Just about every business leader will tell you they care about analyzing customer data. So why do some companies predict customer behaviors with ease while others struggle to gain valuable insights from data? One of the most effective ways of utilizing customer data is to commit to a customer intelligence strategy.
When you gather customer intelligence, you aren’t compiling random data points from someone’s purchase history or customer service interactions. You’re mining the data for a deeper understanding of who your customers are, what marketing efforts inspire them, and how to service their needs for sustained business growth.
Here’s a primer on customer intelligence, plus customer intelligence examples to show how much value you can glean from customer information.
What is customer intelligence?
Customer intelligence (CI) is the process of collecting, analyzing, and leveraging customer data to enhance decision-making and personalize customer interactions. Businesses leverage customer intelligence data to learn about customer behaviors and then use these findings to improve customer satisfaction and boost sales.
A well-executed customer intelligence strategy is all about taking a thoughtful approach, Google’s chief data strategist, Neil Hoyne, explains in an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast.
“Don’t collect information just for the sake of collecting it,” Neil says. “Think about how you might use it to personalize your emails, [customer] experiences, and deliver better value to them. … Customers are OK with sharing that data if they know the value exchange and if they know what they get back.”
Customer intelligence focuses on long-term improvement, and this should guide both your data collection and your data usage. You’re not just documenting present-day customer behavior. You’re using data to plan for the future, whether that’s crafting new marketing strategies, revamping customer communications, identifying at-risk customers, or starting a customer retention program.
Strategies for gathering customer intelligence
- Customer feedback forms and surveys
- Customer relationship management (CRM) systems
- Social media analytics
- Website and app analytics
- Email marketing engagement metrics
- Customer loyalty programs and rewards systems
Neil suggests having a plan before you start pulling together consumer data.
“What I encourage you to do is take a step back before you go into that data, write down your hypotheses,” Neil says. “What do you think you could do to better connect with your customers? What information, if you had it, would change the way that you build products, or that you interact with customers? And then you go get the data.”
As a business owner, you have options for gathering different types of customer intelligence. Here are some strategic ways to gather customer intelligence to improve your business:
Customer feedback forms and surveys
Use forms and surveys to gather direct insights into customer experiences. Analyzing data from these sources can help you better understand customer expectations—even the needs of individual customers.
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems
CRM data helps you gain insights into the customer journey and tailor your marketing strategies. A CRM can also help you break your client base into specific customer segments based on demographics or user behavior, each with its own best practices for promoting engagement and sales conversions.
Social media analytics
Use social listening tools to monitor mentions, reviews, and comments. Taken together, this data can help you understand customer preferences and emerging market trends and inform your marketing teams’ future campaigns.
Website and app analytics
Use tools like Google Analytics and heat maps to track customer behaviors on webpages or apps. You might track navigation paths, time spent on pages, and shopping cart abandonment across multiple channels and platforms.
Email marketing engagement metrics
Analyzing open rates, click-through rates, and email engagement can help you understand customer concerns. Use the customer insights you glean from email campaigns to refine your future promotions.
Customer loyalty programs and rewards systems
Collect customer information such as shopping preferences and demographic details via loyalty programs. One of the benefits of customer intelligence is that you can put this data to work for you almost instantly, whether that’s in product design, marketing, or market expansion.
Ways to use customer intelligence in ecommerce
- Personalized marketing campaigns
- Improved product offerings
- Enhanced customer service
- Optimized website performance
- Customer segmentation
- Market trend predictions
- Customer retention
Businesses in every industry collect and analyze data about their customers, but what do they do with it? Here are seven customer intelligence endeavors you might pursue using the data you’ve assembled:
Personalized marketing campaigns
By analyzing customer intelligence such as psychographic data (about decision-making), transactional data (about purchases), and behavioral data (about engagement), you can create persona-based customer communications tailored to different customer segments by analyzing customer intelligence such as:
- Psychographic data (about decision-making)
- Transactional data (about purchases)
- Behavioral data (about engagement)
A tip from Neil: Use your email software to insert customer names.
“Research supports that adding somebody’s first name into the subject line of an email significantly improves the likelihood that they will open that email,” he notes. “They will engage with that email and [it] decreases the likelihood they will unsubscribe.”
Improved product offerings
Need inside information about what new products you should offer? You can gather qualitative data from focus groups to identify gaps in your product lines or areas for improvement. Combining this attitudinal data about customers’ feelings and opinions with a sentiment analysis will help you develop products aligned with customer expectations and needs.
Neil suggests an unorthodox moment to solicit customer input: right after they’ve made a purchase.
“The height of trust … that customers have with your business is after they give you money,” he says. “‘I gave you money. I really hope your product shows up. I hope I love it as much as I do on your website.’”
Neil encourages retailers to look at this high-trust moment as an opportunity to ask additional questions. These questions can be about design, functionality, or anything else you can leverage to improve future product development.
Enhanced customer service
Analyze customer success data and customer support interactions to identify common pain points. Then task your customer service team with implementing solutions to improve the overall customer journey.
For example, using data from your website and third-party sources like social media platforms, you could create a streamlined FAQ page or an improved chatbot experience.
Optimized website performance
Behavioral data from site interactions can reveal trends like cart abandonment, broken links, or navigation issues. Use these customer signals to optimize your web design, adjust product page layout, and streamline the checkout process. This can enhance customer experience and improve your conversion rates.
Customer segmentation
Analyze customer data to create customer segments based on purchase frequency or brand loyalty. This can help you create targeted emails for different groups or craft loyalty programs appealing to specific customer segments. You won’t just be driving more sales, you’ll be fostering stronger customer relationships that can last years—if not decades.
Market trend predictions
You can anticipate future customer demands or behavior shifts by studying data from internal and external sources. This enables proactive decision-making and strategic planning that aligns with market trends and customer preferences.
One trend that’s piqued the interest of seemingly every ecommerce company is artificial intelligence (AI). Neil says that curiosity is well-placed.
"We have to look at applying this technology within business. … It’s very powerful, but there always needs to be that human element to say, is this message the right thing for our customers?” he advises.
It’s worth being curious about this new technology but consider where it might fit best in your business.
“You should play with it for yourself, but you shouldn’t look at it as something that you have to immediately integrate into your business or worry about being left behind,” Neil says.
“Your business is successful because of everything you’ve done to this point. AI should help to accelerate or transform it, not to dramatically change it and head in a different direction. … AI sometimes can be a solution in search of a problem."
Customer retention
The tactics described above can also be used to reduce churn and keep customers away from your competition. For instance, if your CI data shows one of your customer segments responds favorably to flash sales, you can try to run sales more frequently.
Take note that any CI initiative must protect customer privacy by adhering to laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). This builds trust with customers while ensuring data security in line with regulatory requirements.
Customer intelligence FAQ
What are the benefits of customer intelligence?
Customer intelligence helps businesses enhance the customer experience, improve marketing strategies, and foster brand loyalty. It does this by analyzing data to better understand customer behavior, preferences, and needs.
What is the meaning of customer intelligence?
Customer intelligence (CI) means gathering, analyzing, and applying customer data to understand behaviors, preferences, and needs. Businesses use CI to improve their decision-making and enhance customer experiences.
What is the difference between customer intelligence and business intelligence?
Customer intelligence focuses on analyzing customer-specific data to enhance experiences and relationships. Business intelligence encompasses broader organizational data to improve overall decision-making and performance. Business intelligence does include data about a company’s customers, but it also includes elements like organizational structure, product design, and financial data—all of which combine to form a comprehensive snapshot of the organization.
