Do you want to boost competitive advantage in your industry and truly understand your customers throughout their product journey?
Then, you need data-driven customer intelligence in SaaS. Customer intelligence data has been proven to help product managers build more customer-centric products and services.
Here’s everything you need to know about collecting customer intelligence data and acting on it.
What is customer intelligence?
Understanding customers is one of the most important aspects of running a business. Therefore, customer intelligence is crucial in helping businesses achieve this as it helps implement processes that can improve interactions with customers.
Through data-driven customer intelligence for SaaS, business owners can gather and analyze extensive customer data, which provides adequate insights into their behavior, actions, motivations, and demands.
What are the benefits of customer intelligence in SaaS?
Apart from product teams using data obtained through customer intelligence to improve their products, increase product adoption, and fix bugs, here are other amazing benefits of customer intelligence in SaaS.
- Predict customer behavior
- Make data-driven decisions to optimize content
- Understand your customer’s preference
- Get real-time actionable customer insights
- Personalize user experience
- Improve customer satisfaction
What’s the difference between customer data vs. customer intelligence, vs. customer insights?
While customer data, customer intelligence, and customer insights may sound like they are all cut from the same cloth, they are more different than you think.
Customer data refers to raw data about customers obtained through internal or external sources. This can be any type of data at all, as long as it serves as a starting point for analyzing customers.
Therefore, you can call customer data the input, as it doesn’t give a real insight into customer behavior. That is where customer intelligence comes in. This is the result of analyzing customers through data collected and organized from various sources.
Finally, customer insights are those takeaways you can act on after gathering customer intelligence data. You can use customer data to monitor user behavior, understand this behavior using customer intelligence, and then act on it through customer insight.
What are the types of customer intelligence data?
Customer intelligence data can be internal or external. Through this data, businesses can get real insights into customer behavior. So, what constitutes internal customer intelligence or external customer intelligence? Here’s a breakdown.
Internal customer intelligence
Just as the name suggests, internal customer intelligence data is generated within your website or app. Any customer interaction within this internal environment is enough to create this data. Some great examples are sales team records, daily transactions, behavioral data, results of sentiment analysis, customer feedback, purchase history, and support team interactions. Any first-party data within your website or app also counts towards internal customer intelligence.
External customer intelligence
While internal customer intelligence focuses more on first-party data, external customer intelligence is completely different as it can only be generated through third-party data. Such data include customer reviews on third-party websites, geographic data such as financial districts, regions, cities, and countries, market research surveys, and demographic data such as social status. Despite this major difference, these types of data are so closely related that they can’t exist independently.
How to collect customer intelligence data in SaaS
Now that you know what customer intelligence is and the various types, here are some key methods to help you collect valuable customer intelligence data in SaaS.
Segment customers by behavioral data
You can segment users by using onboarding surveys during your onboarding flow. This is the first step to segmenting new users by job-to-be-done or professional type. Another source for collecting behavioral data is the result from user feedback surveys.
Here’s an NPS survey from Google sheets.
With a product analytics tool like Churn360, you can collect product analytics metrics like engagement rate, conversion, etc.
Use an onboarding survey to know your customer.
One of the best ways to know your customer is to hear from them directly, and onboarding surveys can help you achieve this. Through surveys in your onboarding process, you can capture valuable customer information immediately. Data like customer occupation and expectations can be useful to your customer success team to create a personalized onboarding process unique to each customer.
Use micro surveys to collect user feedback at every touchpoint of the customer journey.
There are a lot of things you’d rather do than fill out long surveys, and even your customers will agree. This is what makes microsurveys so effective. Micro Surveys are short and sweet surveys that usually appear in-app and are great for collecting user feedback without subjecting them to traditionally long surveys. Implement this at key areas of your customer journey, and you’ll find out all you need to know.
Measure customer satisfaction with NPS surveys
NPS surveys are a great way to measure and increase customer satisfaction, as you know exactly how happy they are about specific features. Make your surveys stand out by giving them a personal touch, which will make your customers feel important. This way, you can find out which of your customers are promoters, passives, or detractors.
Collect customer support interactions.
Customer support interactions, such as sales calls, emails, and live chat sessions, can provide valuable insights into customers’ needs, concerns, and expectations. This information can be collected and analyzed to identify common issues and areas for improvement.
How Does Customer Intelligence Help in Customer Success?
Through data-driven customer intelligence for SaaS, product managers and business owners can achieve greater customer success. How? Read on to find out.
Understand customers’ preferences, needs, and wants.
A great way to know what your customers need and want is through customer intelligence data. When you understand your customers’ preferences, you can deliver exactly what they expect, which increases the chances of them being satisfied with your product.
