Customer insight

What is "Customer Insight"?

Customer insight is the vehicle by which you can drive a customer up the satisfaction scale towards advocacy, the highest evolution of customer satisfaction.

It is a profound understanding of your customers based on their behaviour, experiences, opinions, wants or desires. It is not the raw customer data produced by CRM systems. Surveys and CRM systems can tell you how much / how many or when. Insight tells you ‘why’. It reveals what driving the numbers in one direction or another. Of course in uncovering the ‘why’, the numbers needed for benchmarking and tracking become apparent anyway.

‘Insight’ shouldn’t be confused with ‘research’. Research provides snapshot data, usually delivered several months after it could have been useful and doesn’t provide the actionable outcomes needed to improve the elements under research. And that assumes you’re researching the right elements in the first place – the ones that matter most to your customer. Those are what customer insight reveals.

Insight is about the strategic interpretation of your customer data and information, providing a rich and deep understanding of customers. To succeed you must know what's information you need, how to collect it and how to use it to inform your strategic and tactical actions. For if no actions are forthcoming, what future value did you hope to gain in doing the survey or commissioning the research in the first place?

Much can be done quickly and easily to listen to the customer. However, the real challenge is cultural. Being customer centric and using insight is not just about being able to collect data and information. It’s about having the capability to turn that information into action and it requires a culture which values insight and is willing to act upon it.

SynGro has the expertise in bringing about the changes necessary to make your organisation customer centric. See our Consulting Services for more detail