Customer Experience

Why Customer Insights are the Most Valuable Resource for eCommerce in 2023

Customer Insights

Right now, less than 40% of marketers are using one of the most valuable tools at their disposal for making smarter business decisions — customer insights.For businesses, it can be overwhelming trying to sift through mountains of data and trying to gather useful insights for their problems, like anticipating trends, boosting sales, and trying out new products.One of the best tools for understanding your market's needs is customer insight. In this article, we'll tell you why customer insight is so important and how your business can utilize it today.Keep reading to learn more.

What Is Customer Insight?

Customer insight refers to how deeply businesses understand their target customers. This goes far beyond surface-level observations. It is about analyzing human behaviors to figure out the likes, dislikes, needs, wants, and context behind customer behavior.When research is done properly, companies can understand what their customers need and why they need it. It improves how effectively a company can communicate with its customers, and ultimately increase sales.

Why Is Customer Insight So Important?

So what are consumer insights and why do businesses need to spend valuable time and resources finding them? Let's take a look at how customer insights help brands.

Improves the Customer Journey

The customer journey refers to every step that your prospects take when interacting with your brand. With proper customer insights measures, you can significantly improve the customer experience.After listening to feedback from customers, you can make improvements in different areas of the journey, all the way from the first impression to the final sale. You can fill in gaps in the funnel to make a seamless journey for the customer.

Make Product Upgrades Easier

If your business has a product that is constantly being optimized for the changing needs of its audience, using consumer insights can help identify issues easily and add features that your customers want.

Stay Ahead of the Competition

If you know your audience, you can also be confident in decisions regarding your marketing strategy and demographic trends. By staying on top of market research, you can strike first before your competitors do.

Promotes Personalization

Every year, personalization becomes more and more important. To personalize your marketing, you need to have customer insights. They'll help inform you what your customers love and why they love them.With customer insights, you can create accurate and specific buyer personas. Then you can create strategies that are tailored to those target avatars.One great example of this is Spotify's "Wrapped" campaign. At the end of every year, Spotify sends a "listening report" to every one of its users to show them what they listen to over the year.By mentioning specific songs that users loved, a deep, personal experience is made. This creates a stronger bond between the customer and the company.

Boosts Brand Development

Connecting with your customers on an emotional level is an important part of the customer experience. If they only see your business as a faceless corporation that sells random products, you'll never be able to develop your brand the right way.Gathering customer insights is a great way to find what your customers really care about, like the social issues they support.

Identifies Reasons for Customer Churn

All companies have to deal with some amount of customer churn, but it can be highly frustrating if you don't know why it's happening. If your business doesn't understand why customers are leaving, you won't be able to prevent it from increasing.Customer experience insights can help your business understand the issues your customers face. This can help you fine-tune your customer service to make sure you address the problems better.

Helps You Break Into New Markets

To break into new markets successfully, you need to know just about everything about your potential customers. This includes their likes, dislikes, preferences, shopping behavior, and other factors.Gathering deep customer insights can help you build strategies to break into new markets.

The Untapped Data Source That Can Give Your Business Valuable Customer Insights

At any point, businesses have a handful of problems that need to be solved. They need to:

  • Identify product updates
  • Anticipate future trends
  • Boost sales on various platforms
  • Take new products to market
  • Figure out which markets to target

But the problem is that gathering insight from the seemingly endless amount of data can be incredibly cumbersome. Manual research and analysis methods like offline marketing, focus groups, and agile research take months to execute — not to mention the high cost that comes with it.They can often lead to misleading data if not done correctly. This can directly impact sales, KPIs, and job security.The good news is that most companies have an incredibly powerful pool of data already built into their business — customer reviews & ratings. With the skyrocketing popularity of eCommerce, the volume and credibility of reviews and ratings have increased dramatically as well.According to Trustpilot, a whopping 93% of global consumers say that online reviews influence their purchases. 94% say that they'll purchase a competitor's product as a result of a negative review.

Read Our Latest eBookUntapped Data: Why Reviews & Ratings Haven't Been Leveraged for Insights Yet

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The Value of a Reviews & Ratings Analysis Platform

Having access to raw reviews and ratings data is one thing, but being able to meaningfully analyze the data and answer important questions is another.There is an abundance of valuable information to be found in online reviews, but without a meaningful reviews & ratings analysis platform, that data goes to waste.Although there are platforms out there that help aggregate and organize R&R data, many are left with a vague data dump that leaves them with more questions than answers.But with proper analysis and modern AI solutions, organizations can analyze tens of thousands of reviews and gain valuable customer insights that provide clear, actionable steps that businesses can take to move forward.

How Yogi Gives You Powerful Insights in 3 Steps

With Yogi, you can easily gain valuable insights from consumer feedback that already exists for your business. It does this with three simple yet powerful steps.

1. Aggregate Reviews

Yogi will scrape unlimited sources of customer feedback about your products from both public and private review sources and create a centralized repository to house them. This includes sources like Walmart, Target, Amazon, and Bazaarvoice.

2. Organize Reviews

Next, using cutting-edge AI, Yogi will organize reviews based on several different categories, including keywords, topics, sentiment, and more. You can customize these filters to fit the unique needs of your business.

3. Analyze Reviews

With your customer feedback organized, you can then easily sift through all customer reviews and ratings data to find valuable insights that you can apply to your marketing, product, and brand improvements.Instead of waiting weeks or months for customer analysis through other methods, you can get answers to your company's biggest problems within minutes.

The Cost of Inaction

Many brands take a "wait-and-see" approach when it comes to their customer research and marketing. There are several excuses that businesses make:

  • "We spend a lot on our sales team and it's their job to acquire new business."
  • "It's too disruptive to start new processes."
  • "It's an expense that we can't afford right now."

But businesses need to understand what it is costing them by not utilizing important customer insights in their marketing. Nowadays, customer shopping behavior is quickly changing — especially due to the pandemic.Of the 75% of Americans who have changed their shopping behavior since the pandemic, about 40% say they have switched brands. This is twice as many as 2019!This is indicative of how the consumer landscape is changing. Customers now have near unlimited access to "word-of-mouth" feedback. More than ever, the quality of the customer experience and the product themselves are becoming the most powerful marketing tools.Although it might seem like investing in new analytics methods can be costly, not doing anything can be much more expensive in the long run. It can lead to:

  • Decreased brand loyalty
  • Missed sales opportunities
  • Wasted marketing spend
  • Falling behind the competition
  • Mismatched consumer expectations
  • Overspending on promotional reviews
  • Overlooking valuable product improvements

Your potential customers don't need much to decide that it's time to switch brands. Make sure you're taking the necessary steps to understand and retain them.

Start Turning Consumer Insights Into More Sales

Gaining customer insight is one of the most valuable tools that a business can add to its arsenal to solve a variety of problems in the workplace.From marketing to sales to customer service to branding, knowing exactly what your target market is looking for can help you create better product experiences and improve brand sentiment.If you're ready to gain actionable insights from your reviews and ratings, get a free analysis with us today!

Looking for a deeper look into customer sentiment for your products and your competitor's products?

Yogi’s K-means-based AI platform analyses Reviews & Ratings at the deepest level possible across all competitors and retailers. Save time searching for insights so you can move the needle for your brand today.