9 Ways to Gather Customer Insights and Using them for Customer Success

What Are Customer Insights?

Customer insights are what you get when you utilize customer data to discover the behaviors, preferences, and needs of your customers. It’s how companies can build a more personalized customer experience. 

Data is the foundation of customer insights. There are several ways to gather customer data, including market research, customer service data, website data, online reviews, competitor reviews, and feedback questionnaires.

This is part of a series of articles about customer intelligence.

The Origins and Evolution of Customer Insight

In the early days of commerce, customer insights were gathered through face-to-face interactions, which provided a limited but direct understanding of customer preferences and complaints.

The introduction of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems in the 1980s allowed companies to collect and manage customer data more systematically. The 1990s saw the rise of the Internet, which enabled businesses to gather vast amounts of information online.

In the 2000s, the focus shifted towards big data and advanced analytics. Companies began to use software to analyze large datasets, uncovering patterns and trends that were previously invisible. This era also saw the emergence of social media, providing a new dimension to customer insights by offering real-time feedback and sentiment analysis.

Today, customer insights are driven by AI and machine learning, which allow for even more precise and predictive analyses. These technologies can process and interpret data quickly, providing deeper insights. Customer insight technologies continue to evolve, with new tools emerging to help organizations understand and meet the needs of their customers.

The Importance of Customer Insight for Customer Success

Gathering customer data is the foundation for generating customer insight. There’s no way around this. 

The modern customer wants a personalized approach. Salesforce research found that 66% of consumers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, and 52% expect all offers to be personalized.

These insights are pivotal in delivering value, anticipating customer needs, and creating long-term loyalty. The power that customer insights bring can be found mainly in its diversity. Knowing the different types of behavior, attitudes, and demographics within your customer base can help tailor your strategies effectively.

How to Gather Customer Insights?

Here are some of the sources from which organizations collect customer insight data.

1. Market Research

Market research involves collecting and analyzing data about consumers’ preferences, behaviors, and market trends, to guide business strategies. This can be achieved through various methods such as surveys, focus groups, and ethnography. 

Businesses often utilize specialized market research firms or platforms such as Nielsen and Kantar, or tools like Google Surveys and Qualtrics, to conduct both quantitative and qualitative research. The insight gained helps organizations anticipate market needs, understand consumer decision-making processes, and identify market opportunities.

2. Customer Service Data

Customer service data includes information gathered from interactions between customers and a company’s service team. This could involve recorded phone conversations, chat logs, and email exchanges. 

Analyzing this data allows a business to identify common customer complaints, track the response effectiveness, and improve overall service. Tools such as Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud provide comprehensive data analytics features that offer insights into customer pain points and satisfaction levels.

3. Website Data

Website analytics tools such as Google Analytics provide crucial data on user behavior, demographic profiles, traffic sources, and conversion rates. By analyzing these metrics, businesses can understand how visitors interact with their site, which pages attract the most attention, and where users typically drop off. 

Insights derived from this data can guide improvements in website design, content strategy, and user experience, ultimately influencing customer behavior and increasing engagement.

4. Online Reviews

Platforms like Yelp, Google Reviews, and Trustpilot provide unfiltered feedback from customers about their experiences with products or services. To gather insights from online reviews, monitor these platforms regularly. Look for common themes in the feedback, such as frequently mentioned strengths or weaknesses. 

Tools like ReviewTrackers and Reputology can help automate this process by aggregating reviews from multiple sources and providing sentiment analysis to identify trends and areas for improvement.

5. Competitor Reviews

Sites like G2 and Capterra offer reviews of software and technology products, which can be particularly useful in the SaaS space. By examining what customers are saying about your competitors, you can identify unmet needs and opportunities to differentiate your offerings. This competitive analysis can be enhanced with tools like Crayon or Klue.

6. Feedback Questionnaires

Tools like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, and Google Forms help you create and distribute surveys. When designing a feedback questionnaire, focus on specific aspects of your product or service that you want to improve. Include a mix of quantitative questions (e.g., rating scales) and qualitative questions (e.g., open-ended responses) to get the full range of customer opinions.

7. User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) includes reviews, social media posts, blog comments, and forum discussions created by your customers. Monitoring UGC can provide authentic insights into how customers perceive and use your products. Social media listening tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Brandwatch can help track mentions and analyze sentiment across platforms.

8. Internal Teams

Internal teams, especially customer-facing ones like sales, support, and customer success, are useful sources of customer insights. They interact with customers daily and can provide firsthand accounts of customer challenges and successes. 

