business is tied to its profitability. And your ability to grow your business and generate revenue is tied to your customers. Customer analytics gives you a greater understanding of what your customers want and what it will take to get them to buy—and continue buying for years to come. This goes beyond simply promoting existing products and services; correctly applied, customer analytics can uncover unaddressed needs to inform you of future product and service offerings.