Companies spend billions of dollars every year to gain information about their customers, buying data from market research firms, running study after study, and using big data and sophisticated analytical models to make sense of it all. However, most of this data is likely available to your competitors and not living up to your aspiration of gaining meaningful behavioral understanding of your customers.
How to Gain a Competitive Advantage on Customer Insights
To stay ahead of competitors, companies need to implement a system of privileged insights: unique and relevant information about customers that competitors don’t have access to.
Based on research into 12 companies, the authors detail the ways companies can gain their own privileged insights — including creating a more robust and engaging customer service experience, integrating customers into product and service development, and observing and interacting with customers while they use products.
They also detail various best practices. The first is to build trust. Customers that see their lives or businesses intrinsically linked and improved because of what a company offers are much more likely to engage and more willing to exchange unique information and insight into their core needs and challenges. The second: Privileged insights should be embedded into existing customer touch points (e.g., customer service, warranty support, product delivery, etc.). And third: Every business unit should be empowered to make decisions based on these unique insights.