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Customer experience insights (CXI) are crucial pieces of information for your business. It’s so important to understand who your customers are so you can continue to stay competitive in your industry. This guide will help you better understand customer experience insights—and how to use this data to boost business, retention, and even your bottom line.
Whether you’ve just started gathering customer data or are looking to enhance your existing CX strategy, this handy guide can help you better understand what you’re looking for. So, let’s discuss how to turn this meaningful information into an actionable blueprint for improving your business.
Customer experience insights are actionable, data-driven pieces of information obtained from analyzing feedback from customer touchpoints. These touchpoints can be from direct and indirect interactions with your brand. That is to say, this is any time that your customer comes into contact with your business—pre-purchase, during purchase, and post-purchase:
These pieces of customer data provide an overall understanding of your customers, including their expectations, pain points, motivations, and preferences. Further, by taking a deep dive into feedback, customer data, and behavior, you can glean powerful customer experience insights to improve satisfaction (and even boost revenue!).
Knowing how to gather customer experience insights starts with knowing what your source is. Thankfully, there are several ways to gather feedback for analysis.
Typically, one of the first sources of customer experience insights comes directly from your customer. You or a third party can request this type of feedback to collect specific information. That being said, depending on the service or product, your customers might choose to give their feedback unprompted. You will likely still find value in almost all customer comments, regardless of how they are received.
Businesses carefully craft their surveys based on goals and objectives. So they’re helpful when looking to validate brand integrity, CX strategy, or a recent marketing campaign. You can also use this form for customer experience insights from product reviews or feature requests.
Customer surveys can be administered via email, text messages, phone calls, printed receipts, comment cards, and your website. They can even be triggered after specific customer actions.
Customer experience insights gained from online reviews also provide you with unique data. Customer reviews can give you honest input directly from the customer, in their own voice and with their own emotions. Most online reviews utilize a scoring system—for example, one to five stars—which can help you filter out the type of feedback you’re looking for.
That being said, because this kind of feedback is a long-form comment (instead of a predetermined answer), it typically takes more time and effort to sort through all the reviews. However, there are review analysis providers that offer simple ways to aggregate your customer experience insights and give you reports that are easier to digest.
An NPS survey asks customers how likely they are to recommend your business, service, or product to friends and family. This type of customer feedback is typically very short and based on a scale of 1 (least likely) to 10 (most likely). For this reason, some businesses opt to ask one or two additional questions—but the expectation is that it should only take a couple of minutes for the customer to complete.
These surveys can be created as a popup on your website, or triggered by a specific behavior that your customer does. Thus, by aiming this feedback at customers who spend more time doing business with you, you can get quality data on customer loyalty.
Bonus Tip: Whether the customer experience insights are good or bad, it’s important to respond in a timely manner with an on-brand reply. Handling public concerns quickly helps the appearance of your brand and is essential to maintaining customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Another beneficial way to gain customer experience insights is by gathering data based on their behavior. From in-person interactions to online habits, there’s plenty of information at your fingertips.
Your numerous opportunities for collecting customer experience insights include everything from website traffic to social media engagement. For example, many websites have tools that track page visits and searches, purchase history, time spent on pages or your app, and what event or campaign brought visitors there.
In addition, social media platforms can review impressions, engagement, growth, and visitor interactions with your content. In fact, a great benefit of social media posts is that they allow for easy sharing, which can expand your customer base.
Bonus Tip: Email marketing platforms can use this data to trigger specific automated email campaigns—giving you even more customer experience insights.
Gaining customer experience insights from transaction history can also provide crucial data. This is especially helpful if your point-of-sale (POS) system is connected to your online and in-person locations. Learning when your customers purchase an item (and how often) can help you understand their preferences.
Further, the more data points you track can give you a larger picture of your customer experience insights. Average order value, product affinity, and customer lifetime value give you a better perspective on your typical customers. Even so, knowing these data points will help you prevent churn and improve engagement.
Personal interactions between your employees and customers can provide an alternate view of your customer experience insights. For instance, feedback from your frontline staff can often give you valuable observations about customer sentiment and behavior.
Additionally, you can gain crucial feedback when customers interact with your support functions. For this purpose, whether you use AI-driven support or employees, you have several options to observe pain points and satisfaction levels:
In sum, tracking these interactions can help you build a comprehensive understanding of your strategy with customer experience insights.
Once you have the data from your customer experience insights, you’ll need to review and complete an analysis process. Delving into the raw data will help you create and apply actionable strategies to enhance your business strategy and customer journey.
Analyzing customer experience insights is a vital step to ensure that your CX strategy aligns with your goals and overall mission. To clarify, there are several reasons to analyze this data:
Essentially, this data is important for growing your business and customer base. This growth can contribute to better customer satisfaction, retention, and a better bottom line.
Turning raw data into actionable strategies requires an effective and systematic approach. For this purpose, having a process to aid your data processing can be beneficial in the long run. Over time, with several channels to review, it can be tough to keep up with all the data streams.
Thankfully, depending on your specific needs, there are several tools that you can implement for data integration. Depending on your business model, you might need to consider one or more tools:
These tools can often be bundled together based on your needs—or require a separate system to implement. The key is to understand your CX strategy by mapping out your goals and objectives.
In sum, depending on what you require, there are a variety of tools available to fit your business goals for obtaining customer experience insights.
Once you’ve analyzed your customer experience insights, the next step is to apply the knowledge to your business strategy. Further, it’s important to follow a strategic plan when implementing the changes. You’ll want to ensure that it’s organized and that you can measure the results of the changes accurately.
There are several exciting ways to implement changes in your business strategy:
In sum, these are just a few ways that customer experience insights, once applied, can help grow your business.
While customer data is vital when attempting to improve your CX strategy, the process comes with its own set of obstacles to overcome. These are common issues that you may encounter when looking to gather customer experience insights:
Of course, understanding these challenges early on can help you prepare to gather and implement customer experience insights. With the right tools and organizational commitment, you’ll be able to effectively gather the necessary data and improve customer satisfaction.
Incorporating and implementing customer experience insights into your CX strategy is an ongoing commitment to your customers and your brand. Knowing how to effectively gather, analyze, and implement this critical information will help create an ever-improving customer experience. The key to leveraging these insights lies in your ability to listen, adapt, and evolve to meet (and exceed) the expectations of your customers.
With this in mind, gaining and strategizing this information can be a powerful tool to encourage the lasting success of your brand.
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