What is customer knowledge? One of the main reasons for the existence of a company is its customers: if the customer inspires the equation that the service or product delivered must solve, he is also the recipient and the judge. Without it, there is no activity, which is why customer satisfaction is one of the major challenges of any company. To conquer and retain them, it is important to keep your information about them up to date, to enrich your database to make your actions and exchanges more reliable. All of the data available to you for this purpose includes the area of customer knowledge. We tell you what this consists of.
Collect data for in-depth customer knowledge
For a company, customer knowledge aims to benefit, thanks to the data, from a unique, global, most precise, and relevant customer vision possible. This approach allows you to continuously know the position of your consumers in relation to your offers, to understand who you are addressing, to identify their needs and expectations. In other words, thanks to customer knowledge, you will be able to constantly improve your value proposition.
To do this, it is imperative to go through data collection, which must take into consideration all the points of contact in place between you and your customers. There is an impressive amount of usable data, it will necessarily be necessary to determine upstream which ones are interesting for the achievement of your marketing and commercial objectives.
Data types
Among the truly useful information for your prospecting, part comes from socio-demographic data. These include the age, family situation, or geographical location of your customers. These elements can, for example, be used to establish a typical profile of your consumers.
We differentiate between buying behaviors which represent another kind of crucial data to evaluate your customers. These relate to the history of purchases made (recency, frequency, amount), or even the products and services most requested by consumers.
Of course, there is other information to consider, such as web browsing data. You can also focus on interactions with your brand and customer feedback.
Analyze collected customer data
Data collection is therefore only the very first step in customer knowledge, and to continue, the optimization and analysis of the information at your disposal will be carried out. In simple terms, you must classify, complete, study, and cross-reference the elements in order to qualify your database. A well-conducted analysis will allow you, for example, to establish a predictive score revealing which customers in your base would or would not be receptive to a given offer. At this level, we are talking more about data mining than simple analysis.
It’s hard to talk about customer-centric data analytics without mentioning marketing segmentation. Simply put, this is the operation by which you group your customers into homogeneous groups to create sub-markets. It is carried out according to various criteria which make it possible to bring together consumers with similar profiles. Depending on the characteristics considered to perform the segmentation, it is possible to achieve very distinct objectives. You can find other details about customer and prospect categories on some e-marketing sites that develop the concept of segmentation. Of course, the aspects of segmentation and targeting represent a subject in their own right within customer knowledge. Thanks to the analysis of your database, you will be able to refine your prospecting and targeting methods by taking into account the segments in which your contacts are classified.
In addition to perfecting your customer knowledge, marketing segmentation has many advantages. This approach helps, among other things, to define priority actions in marketing and prospecting. Controlled segmentation is one of the best ways to improve your ROI (Return on Investment).
Use the information at your disposal wisely
The last step of customer knowledge consists of exploiting the information collected, augmented, and analyzed. It’s about how you use data to adapt your marketing and sales strategy to this new, more comprehensive view.
In fact, you guarantee maximum performance for all of your campaigns.
The exploitation of data includes by extension the improvement of your offers and your products. In particular, you can determine new pricing to better correspond to a particular type of consumer. It will also help you methodically direct your loyalty actions. Extending the customer experience by putting satisfaction at the heart of your policy will become more intuitive. As you will have understood, the possibilities are numerous when the company benefits from advanced customer knowledge.
Given the level of skill required, these procedures are most often entrusted to professionals. Depending on the context, it will often be advantageous to involve experts in customer knowledge to accompany you throughout the process.