The B2B companies experience challenges like never before as their clients are flooded with “unheard of” options. Henceforth, there is a complete paradigm shift in the procurement process of products and services within the industry, reducing the time a client spends with a particular organization.
For this reason, organizations have a tiny window of opportunity to entice their clients and need to make the most of it. Usually, it is taken care of by delivering a consistent customer experience across multiple platforms, be it marketing, customer success, or sales.
Table of Contents
What is Customer Intelligence?
Customer intelligence (CI), in referral to B2B businesses, is analysis, collection, and utilization of data about prospects and their interaction with products/services. The process involves collecting information from human and digital touchpoints to better understand customer behavior through challenges, needs, and preferences.
This detailed information is crucial to drive informed decisions, enhance business growth and customer experience, and establish permanent business relationships.
32% of the clients will likely remain loyal to the brand if they don’t encounter challenging experiences. So, to maximize customer satisfaction, organizations need to start incorporating customer intelligence insights.
What is the significance of customer intelligence?
Every business will completely agree that happy customers generate sales. At the same time, meeting customers expectations is one of the challenging aspects of any business. Today, 84% of marketers believe that customer experience is crucial and always try to implement customer-centric strategies. But, only 14% of them agree they have strong expertise in that area.
Prioritizing customer experience through CI is crucial for every organization as it provides better knowledge about their requirement and concern of clients. By using customer intelligence they can provide their clientele with personalized care and build customer maps’ journeys.
What are the Best Strategies to Collect Customer Intelligence Data?
We are listing some practical strategies that will assist you in getting under the client’s skin to understand what is driving their investment behavior.
Working with a reliable customer intelligence software
The organization’s support team should start working with a customer intelligence platform that can store, analyze, and collect information. CRM software is one of the most widely used forms of customer intelligence, and here are a few of the significant benefits of using it.
- Access advanced reports: A high-functioning CRM software tracks metrics in one dashboard and provides insightful data-driven analysis. For example, it can generate reports on campaign profitability and quarterly sales cycle.
- Monitor customer interaction: The customer relationship management software can track client information at every touch point. The software can track social media comments of clients, posts shared by clients or a client’s one hour call with the support team.
- Integrate tools in your tech stack: CI software can be easily integrated with other technical software when required. Like CRM, processes get simplified since CI has a vast amount of data as well as numerous tools and software involved.
- Apply automation to your process: CRM incorporated with Artificial intelligence heightens workflow automation. Henceforth, more clientele is encouraged to perform self-service operations, which provides organizations with relevant customer insights.
Therefore, CRMs are excellent customer intelligence software as they keep cross-functional teams in sync and store valuable data.
Gather both qualitative and quantitative data
Quantitative data are measurable as they are either numeric or percentage-based. This data works as the basis for understanding customer behavior because it identifies the key trends and can determine whether additional information is required.
But more often, businesses will also encounter scenarios where they find it hard to reason the ongoing trend. In such cases, qualitative data will fill in more context by providing information about your client’s preferences, beliefs, attitudes, and motivations.
To collect these valuable insights, one must analyze websites, collate support data, and work with the sales department to find helpful information. All of this data gives you complete information about customer expectations and needs. For B2B businesses who don’t have their very own data reservoir, they should reach a data solution provider to source meaningful CI data.
Bring together the data from different sources
Just because the marketing, sales, and support team discover a crucial insight doesn’t mean it should be limited at their disposal. The information should be sent across all teams to enable more personalized customer experiences.
Use sophisticated tools to ensure data is available to anyone who can benefit from using it.
Here are a few relevant examples to utilize data from other departments:
- Marketing team: This team utilizes the data from the support and sales team to heighten advertisement promotion, perfect messaging, and lastly target the right client segment with the right product.
- Sales team: To close deals and follow up with customers, the sales team requires data backup from the marketing and support team.
- Support team: Like the previously mentioned teams, the support team often needs help from the marketing and sales team to track past purchases and proactively predict future clientele needs.
How to Utilize Customer Intelligence Analytics?
We previously discussed some crucial ways to retrieve the finest customer-intelligent data. Now, let’s dig deeper and understand how businesses can use customer intelligence and get successful outcomes.
- Price optimization: When CI is put to the proper use, organizations start studying which features are the most important to clientele. Setting the price according to the requirement can maximize your organization’s sales and revenue.
- Cross-selling: Studying the past investment records of the clientele will generate lucrative opportunities to work upon. It will help businesses pitch products to existing clients, generate need for your business provisions, and finally close the sale.