Customer segmentation
It’s easier to target clients when you separate important client data into its respective customer segments. This makes marketing seamless, as you’ll be tailoring it to specific preferences, and when combined with the right customer segmentation software, you can connect with your customers better.
Customer Retention
Data-driven customer intelligence for SaaS increases your chances of keeping your customers long-term as it helps you identify the exact moves to make to retain your customers and ensure their loyalty. A great example is a customer who had a great onboarding process when purchasing your product but stopped using it within five months. With customer intelligence, you can take action, like sending an email reminder, to help you understand this change in behavior and solve possible issues.
Customer Acquisition
Want to get more customers? Customer intelligence can help you identify potential new customers at the right time and with the necessary information that will increase your chances of converting them. For example, location-based offers arriving at the right time can boost customer acquisition processes.
Personalized customer experience
Everyone appreciates a personalized, data-driven customer experience where it feels like you’re understood and don’t have to jump through hoops to get whatever you want. Customer intelligence is the perfect way to get into your customers’ heads and give them an experience tailored to each person’s unique needs.
Churn Analysis and Prevention
Improve your chances of customer success by using customer intelligence data, which helps you understand what is causing churn and how to prevent it. Discover why your customers are leaving as early as possible and nip the problem in the bud before it becomes almost impossible.
Identify trends in customer behavior
Track your customer journey in SaaS better and discover areas that need improvement early enough by using customer intelligence to identify trends in customer behavior. Through this, you can enhance sales efficiency and target users at important stages.
Increase the productivity of customer success managers
Customer success managers are more effective in carrying out their duties when they have access to the necessary metrics and data to help them understand customers better. Use customer intelligence to help your customer success managers perform their roles and responsibilities with more positive results.
How to Improve Customer Intelligence in SaaS
Increase your chances of customer success in SaaS through the right customer intelligence practices. The goal is to use personalized experiences and several relevant enhancements to improve customer interactions. Here’s how to improve customer intelligence in SaaS.
Collect the right customer data
Use the right customer intelligence platform to gather and analyze the right customer data, which helps you understand customer behavior better. Data can be collected from metrics or through user feedback. Not every user metric is important, so you should be sure of the ones to look out for to give your business a competitive advantage.
Read more: KPIs to grow your business faster
Analyze the data collected and create a CI strategy
With Customer retention software, you can analyze thousands of data points collected from monitoring key metrics and implement steps that drive customer retention. The data collected and analyzed can form the backbone of an efficient customer intelligence strategy for amazing data-driven CX results.
Act on data collected
There are numerous ways to use the information gained from AI-based customer intelligence analytics tools. These can be integrated into different departments to make them more efficient.
For example, customer intelligence tools in the customer success department can help customer success managers identify opportunities for engaging with customers in a timely and effective manner.
It can also help the product management department create more customer-centric products. Of course, the marketing and sales departments are not left out, as the valuable information gotten through customer intelligence can be crucial in updating your marketing methods to become more effective in attracting new customers.
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Challenges of Customer Intelligence
- Quality of data collected: The success of customer intelligence lies heavily in the quality of data collected. Therefore, unreliable sources and bias could put a dent in the entire process.
- Inability to capture data: This could be due to the lack of suitable tools or effective methods to obtain credible data from customers.
- Understanding how customers interact with your brand: Customer interaction with your brand includes how they respond to your marketing strategies, their first contact with your brand, what they buy, and where.
- Collecting data from multiple sources: To avoid being off-track on what your customers expect, you need accurate data from multiple sources to make the right decisions on the products and services they need. Getting data from different sources helps you compare and contrast to identify patterns and opportunities for improvement.
- Limitation of tools: You may have the right idea of what to do to keep your customers happy, but without the right tools, you won’t be able to act on this the proper way and monitor key metrics for customer success.
Best customer intelligence platforms
Customer intelligence is so much easier when you have access to the best customer intelligence platform. Here are the top three choices and some important features to look for in these customer intelligence platforms.
Churn360
Churn360 drives customer success with amazing features such as customer segmentation, easy integration of third-party software, proper customer journey monitoring, and access to key metrics to reduce customer churn.
Hubspot
This amazing CRM software has a simple visual dashboard that makes it easy to navigate, and this is considered its unique selling point. It’s great for monitoring your entire sales funnel in real-time and helping various teams work together seamlessly for a positive, data-driven customer experience.
Userpilot
This versatile tool collects customer data throughout the customer’s product journey, starting with the sign-up process. It includes diverse features, including goal tracking, microsurveys, advanced customer segmentation, and feature usage tracking.
Conclusion
For the best data-driven customer experience, you need access to effective data-driven customer intelligence in SaaS.