Implement regular cross-functional meetings and feedback loops where team members can share their observations and insights. Collaboration tools like Slack, Trello, or Asana can help streamline the process of sharing internal feedback.

9. Case Studies and Testimonials

Case studies and testimonials offer detailed insights into how your products or services are used by customers to achieve specific goals. They highlight real-world applications and benefits, providing qualitative data that can inform your customer success strategies. 

Interview your customers to understand their journey and document their experiences in detail. Testimonials can be collected through follow-up emails, feedback forms, or direct outreach. Tools like Case Study Buddy and TechValidate assist in creating and managing these assets.

Types and Examples of Customer Insight

Behavioral Insight

To derive behavioral insights, you can leverage analytics platforms that track and analyze customer interactions with your product or service. Tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Amplitude are excellent for understanding the behavior of your customers. You can track metrics like page views, session duration, and bounce rates. These insights give you a clear view of how users navigate and engage with your platform. 

For a more in-depth analysis of product usage, tools like Pendo or Hotjar offer heatmaps, session recordings, and in-app surveys to understand feature usage and identify usage gaps.

Attitudinal Insight

For attitudinal insights, sentiment analysis tools are key. AI-powered platforms like Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, and Zendesk offer amazing sentiment analysis capabilities. These tools help CSMs gauge customer satisfaction, understand feedback, and identify trends in customer sentiment. These tools can analyze data from surveys, social media, support tickets, and online reviews, providing a comprehensive and holistic view of customer attitudes toward your brand.

Demographic Insight

Gathering demographic insight often starts with collecting data through your CRM, like Salesforce or HubSpot. These platforms can store and manage customer data, including job function, location, job title, and industry. Both can integrate with many other data tools like Clearbit or LeadGenius. All of this data allows for better customer segmentation which leads to more personalized marketing campaigns and tailored customer experiences.

Drawing Insight From Customer Data

Drawing practical insight requires more than just collecting data. The following steps are key to discerning what data is necessary for long-term customer relationships: 

• Analyzing Customer Feedback: When using tools like Typeform or Google Forms to collect direct feedback, NLP (Natural Language Processing) technologies can help analyze open-ended responses, providing deeper insights into customer sentiment.
• Analyzing User Behavior: Utilize advanced data analytics platforms like Tableau or Looker to see user behavior data and determine patterns or trends. These tools can integrate data from various sources, offering a holistic view of customer interactions.
• Leveraging Customer Interactions: CRM platforms, when integrated with communication tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams, can turn customer interactions into actionable insights. Customer service platforms like Zendesk or Freshdesk capture every customer touchpoint, providing the perfect dataset for analysis and insight generation.

Integrating Customer Insight into Your Customer Success Strategy

Now that you know how to gather the right data, it’s time to apply it. The true test of customer insight is its application. Here’s how these insights can play a pivotal role in shaping your CS strategies.

Customizing Customer Success Plans Based on Customer Insight

• Personalized Onboarding Processes: Use customer insights to create tailored onboarding experiences that address specific customer pain points, job titles, and goals of your customers. This will help mitigate churn, build better customer relationships from the get-go. 
• Tailored Communication Strategies: This is simply the process of developing communication plans that resonate with different customer segments based on their behavior and preferences. A combination of analytics and direct client feedback can help you find the right channels and frequency to improve your customer interactions; whether it be slack, emails or meetings. 

Proactive Issue Resolution with Predictive Customer Insight

• Anticipating Customer Needs and Challenges: Predicting future behavior can help you proactively offer solutions before issues arise. With the help of AI, it’s now much easier to analyze customer interactions and product or service usage at scale to generate accurate customer health scores and sentiment analysis.  Both of these data sources are extremely valuable to Customer Success leaders since they serve as early indicators of customer satisfaction and loyalty. 
• Preventing Potential Issues: Utilizing these insights can also mitigate churn and improve overall customer satisfaction. Data driven insights mean more accurate and unbiased customer risks are being reported on in real-time. Having accurate, up-to-date feedback from your customers can help Customer Success teams be more proactive in their approach to each customer situation. Whether it’s identifying an issue before it becomes an escalation or providing an exciting update on a feature request your customer just submitted, all forms of customer feedback are opportunities for customer success teams to provide value.

