Customer intelligence: What is it and how can it help you increase sales

Customers now have access to multiple sources of information about your company’s products as well as your competitors. They are also using that information to actively make purchasing decisions. In this digital age, social media has enabled customers to instantly give feedback and share interactions about products in real time regardless of whether they are positive interactions or negative ones.

Customers are as a result now more empowered and are less likely to remain loyal to a product. Given that it’s already hard enough to rise above the noise and get your product noticed; there is a need to know your customer and what drives their purchasing decisions.

What is customer intelligence?

Customer intelligence involves gathering insight about customers that is informative, useful and contextual. To gather customer intelligence, a company draws data from multiple sources including closed and open ended surveys, tracking website interaction, and landing page data to better understand potential customers.

Customer intelligence enables companies understand individual customers as holistic people capable of making purchasing decisions.

What is the difference between customer data and customer intelligence?

Customer data is raw detail about a customer, it may include the name, location, number of products and frequency of purchases. Customer data may not be as useful unless it is correlated and contextualized.

Customer intelligence refers to data that has been collected, analyzed, and contextualized. Customer intelligence can be used understand; who is buying a product, where they are coming from, how they are making the purchase, and most importantly, why they are buying the product.

For instance, a startup may be looking to purchase a time tracking software. It may be easy to collect information about where the company is based, who is making the purchase, or even how the purchase is going to be arranged. It may be more insightful, however, to understand why they want to purchase the time tracking software. Such insight may unveil product or sales details that may not have been apparent or may have been understated.

Let’s say the startup works with freelancers and would want to track the time spent in order to justify billable time. A feature like an automatic rate calculator may add value to the product and drive sales for the company.

How then does customer intelligence affect sales?

The company that is able to capture, analyze and contextualize customer information will understand the empowered customer. It will also be able to adequately respond to the customer’s needs and provide a better customer experience. The company will also be able to make informed, effective and intelligent business decisions based on the contextualized data.

Understanding contextualized data about a customer enables a company to identify what drives sales and what improvements can be made on the product or the buying cycle. Intelligence may unveil bottlenecks in the lead conversion cycle and improve customer interaction with the company and its products.

Accurate and detailed customer intelligence not only provides insight but it’s able to guide and inform line of business make better decisions using actionable and measurable results.