Customer Intelligence is a crucial way for SaaS businesses to understand their customers and deliver better customer experiences. A hyper-focus on your customers is the only way that you can beat the competition and ensure that customers keep returning to your business.
In an age of technology, it’s easier than ever to gather insights about your customers through data. For the modern SaaS business, gathering this intelligence and using it to inform positive action is crucial for improving customer retention and reducing churn.
Many teams in SaaS businesses can benefit from customer intelligence, including customer success, customer support, marketing, product, and sales. It’s all about connecting customer behavior with context to find out how you can better support them in their goals.
What is Customer Intelligence?
Customer intelligence is the process of collecting and analyzing customer data from internal and external sources. This gives the SaaS business insights into customer needs, motivations, desires and goals, enabling them to improve their communications and interactions with customers.
Customer success teams in particular are reliant on customer data to inform their actions in better supporting customers. When a CSM is using customer intelligence to predict behaviors such as churn, they can better target their interventions to save customers before it is too late.
Customer intelligence is not just about gaining insight into past behavior but also using those insights to predict future actions. SaaS companies can use this data to better tailor their experiences and increase the chances of customer retention.
What are the Benefits of Customer Intelligence?
Personalize the customer experience at scale
The more customers you have, the harder it is to make every experience personal. Customer intelligence allows you to overcome the barriers of high volumes of customers and increase product adoption as well as customer satisfaction.
Enhance insight into your customers
Customer intelligence allows you to understand your customers on a deeper level and engage in more effective actions to influence them. You must have insight into your customer base in order to serve them properly.
Prevent customer churn
By analyzing the root causes of customers who have already churned, CSMs can use this data to predict and prevent future churn. There will be some variables that your groups of churned customers have in common which can be addressed to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
More targeted marketing campaigns
Sales and marketing can benefit from customer intelligence through being able to develop more targeted marketing campaigns that are tailored to your potential customer base. These campaigns will be more effective because they are designed to appeal to customer wants and needs.
How to Improve Customer Intelligence
Segment your customers based on behavioral or demographic traits
Segmenting your customers based on shared behavioral or demographic traits helps you to identify trends among your customer base and target your interactions based on insights. For example, you could segment your customers with reference to feature usage or industry, and deal with customers as a group rather than individually.
Customer Segmentation allows for better personalization because you are targeting customers based on a set criteria, setting the stage for a more effective customer success strategy. Rather than treating all customers the same, you are focusing your efforts on those customer segments who will be most receptive.
Organize customer interviews for more in-depth data
Conducting customer interviews allows you to gather more qualitative data on how customers perceive and value your products and services, thus generating deeper insights from your customer intelligence program. You can target groups of customers based on the segmentation work you did earlier and identify those who would be willing to share their opinion.
Schedule a demo with one of our experts to take a deeper dive into Churn360
Book a demo
Your customer success team can approach highly engaged customers who have been regularly interacting with your SaaS product. Interviewing customers in person or over the phone allows you to gather a more detailed analysis of customer sentiment and ask probing questions to elicit the reasons why.
Launch NPS surveys to gauge loyalty
NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys allow you to collect a range of qualitative and quantitative data relating to how likely customers are to recommend your SaaS product to others, and thus how loyal they are. NPS surveys are generally used to measure how a customer feels about the brand overall, but you can tie it to a specific moment such as the release of a new feature.
Whether a customer is a Promoter, Passive or Detractor can give you customer intelligence because you can also relate it to whether a customer takes a follow-up action. For example, a customer who is a Promoter may go on to log into your app and extensively use certain features. You can approach these loyal customers for further engagement such as a case study or review, or offer a reward such as a discount for their loyalty.
Use a customer intelligence platform like Churn360
Churn360 customer success platform offers customer intelligence capabilities. For example, Churn360 makes it easy to segment your customers based on common traits and perform bulk actions, no matter how large your customer base. Segments are based on certain rules and conditions which you can combine to target a very specific group of customers.
Churn360 offers other customer intelligence features such as analyzing health score which can tell you which customers are at risk of churn. Health score is calculated using a range of factors, with the ability to assign different weightages to a range of data points depending on the characteristics of your customers. You can create multiple health scores related to different customer segments for a more detailed analysis.
Wrapping Up
SaaS companies who use customer intelligence will enjoy a competitive advantage over those organizations who are not data-driven. Tools like Churn360 automate much of the data collection so that your customer success teams can focus on generating insights that allow them to increase revenue and drive retention.
Getting to know your customers on an intimate level sets your company apart from the herd. When every business decision is based on customer insight, you transform your SaaS business with a culture of customer-centricity.