Continuous Improvement through Feedback Loops

• Collecting Ongoing Customer Feedback: Consider implementing tools that provide real-time analysis and alerts when there are changes with your customers. Whether their health score changed, a new support ticket was logged, or an angry tone was detected in a communication; it’s important to understand a holistic and up-to-date view of your customers. 
• Iterative Adjustments to Customer Success Strategy Based on Insights: Continuously refining customer success initiatives to align with evolving customer expectations is key for long-term success. Over time you can collect data and draw insights on what customer success strategies work and which don’t. For example, are your customers more likely to renew their contract when regular business reviews happen? Or when more people from your clients’ organization are involved with the deal?
• Encouraging Customer Advocacy through Positive Experiences: You turn satisfied customers into brand advocates by consistently exceeding expectations based on their feedback. An effective customer insights platform can help your team easily identify which customers fit this profile. It can help you actively target them for testimonials, case studies, and referrals. 

Common Challenges to Integrating Customer Insight

Here are some of the main challenges that organizations face when trying to integrate customer insights into their business planning.

Data Silos

Data silos occur when customer data is isolated within different departments or systems, preventing a unified view of customer interactions and experiences. For example, marketing might have access to campaign data, while sales and support have their own sets of customer interaction records.

Data Quality Issues

Many organizations struggle with data quality issues such as incomplete, outdated, or inaccurate information. These issues can stem from manual data entry errors, lack of standardized data collection processes, or integration problems between different systems. Poor data quality can lead to incorrect conclusions and ineffective strategies.

Privacy and Ethical Concerns

Collecting and utilizing customer data raises significant privacy and ethical concerns. Customers are increasingly aware of their data privacy rights and expect companies to handle their information responsibly. Compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA is mandatory, and failure to do so can result in severe penalties.

Actionability of Insights

Even when organizations gather high-quality data, they often face challenges when translating these insights into actionable strategies. Insights need to be timely, relevant, and easily understandable for decision-makers to act upon them. However, complex data analyses can result in insights that are too abstract or technical for practical application.

Strategies to Overcome Customer Insight Challenges

Here are some of the measures that can be taken to make the most of customer insights.

Centralize Data Storage

Implementing a unified data platform, such as a data warehouse or data lake, allows organizations to aggregate and integrate data from various sources. This central repository ensures that all departments have access to the same, up-to-date information about customer interactions. Cloud-based solutions like AWS Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Snowflake offer scalable and secure options for centralized data storage.

Establish Data Standards

Clear data standards and governance policies ensure that data collected across the organization is consistent and accurate. Standardized data formats, naming conventions, and validation rules help maintain data quality, alongside regular audits and data cleansing processes. Tools like Informatica and Talend can automate data governance and quality management.

Align Insights with Business Objectives

For customer insights to be actionable, they must align with the organization’s business objectives. This requires collaboration between data analysts, customer success teams, and business leaders to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) and strategic goals. Regular reviews and adjustments of KPIs based on insights help align them with business priorities.

Implement Privacy by Design

A privacy-by-design approach ensures that data privacy and ethical considerations are integrated into every stage of data collection, processing, and analysis. This involves building privacy features into products from the outset, conducting privacy impact assessments, and ensuring compliance. Tools like OneTrust and TrustArc help manage privacy and compliance.

Invest in an Integrated Technology Platform

A platform that combines CRM, data analytics, and customer feedback tools streamlines the process of gathering and analyzing customer insights. It can integrate various data sources and offer advanced analytics capabilities. Integrated technology platforms enable real-time data sharing and collaboration across departments, keeping insights accessible and actionable.

Evolving Customer Insight and Customer Success Strategies

With the advent of AI and machine learning, the future of customer insights looks towards predictive analytics—turning engagement and sentiment data into predictive insights for churn and growth.

Staircase AI is a tool that makes the gathering of customer insights easy and effective. Our AI-driven metrics draw on meaningful insights by analyzing all your customer interactions with your company through all your communication channels to determine their overall sentiment and health. When you use Staicase’s AI analysis, you can accomplish the following: 

• Drive Real Business Insights and Action Items: Identifying behaviors, attitudes, and demographic data is important. Now you can expand on that data and drive insights that lead to real business outcomes based on the data gathered through Staircase.  
• Turn Engagement and Sentiment Insights into Real-Time Predictions: churn, expansion, revenue, and more can now be more accurately measured thanks to AI-driven insights. It also makes it easier to identify customers who are likely and least likely to renew. 
• Forecast Growth and Expansion Opportunities: It’s been proven time and time again that expansion revenue generates more long-term business growth than new revenue. AI-driven insights provided by Staircase are what make it possible for any organization to identify expansion opportunities in real time by making it much easier for Customer Success teams to bring in more revenue for their organizations. 

Learn more about Staircase: AI-based customer intelligence platform