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Make the Customer’s Behavior Work for You: Customer Analytics

 

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Make the Customer’s Behavior Work for You: Customer Analytics

You want more customers, but how do you get them to come to you? Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a tool for understanding exactly what customers want and how they want it?

It turns out, we do have such a tool. It comes in the form of customer analytics, and utilizing it can allow you to build an effective customer experience at every stage of the process, driving traffic and conversions in turn. To make customer behavior work for you, apply customer analytics.

But getting started requires understanding how analytics interacts with customer data and how it can provide insights from these interactions. Here’s what you need to know.

Use Analytics to Understand Customer Behavior

It all starts with data. Making use of this valuable resource can provide you with an understanding of your customer’s behavior, their wants, and their needs beyond what you might get through sales numbers alone. Customer analytics can be derived from several sources, but data is always the foundation.

It takes well-vetted resources and a comprehensive method for juggling all your tools to be able to manage your data effectively, however. You can’t just charge in and make your customers act more like you want them to because you have a sheet of numbers (but wouldn’t that be nice). No, you’ll have to work your customer data to be able to draw conclusions from their actions.

One of the best places to start is with a software service dedicated to the management and cultivation of business insights. Salesforce is one example of such a service. Bundling cloud-based data management with Customer Relationship Management (CRM), a business analyst can use Salesforce to produce information like: 

• Customer needs
• Customer challenges
• Customer satisfaction
• Business platform weaknesses
• Goal progress  

For instance, if customers with more than one interaction with your customer support staff report lower satisfaction rates, you know there must be a problem in the way your customer support team is performing. You can’t just have the data; you need to connect information where it forms a compelling narrative. That brings us to our next point.

To effectively use customer analytics to change their behavior, you’ll need to convert the data into stories. Storytelling is one of the most powerful methods we have for building empathy in a short amount of time. By plotting your customer behaviors and metrics into a story-driven narrative, you’ll be able to put yourself in your customer’s place. From there, you can derive all manner of ways to build value for them.

Then, it’s only a matter of using those insights to grow your own business revenue.

Use Customer Analytics to Boost Your Revenue

The application of business analytics can boost your business value and net profit. But it will take careful research and a commitment to safe business practices. A data breach, for instance, costs businesses an average of $225 per stolen record, making cybersecurity one of many considerations you’ll have to account for in your analytics endeavors.

As you plan now for a better business approach, you’ll need to inventory all the ways you can make use of customer analytics to draw the attention of even more shoppers. Here are just a few tips for applying analytics towards changing customer behavior:  

1. Set realistic business goals and align these goals with customer metrics.
2. Explore the market of data management software to find the best fit for your business model.
3. Make a plan for avoiding and resolving data breaches in an emergency.
4. Create narrative-driven customer profiles.
5. Personalize your marketing strategies to address customer needs, desires, and challenges.  

By following these strategies, you’ll set your business up for much greater success than you might without the help of customer analytics. For instance, a goal of generating new leads can direct your attention to niche markets you might have been serving the whole time. Alternatively, customer challenges with your UI might come up in your assessment of feedback.

Regardless of the insights you uncover, you will then be able to mold some element of your business model to support customer behavior that favors you. This might mean more sessions per ad or a lower bounce rate. The key is building a comprehensive way to look at the data, then translating that data into human behaviors.

Use Customer Analytics to Understand the Industry

In broad strokes, customer analytics gives businesses the tools they need to make data-driven decisions regarding just about anything. To take advantage of all the benefits this creates, you’ll need to craft an expert approach to working with analytics if you want to incentivize customer behavior that works for you.

Start by assessing your data to better understand your customers. Then, apply these insights into carefully plotted and personalized marketing campaigns. With effective customer analytics, you’ll always know how to make that final touch that pivots the customer your way.

Customer analytics means understanding your customers. Through them, you can understand your larger industry and the trends of the future.