How to Develop a Better Customer Experience Through Customer Intelligence

Just like in the brick and mortar world, all online businesses can be sorted into three groups: ones that strive to provide the lowest prices, ones that pride themselves on offering the highest quality goods and ones that provide their customers with superior services and experiences.

There are arguments (and money) to be made with each of them, but in the online world, one of these models is the clear winner. In fact, by 2020, customer experience is projected to trump both product quality and price and emerge as the key brand differentiator. According to a recent Walker study, 86 percent of buyers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.

So how can you ensure that you’re providing the best customer experience for your potential customers? Two words: customer intelligence.

What is customer intelligence?

In a nutshell, customer intelligence is where artificial intelligence meets customer behavior data. It’s an AI-driven process that marketers can use to uncover insights into customer behavior to help them make informed decisions. While most customer analysis stops at determining the “who,” “what,” “when” and “where” of customer behavior, customer intelligence goes further to reveal the “why,” or intent. This enables marketers to anticipate their customers’ needs and offer them the right experience at the right time. To do this, customer data is gathered from as many sources as possible and processed in real time to reveal actionable insights that marketers can use to engage customers on a personal level across multiple channels.

So how can you use customer intelligence to improve customer experience?

First, customer intelligence offers up winning suggestions to develop engaging content. In the past, you might have cobbled together data from your CRM, Facebook and Google Analytics and any other analytical tools that you rely on, and dumped them into a spreadsheet and analyzed them. Customer intelligence brings these sources together with other third party data and suggests dynamic content strategies. The result is accurate data-driven insights into your customers and an improved marketing strategy.

Second, you’ll be able to fine tune your customer personas. Using AI-based tools provides new levels of insight into customers and helps refine customer personas, making them more accurate and comprehensive. This gives you the ability to create content that’s more on point and it also gives you the resources needed to create new customer personas that you might have previously overlooked.

Third, you’ll be able to create highly personalized content for the entire marketing journey. With actionable insights provided by AI-based customer intelligence, you’ll also understand what types of content work best for each customer segment at each step of the journey, whether you’re turning social media followers into website visitors or customers into repeat customers. You’ll spend less time analyzing and more time creating and testing new content.

Lastly, even accurate customer personas and content that engages people all along the buyer’s journey won’t help you gain many customers without meeting the right people in the right place at the right time. Here again, customer intelligence can provide insights into which channels work best when.

For an easy way to make the most of customer intelligence, reach out to us here at Mediaplanet. We’d be happy to provide you with content marketing campaigns that take advantage of the latest advances in this valuable resource.