Top 5 Data Sources for Customer Insights in 2024

With the emerging technological advancements in the last decade, companies started to implement different strategies to understand data from their customers and their relationship with the brands. However, a recent study shows that 80% of companies still use only basic customer analytics tools. Thus most of the crucial insights from customers go unnoticed. 

This article explains why customer insights are important, how to analyze them, and how they can be turned into actions that help businesses grow.

Figure 1. The rate of customers who state customer experience is vital in making purchasing decisions

Why are customer insights important?

Through gathering customer insights, you can:

• Identify pain points, the main drivers of satisfaction, customers’ journey, and your company’s unique assets.
• Assess how customers behave and interact with your products, services, or brand.
• Understand the acquisition processes by analyzing the channels new customers use.
• Evaluate retention rates, the reasons behind customer churn, or the typical characteristics of customers who do not purchase services/products of your company anymore.

How to work with customer insights?

There are 4 steps in working with insights from customer data:

1. Collection: Collect consumer data through different channels such as social media, e-mails, phone calls, etc.
2. Enrichment: Enrich the data with internal or external data sources such as segmentation data
3. Analysis:
   1. Visualize the data to get a grasp of the overall situation
   2. Select a model to analyze the data you have
4. Experimentation / operationalization: Based on insights, users need to carry out experiments to operationalize these insights

Where to get consumer insights?

Research shows that consumers share almost two Mb of data on the internet per second daily. So, there is a high potential for gathering insights from the customer data regarding purchasing behavior. 

There are five main ways of gathering consumer insights, and you can apply them to increase the reputation of your business, its success, or sales.

1. Feedback Surveys & Reviews

Bad employee attitude and unfriendly service are two of the most stated reasons driving customers away from brands.

So, paying attention to customers’ reviews and feedback can help understand the customers’ satisfaction level with the company, and that data can be compared with their purchasing behavior. By understanding their concerns, you can take action and implement new strategies.

Figure 2. Drivers of customer churn

Here are some questions to consider for your feedback surveys:

• How would you define our brand in general?
• What are your three most important drives for using our products/services?
• What would you change about our products/services?

To learn more about customer feedback analysis, check our article.

Companies have also started to leverage sentiment analysis services to analyze the emotional tones in their customers’ communications, including texts, feedback, calls, or reviews to better understand their customers’ feelings about their products or services. To conduct sentiment analysis on customer insights, labeling the existing data as either positive, negative, or neutral is required. Some companies are offering labeled data to train the models for sentiment analysis.

You can also check our data-driven list of sentiment analysis services. 

2. Phone Calls

Although there is a trend for digitalization, 76% of customers state that they prefer phone calls over e-mails or social media contact. So, there is a high potential for finding critical insights regarding your services, products, and customers’ thoughts about your brand.

3. A/B Testing

Even though companies develop their own customer insight solutions based on data-driven approaches, they might not always succeed in identifying customers’ needs. That’s why conducting A/B tests in a way that offers customers different variations and measuring which one gets more attraction to understand the real-life consequences of the implementations is crucial. 

Figure 3. An example of A/B testing on a website

By conducting A/B tests, companies can get insights into their customers’ preferences which help them to keep or change their strategies.

4. Social Listening

Even though surveys and customer reviews can be effective methods of gathering valuable customer insights, they are not the only channels through which customers can share their opinions on products, services, or brands in general. Social media is also considered an effective means (Twitter, Instagram, personal blogs) to understand how the public perceives the company.

5. Chatbot Services

It is estimated that the chatbot market will reach $1.3 billion by 2025, and almost half of the large companies from the survey plan to invest in their chatbot services. Chatbots can provide a 24/7 service, so they are more available to customers than human agents.

Conversational chatbots can be a great source for consumer insights so companies can analyze customer needs, queries, or complaints. Then they can detect the areas that need to be improved.

You can also check our article on digital transformation in customer experience for a more comprehensive account.

If you have further questions about customer insights, do not hesitate to reach us: