Summary
- Customer knowledge: Definition
- The challenges of customer knowledge: Why is it useful?
- What are the 4 advantages of customer knowledge?
- What are the tools used for customer knowledge?
- Conversational analysis for customer knowledge
- How to improve your customer knowledge
- Looking to boost your customer knowledge?
With an ever-increasing amount of information accessible for them, and with vastly increased exposure through social media, customers are, naturally, becoming more and more demanding. Businesses are therefore being forced to switch up their approach, and to abandon service/product-focused tactics in favor of customer-centric models.
To succeed in this, professionals need to know more about prospects' behaviors, habits and needs. The idea is to build a business relationship with a whole new dimension, in which trust and closer connections allow for loyalty to be kept firmly in sight.
So, how can you enhance your customer knowledge? Let's start by getting the definition clear.
Customer knowledge: Definition
Customer knowledge is a concept covering a business' greeting and information exploitation actions, in the aim of gaining a better understanding of its clientèle and leading campaigns that are better targeted and, in turn, more effective.
What are the questions answered by customer knowledge?
Here are a few examples of questions which good customer knowledge can enable you to answer:
- What are customers' needs? How do customers behave?
- What motivates customers?
- What are the emerging trends in my sector?
Let's take a more concrete example in the form of software publishers. Here's a set of 12 questions that you should ask if you're selling a software solution to your customers:
- What are the main cases in which our current customers are using our software?
- How are our customers integrating our software into their technological set-up?
- Which of the software's features are most used? Which ones are being under-utilised?
- What challenges do our customers face on a day-to-day basis?
- What challenges do our customers encounter when using the software?
- How can we improve the software's interface?
- What are customers' needs for onboarding?
- What type of support needs to be set up?
- What are customers expecting in terms of updates?
- What are the features most requested by customers?
- How can you measure customer satisfaction?
- What trends are emerging in your sector and in your clientèle's sector?
The challenges of customer knowledge: Why is it useful?
Once upon a time, many years ago, the brand and price were the main reference criteria considered during the product selection process. Times have certainly changed since then, and B2C and B2B customers alike are now looking at many more factors when choosing a product or service. Moreover, the competition is a lot more brutal, so now you need to do all that you can to better align with customers' requirements while standing out from the competition crowd.
Adapting to behavioral changes
Things change over time, and rather than constantly just reacting to changes, it's important to identify and even anticipate them, particularly when it comes to buyers' attitudes and the methods and resources that they use. It's a pretty immense challenge, as a business that's working against its customers' flow won't be able to retain those customers forever.
Anticipating
Adapting and anticipation are two complementary notions. The more data you have on your clientèle, the better you'll be able to anticipate the changes we mentioned above. Be careful, though, as this isn't just a case of collecting any data that you can get your hands on and just stacking up information without utilising it correctly, as that would be counter-productive.Data volumes are also so big that it's best to use tools driven by artificial intelligence to process them. That's right! Even Excel formulas have their limitations.
Improving
Knowing your customers' preferences will allow you, on the one hand, to propose offers that better align with their requirements and, on the other hand, to more easily identify the origin of any pain points or dissatisfaction. Improvement is an ongoing quest, and a challenge in which customer knowledge can help you to conquer it efficiently.
What are the 4 advantages of customer knowledge?
There are different ways of drawing on the benefits of customer knowledge. Customer knowledge can help you to:
1. Refine your clientèle targeting
To target your clientèle, you first need to identify it. Customer knowledge helps you with both of these actions. Often, a product or service will be used by completely different targets, and in different ways. You need to take each target and use case into account in your communications.
We can illustrate this with our software publisher example. imagine that this publisher offers a quoting & invoicing solution for SMEs. A mechanic's garage or architecture firm both need this type of software, but will their requirements and uses be identical? Legislation also plays an important role. For example, a company based in England won't be subject to the same laws as a company based in Spain.
An in-depth understanding of your customers and prospects will help you to identify their specifics so that you can better target them, by segmenting your database in order to deploy more personalised campaigns.
2. Use data to create personalised campaigns
Personalising marketing campaigns, as well as each interaction with customers, is essential. To do this, the solution is to create personas. If your customers are businesses, the idea will be to target decision-making profiles, such as team managers or directors.
Create personas or these profiles and think about how you can respond to their requirements in terms of price and customer service.
To put your personas together, you can start from scratch, but it would be a shame not to use the data already available to you. This may be transactional data or personal data that can be accessed via your CRM or your social media platforms:
- Data on purchasing behavior (purchase history, subscribed and used services, returns, etc.).
- Interactions (preferred channels, interaction durations, time spent on pages, vocabulary used, comments on social media, etc.).
- Social-demographic data such as age, family situation or even social-professional category.
- Feedback (responses to satisfaction surveys, reviews, comments on orders, etc.).
3. Boost loyalty
Customers are more demanding than ever before, and they're also more volatile. Customer knowledge should enable you to identify what customers' engagement is based on, so you can identify how to retain them or how to make sure that they choose you. Understanding your clientèle allows you to answer questions such as:
- Are customers returning to you or staying with you because you're the cheapest on the market?
- Because you're the only option for this segment?
- Because your company is a market leader?
- Because your product is the best?
4. Being more agile and reactive
Understanding your customers helps a business to boost its agility and reactivity, so that it can adapt to changing markets and trends more quickly. Armed with the right tools for customer knowledge, businesses can even adopt a proactive approach and anticipate these changes.
What are the tools used for customer knowledge?
