If you want to grow your business and become more profitable, your journey has to start with knowing your customers. For your customer knowledge to go beyond a superficial level, you have to be fully immersed in their journey. Understanding every step they take from the time they discover your brand, to when they make a purchase and when they’ll need customer support afterwards.
Software can help to improve customer knowledge by giving you and end to end look into the customer experience and improve processes to give your company more efficiency.
The aim of any software is to gather raw data and then derive actionable insights. A good software solution should be able to
- Be tailored to collect actionable data
- Deliver insights in formats that are easy to use and understand
- Combine data from feedback channels to provide you a view of customer behaviour and experience
- Combine different types of data, such as demographics, transactional information and behavioural data
- Track information in real time
- Suit your company’s way of working, making it easier for you and your employees to derive insights and continue to drive growth.
Below are different categories of software that can enhance your understanding of your customers and shape how you do business with them
Software that will give you customer insight
Software that tracks customer behaviour throughout the sales funnel helps you to
- Discover what makes your customers happy or unhappy
- Keep track of and engage more with your most valued customers
- Anticipate customers’ needs and improve satisfaction by giving them what they want
- Customer satisfaction leads to loyalty and brand ambassadorship.
When you have quality data from your software, you will make the right decisions and get the more value from any visitor to your website.
Customer support software
Support software is also critical for understanding customers.
The software alone cannot help you to meet your goals of customer satisfaction if your support strategy only aims to quickly resolve issues.
A good customer support strategy should promote customer understanding so that teams can anticipate customer needs and create products and solutions that will address their frustrations.
With this in mind, an audit of the tools you have and of your customer support processes will reveal how well you understand your customers.
Ask yourself:
- Is your software collaborative?
- Does it make all customer-relevant information available to teams?
- Does it promote holistic understanding of customers?
- Does it ensure and guarantee continued customer satisfaction and retention?
If the software you have does not do these things, it’s could be time to upgrade.
Great software will also enhance your support team’s proactivity. When teams know what a customer’s needs or frustrations are, they can reach out with a ready solution. This in turn increases sales. Customers will readily accept advice that is helpful to them. Customers will also retain the business of companies that prove to be valuable partners and efficient problem solvers.
Tools that enhance team collaboration
Without collaboration, it’s difficult for your employees to access and act on relevant insights regarding customers.
For instance, data analysts, marketers, sales teams and customer care teams can all collect information about their customers. But if this information is not merged, then all teams will only have a limited picture of the customer, meaning customer problems and needs will never be addressed holistically.
Departments should be able to share information with other teams so that they understand customers from different points of view.
Tools for analytics and social listening
There are many channels that customers use to communicate with brands and voice their opinions. Emails, online surveys, offline surveys, phone calls and most powerful of all, social media. By collecting and analysing data from these streams, you will understand what customers feel about your brand.
The challenge lies in combing through all the comments from these channels. It would take days to do so and by the time you get any actionable information, it will be too late to react and the customer might have moved on to another brand.
The solution to this problem is to use software for analytics and social listening.
Such tools can be customised to listen to certain words and alert you when they come up. This then allows you to react with appropriate remarks or solutions in real time. With a good tool, you can analyse large bodies of unstructured data to give you comprehensible reports and graphs.
