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Consumer Insights: The Secret Weapon

Customer insight has come into vogue, with small to large companies leveraging a customer-driven approach to perfect their marketing strategy. It may seem that most companies are plugged into the art of customer insights. However, the majority of small businesses (especially small) fail to take notice of the most obvious customer insight source – a company’s website.

It’s not revolutionary, you would say. But we can bet you’ve been overlooking some areas of your website that can fetch you customer feedback without testing anything whatsoever. Would you be interested in using this information to perfect your online operations and maybe increase conversion? Read on to find out.

Digging up your website

There are various places on your website that reference the customer. But our places of interest include direct customer feedback. Direct here means ‘in their own words’.

1. Comment boxes in form fields

If you haven’t seen those omnipresent boxes, you live under a rock. Let’s face the elephant in the room: it’s not the greatest insight-generator, since few people bother to fill those forms out. But if you have a decent amount of traffic, you can obtain quite a few valuable comments. As you keep track of those comments, you will begin seeing trends in the type of comments your customers are asking. This source does call for some analysis, but the bonus will be impressive.

2. Customer service chat transcripts

Customer service chats are multi-purposeful. As for our subject of interest, online chat service is the backbone of live interaction. So, why don’t we implement these interactions to guide your online operations? As with the comment boxes, try classifying the most popular questions and issues and allocate time to specifically study a sample of the data provided. Once you test improvements according to your insights, you’ll have higher chances to mitigate user dissatisfaction via site interface.

3. Feedback surveys in email newsletters

Email newsletters are the big ticket for your digital marketing campaign. Whether it’s promoting a new product or sharing your blog updates, newsletters are your one-in-all tool. But have you ever thought about adding a feedback survey to them?

If you are having a hard time with your marketing efforts, chances are you lack understanding and engagement with your customers. So why not approach them directly? Feedback surveys can be a great way of testing your uncertainties about your products, blogs, or newsletters. Your customers will get a chance to keep you en route and share their thoughts.

Based on the number of subscribers, feedback surveys can also present you with precious data bits about your target audience that can then be transformed into tests.

4. Offline customer service efforts (call centers)

In a perfect world, customer service serves as a bridge between your online and offline support and adds to the most favorable customer service experience. Lots of brands have included interactive FAQs to pivot from live interactions (as if they knew 2020 was coming).

As a rule, most call center transcripts can become an insight bonanza, since they include the following data:

Issues that customers are decrying;
Controversial product items;
Direct feedback on marketing.

If the obtained data seems minute, report it anyway. Indeed, even the inconsiderable insights may snowball into bigger experiences for those investigating your information. Set aside the effort to examine the information your clients are giving and devise a test system that will permit you to gauge their reaction to fine-tune your endeavors on the site and via telephone.

The Bottom Line

They say, everyone’s fair in love and war. We say all’s fair in gathering customer insights. In an attempt to become more customer-centric, an increasing number of companies do mumbo-jumbo instead of leveraging the tools they already have. A company’s website, in particular, is an unending source of fresh and bubbly consumer feedback.

For the finale, shout out to the sponsor of this newsletter: ScoutAPM, who specializes in pinpointing N+1 queries, memory bloat, slow queries, and more with application performance monitoring that ties bottlenecks to source code.

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