- Educational material: Once your business understands the pattern of investment for your niche clientele, it will help you determine which content piece in your website needs optimization and what new kinds of content need to be published to meet the existing knowledge base resource gap on your website.
Leading Practices that are in Trend Related to Customer Intelligence
Now that you know how to get the optimal output from customer intelligence, we will move on to focus on some of the leading practices you should follow that will guide your business to attain customer success.
Below, we have mentioned five of the leading customer intelligence practices:
Capitalize on customer sentiment: Today, customer sentiment is a metric used to measure what a customer thinks and feels about a business. Understanding the gaps in their business will guide organizations in the journey to win over clients beyond their targeted demographic. Around 58% of the customer service representatives believe CI deficiency is the reason for poor support, and, eventually, it ends up causing negative experiences. Such issues can be quickly addressed by taking care of your prospect’s sentiment.
Work towards building a customer-first organization: This practice has only helped organizations acquire more profits, enhance customer retention, and generate happier customers. Therefore, analyze the core of your customer intelligence because it directly impacts the customer experience.
Incorporate acceptable agent efficiency: Third-party organizations can collaborate with your organization to analyze the CI and anticipate the customer needs; they can aid in the process of redirecting customers to the knowledge base, inevitably gathering more information about your organization’s clientele.
Respect customer privacy: Collate information that only customers consent to. Adhere to local, state, country, and world compliance rules and regulations so the CI you store is safe and reliable. Lastly, it should only be accessible to authorized parties.
Real-time and historical data easily accessible: Use CI to work on trend fluctuations and long-term customer behavioral patterns. While doing so, consider the real-time data, keeping your business aware of emerging trends and concerns in advance.
Two Insightful Examples Highlighting the Power of Customer Intelligence
When organizations use customer experience reports to derive their internal predictive behavior for impactful decision-making. It puts forward prized CI data and empower teams to develop actionable strategies. Over here, let’s go through two real-time examples of organizations that put CI data to good use.
Utilized CI to begin cross-functional collaborations
Polaris is a Minnesota-based retailer that trades motorcycles, snowmobiles, boats, and off-road vehicles. In 2017, the business wanted to make a deeper connection with its clientele and launched Polaris Adventures to increase the accessibility of power sports.
Why there was a need to access customer intelligence: Polaris had to channel its resources into evaluating the available data and client needs and then figure out the number of resources required to fulfil them.
| Takeaways | Solutions | Results |
| Data related to Polaris Adventure indicated that the business was taking off. Therefore, it needed more attention to scale the customer service team, which keeps the inbound requests coming in and, increases collaboration. | Polaris Adventure eventually partnered with Zendesk to reduce data challenges, magnifying collaboration and productivity. The platform offered unified access for all team members to learn in-depth about the customer context, subsequently, the brand started delivering a smoother and faster experience. | Zendesk’s collaboration with Polaris soared the venture in the productivity domain. Each employee has become capable of handling 40 percent more work with meaningful customer insight. |
Utilized CI to reap more profound knowledge about customer needs
Noom is an application available based on a subscription, and its job is to track its user’s exercise and food intake. In 2021, the application launched a powerful counterpart, “Noom Mood.” It is an online app for cognitive behavioral therapy that helps users cope with and manage mental health conditions.
Why there was a need to access customer intelligence: After the launch of the application, leaders found out that the application was not performing as expected, even though there was a significant market gap that could be addressed.
| Takeaways | Solutions | Results |
| The leaders understood that the application needed a considerable productivity boost, by analyzing their client’s sentiments, and deflected support. AI can address all of these concerns. | Noom collaborated with Zendesk and went ahead with incorporating automation into the workflow. The automation helped the venture learn more about the process, product issues, and customer intent. | Eventually, Noom streamlined its process and also gathered quality insight. The application also started providing a customer education campaign, which guides the Noom application to perform better in the marketplace. |
Conclusion:
The competition between the B2B organizations is soaring. Companies trying to stay ahead of their competitors must incorporate the advantage of customer intelligence, it will help the marketing and sales plans. Utilizing software to gather and analyze all the required customer information will improve business productivity by making well-informed and data-driven decisions.
Undoubtedly, it provides the employees with more time for proactive approaches and strategic thinking, such as tailoring action plans in distinct stages of the client journey. This intended shift helps the organization take control of the situation before the competitor does. As CI’s data-driven insights optimize the existing strategies, personalized approaches drive revenue and growth.
