How to Decipher What Customers Are Really Thinking About Your Brand
How to know precisely what customers want from you now and in the future
Business success hinges on delivering what your customers want from your brand. To accomplish this, you need to know precisely what they want from you now and even better, what they will want next.
According to Gartner, companies spend an average of more than 9 percent of their annual budgets on marketing to their customers. And a component of that market research goes toward better understanding customers. Despite this level of investment and focus, many businesses can’t get an accurate picture of how customers view their brand. Even surveys, Net Promoter Scores, and customer satisfaction scores don’t reveal the full depth of a customers’ opinion of, or attitude toward, a brand or worse, they can be misleading so issues go undiagnosed and unaddressed.
Embracing a data- and AI-powered approach can help companies decipher customers’ true feelings and discover actionable insights into each customer’s mindset.
Here are my recommendations for actions that will help you fully decipher and understand what your customers are saying and not saying:
- Analyze and interpret data about how customers interact and transact with your brand. It’s important to blend contact center metrics with structured and unstructured data from third-party sources including CRMs and HR applications, and further enhance it all with speech analysis of customer interactions.
- Listen and track mentions of your brand, products, and services across platforms. By analyzing recurring complaints, concerns, or even subtle changes in brand sentiment, you can uncover hints of dissatisfaction.
- Monitor every mouse click, page visit, and abandoned cart. Get live insight into your contact center to understand what’s happening in real time. Pay close attention to customer journey velocity and progression, where changes can indicate friction or disengagement.
- Embed tools within your products, services, and support environments that allow systematic collection and analysis of customer activities and actions at every engagement point.
- Predict the customer’s trajectory and probable next moves by using AI and analytics to proactively identify issues and opportunities. By analyzing historical data against current activities, you can foresee customer needs, anticipate potential risks, and mitigate dissatisfaction and churn.
- Empower agents. Customer service professionals can perform miracles if given the right tools and technologies to do their jobs effectively and efficiently, increasing their morale in the process. A happy, motivated customer service department will pay dividends in the quality of service delivered to customers.
- Insight is only as useful as it is actionable. When deeper meanings underlying customer behaviors are detected, actions such as initiating or increasing engagement, making special offers, or even providing empathy can help improve the CX.
Customer experience is now the major differentiator between competitors. As most customers today are omni- or at least multi-channel, customer service departments can use advanced AI and analytics technologies that collect real-time data about customers’ journeys. Combining these insights with the right analysis of customer interactions, companies can see through the maze of actions, words, and the emotions behind them for a dashboard view of how the customer thinks and what they will likely do next.
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