Time is passing by really fast. We are approaching the end of April, and time is running by really fast now. 

Now, onto the main event for this post:

In this blog I would like to put the spotlight onto the world of customer insights, as they very much are part of my second internship assignment. Regardless of the product or service you provide for your customers, gathering qualitative and quantitative insights will fuel the organisation on its path to become a more customer-centric and data-driven organisation. Embracing an insight based approach towards business and product development will be valuable across the board, no doubt about it!

I will down below present a few examples of why customer insights are vital:

• Leveraging insights for user experience enhancements: You are selling software as a service right? Their experience of that software must be considered crucial in order to keep them paying. Collecting those insights may lay your pathway to be able to walk in the shoes of your customer. What pains might they experience in your customer journey?

• Enable iterations by measuring: Using both relational and transactional KPI:s to quantify insights about your customer journey, enables you to evaluate and iterate your initiatives and strategy effectively.

• Align insights with the business objectives: By utilising customer insights, you can align your strategies and initiatives with the overarching goals and objectives of the business, ensuring that all efforts are directed towards common targets.

• Create a customer centric culture: Incorporating insights into your organisation’s culture fosters a deepened understanding and empathy toward the customers, driving decision-making processes that prioritise their needs and preferences.

These are just a taste of the many benefits of leveraging customer insights, a quick Google search will reveal countless more.

Just as important as it is to gather insights from your customers, it is just as important, if not more important to make sure to spread them within your organisation. Even though you in your profession and role do not feel close to the end customer, you are one part of the puzzle of creating value that in the end will affect the customer. Therefore democratising those insights means creating a systematic way of making sure that employees are knowledgeable about the customer. And just as vital for the development of the organisation and its products or services.

A few other pitfalls may be:

Collecting feedback with no purpose: A famous quote is “What gets measured gets done” and then someone else said “Not everything that we can measure matters”. Let us ensure that what we measure is purpose-driven to leverage actionable insights with the goal to create more value for our customers.

Competitive analysis: As discussed in a previous blog post, performing a competitive analysis will enable you to create a tool for your organisation to benchmark against. Pricing strategies, customer feedback and product features are parameters to be knowledgeable about in order to identify gaps, maybe uncover a competitive advantage, refining your pricing or marketing strategy. 

Just as mentioned above, a quick Google search will give you several other examples 

That brings us to this week’s final point: 

Insights are great! Gather them, use them, and let them guide your actions.