Businesses have a wide range of digital tools available to them for taking on the various challenges of customer knowledge. We've summed them up in this table:
| Customer Knowledge tool | Use | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| CRM (Customer Relations Management) | Centralisation of customer information and interaction tracking for each department within the business. | Alignment of marketing teams with support, technical and sales teams for each customer and strategy through the CRM. |
| Surveys and Feedback | Collecting customer reviews to assess their satisfaction levels and to identify any areas for improvement. | Short phone questionnaires on orders placed, surveys or email follow-up for review submission on the business' Google page. |
| Social Media analysis (social listening) | Monitoring social media pages to gain a better understanding of brand perception, opinions and trends. | A brand can quickly detect a bad buzz or a sales opportunity by monitoring specific keywords. |
| Clientèle segmenting | Classifying customers into several groups put together according to shared characteristics, to refine targeting for marketing campaigns. | In order to increase sign-ups for a specific webinar that it's organising, a company can choose to only target a specific portion of its customers by using segments based on customer posts, or their location, for example. |
| Customer Experience monitoring | Continuously evaluating the customer journey to identify any pain points and their origins. | Proactive communication with omnichannel tools, such as informing a customer that the delivery of their order has been delayed and that they can change their date and location of their delivery, before the customer has contacted the carrier or retailer. |
| Predictive Analysis | Using statistical models to anticipate customers' future behavior and trends in the business' sector or in the customer' sector. | A business can anticipate the creation of a new product range based on market signals. |
| Automated marketing | Automation of marketing campaigns for personalised communication, even on a large scale. | Personalised emails sent automatically based on a specific scenario activated by a trigger element, such as a visit to a web page or adding a product to a wishlist. |
| Ticket Management Systems | Effectively monitoring and resolving customer requests | Collaborating on tickets without disturbing customers, particularly thanks to tools such as call whisper or internal messengers. |
| Monitoring | Staying alert to market changes | Monitoring the competition and how they're communicating with their customers. |
| Analytic tools | Digital behavior | Observing the customer journey on the website. |
| Data analysis | Extracting trends and models from the customer database to facilitate strategic decision-making. | Conversational analysis to identify recurring keywords or requests in phone calls. |
Conversational analysis for customer knowledge
With the dawning of the era of artificial intelligence, conversational analysis is really coming into its own. The perfect occasion for us to walk you through some of its advantages.
1. Identifying issues and acting accordingly
You can use conversational analysis to identify trends in your market or even within your customer services, such as the frequency of certain requests. A tool like this can allow you to collect quantitative information from what your customers are saying, and to take action accordingly.
Example: You realise that certain contacts are reporting an issue with making appointments via a specific page on your website. Thanks to conversational analysis, you can directly access this data and correct whatever is going wrong. The result? Your incoming call volumes will be reduced, and online bookings will increase.
2. Improving the customer experience
With a conversational analysis tool, it's simpler and quicker for a manager to check their employees' sale pitches. The same goes for supervisors, who can see whether customers are being properly taken care of by agents in just a few clicks, and check whether the experience provided aligns with the brand. Conversational analysis therefore allows for the coherence between employees' pitches and the brand image to be verified, and for any areas for improvement to be identified sooner.
3. More sales
As we've seen above, analysing customer conversations also helps to identify the most effective pitches and practices. Analysis facilitates the decision-making process. All of this helps to standardise pitches and deploy the top-performing sale scrips and to, as a result, increase sales.
How to improve your customer knowledge
Often, a simple change in your workflow can help you to do more on a daily basis. As for customer knowledge, here are a few tips to put into practice to improve your workflow:
1. Clearly identify the data available to you
It's important to identify all of the data that you have on each customer. Based on this typology, you can then define new strategies or reinforce existing strategies.
2. Make full use of the channels used by your customers
Each interaction can enrich your customer knowledge, whether it's browsing on a website, reposting content on LinkedIn, downloading a white paper or declining an automatic repurchase subscription for a product purchased at regular intervals.
Opt for the channels most used by your personas in order to obtain reliable and, most importantly, usable data. Have you noticed that one of your blog articles has been reposted on LinkedIn by contacts from your database who aren't yet customers? Establish a campaign strategy that's personalised with inMail to boost your prospecting. The data you collect is important, but what you do with it is even more important.
3. Segmenting is key
Creating segments will help you on multiple levels:
- Personalisation for communications will be more precise and, in turn, it'll improve the efficacy of each message.
- Reducing costs, particularly in terms of your marketing budget. Thanks to segmenting, you'll waste fewer resources, in terms of time and money, by focusing on the right time and the right segments.
4. Tracking the right indicators
As we mentioned earlier, improving results and the customer experience is one of the main challenges for customer knowledge. That said, to achieve this, you need to use the right indicators. Here are a few examples:
- Purchasing behavior: Locations, methods and frequencies of purchases
- Customer satisfaction: Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer effort score, engagement rate on social media, or event CSAT satisfaction levels.
- Number and type of tickets: What issues are being encountered? How often are requests coming in for this issue?
- Online behavior: Time spent on the website, number of sessions, connection times and geographic zones, type of pages displayed.
Looking to boost your customer knowledge?
Customer knowledge has definitely become a pillar for customer relations over recent years. This is for good reason, as it offers extremely interesting advantages in terms of sales approaches.
Thanks to customer knowledge tools, businesses can refine their personas and stimulate growth by offering their customers and prospects experiences and messages that are more targeted.
Over these past years, conversational analysis solutions have emerged which, when integrated into tools for customer relations and prospecting, allow business to further develop and to boost the precision of this knowledge. Empower is one of these new-generation tools.
Driven by AI and featuring automatic transcription and translation features, Empower enables you to focus on the key moments of each conversation with your customers, taking away the time-consuming task of listening back to calls to extract value.
To find out more about the different ways that Empower can be used and how this solution can help you to boost your sales performances and customer relations, try it now by requesting a demo — just give our experts a call on +33 (0)1 84 800 800.
