What are customer insights?
Customer insights are used by businesses to gain a deeper understanding of their customers’ wants and needs by analyzing their behavior. As Tech Target explains, insights are the actionable motivations behind the wants and needs of customers that can be used to expand features, develop new products and create consumer benefits.
Leveraging consumer insights can improve customer experience and potentially lead to increased revenue for your organization. A Microsoft article points out that a moderate increase in customer experience generates an average revenue increase of $775 million over three years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenue.
Other than deepening the relationship with your customers and generating meaningful, quantifiable results, there are other actionable steps you can take based on consumer insights, such as:
- Predicting churn
- Expanding into new markets or leaving underperforming ones
- Delivering personalized experiences
- Optimal product pricing
- Better inventory planning
Why are visual customer insights important?
While data-driven insights are essential for C-level decision-making and improving a business for your customers, the sheer amount of information available can be hard to sift through. One way businesses can cut through the noise is through data visualization: the graphical representation of numbers through charts, maps, timelines, graphs, heat maps, and other easy-to-read aids.
- Visualization makes data more accessible and intuitive at a glance, helping your team discover customer insights it might not have seen in the raw data.
- You can use customer insight data visuals to tell a story, which has the advantage of helping key decision-makers take the appropriate action. With a full story to tell, your message will resonate much better than the data alone.
How to visualize customer data in 5 simple steps
Translating customer insights into a visual medium means everyone speaks the same language. Data no longer requires expertise to make sense of it in visual form. You can decipher patterns at a glance, then share insights with stakeholders and anyone else in your community
Visual storytelling is vital for stakeholders, as it helps to communicate patterns at a glance, and informs their decision-making. Sixty-four percent of participants made an immediate decision following presentations that used an overview map. Consider these five ways to share customer insights visually:
- Heat mapping lets your marketing team test ad and marketing effectiveness, helping prevent wasted advertising money
- Infographics distill multiple sources of information into a compelling story for anyone in your organization
- Customer journey mapping helps you identify potential hiccups in the customer experience as you introduce them to your offerings
- Graphs, like your brand’s personal price sensitivity meter, will guide you to ideal pricing strategies.
- Pie charts display customer preferences at a glance
Best practices to translate insights into visuals
Since data visualizations exist everywhere online, it is important to find ways to translate customer insights into a compelling visual story that, in a sea of data, leaves an impact. Here are some best practices for presenting customer data in a visual structure.
- Gather customer intel – Every good story starts with collecting solid material. Fuel Cycle’s Customer Insights platform can help identify gaps in the customer experience by taking their feedback and behaviors and turning them into actionable data.
- Choose a visual element that suits the customer insights you want to find – Diagnose which medium works best for your information. If you’re unsure where to start, you can also use the Fuel Cycle Research Engine to determine the current gaps in your marketing data tools.
- Identify a pattern in the data because anyone viewing your visual insights will be looking for them.
- Match your visual representations to your message – Look for consistency between your chosen medium and the customer insights.
- Build a narrative – Data storytelling can be dry if you don’t consider basic story structure. In its most basic form, look for two elements: a problem and a solution. What is the problem you need to solve, and how does the data you have hinted at the answer?
References:
- Scott Sachs, “Customer insight (consumer insight)”, Tech Target, https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/customer-insight-consumer-insight
- Christi Olsen, “Delivering on the customer experience imperative”, Microsoft Jan 7, 2020, https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/post/january-2020/delivering-on-the-customer-experience-imperative
- Deb Marotta, “Consumer Insights: What They Are & Why They Matter”, Hitachi Solutions, https://global.hitachi-solutions.com/blog/what-are-consumer-insights/
- Natasya Sunarto, “55 Facts and Statistics Showing Why Data Visualization is Important”, Piktochart, Oct 18, 2021, https://piktochart.com/blog/data-visualization-statistics/