Knowing who your customers are, and how they perceive your product is the fundamentals of establishing a brand. Numerous businesses are now focusing more on consumer behavior than ever before, because of its added benefits to a business and customer alike. Brands use customer behavior analysis to uncover the needs of their customer, behavior patterns, and personal preference to bring them value-adding products.
Similarly, as brands offer customers their desired value proposition, the churn rate decreases while the conversion rate increases. Safe to say, understanding the behavior of your customers can be beneficial to the business and its end-users alike. It is imperative to understand your business by knowing your customers and here are some essential things to consider before you start.
The Need to Understand a Customer Behavioral Analysis
Before you use the results of your consumer behavioral analysis, first understand what questions you want the analysis to answer. How customers come to a buying decision or what product or service they prefer the best is only the tip of the iceberg. Base your analysis to understand the following main fields, and then translate the findings into action points to further advance your business:
Can Predict Customer Value
What value do customers base on your product or service, and what value is the product or service delivering in actuality.
Can Personalize Shopping Experience
What bespoke customer journey is most sought after, and what you can do to improve it? Finding a profitable niche and targeting, and optimizing it will help your business in the longer run.
Can Improve Customer Retention
Find areas in your behavioral data that highlight “why” your customers aren’t buying from you today, and then remove those bottlenecks to foster retention.
Additionally, here are 5 simple ways to understand the behavior of your customers and make it profitable for your business.
1. Pay attention to Customer Feedback
Perhaps one of the most effective ways of understanding your customers, and their behavior is by focusing on their feedback. Customer responses have valuable insights into what goes on in the minds of the customers, and what their opinion is about the product of the brand. Use the data from customer relationship management software to find areas of concern, and test those claims against quality control.
As a business, understanding what’s wrong with your product, and why there was a bad review can help your business grow towards sustainability. Evaluating and understanding customer feedback can also present numerous opportunities to expand your product.
2. Use Customer Personas, Community Forums, and Virtual Focus Groups
A business is nothing without its customers, and factoring in user behavior is the key to long-term sustainability. Look up community forums where your products are being discussed, and periodically observe how customers behave and voice their opinions.
It is an effective way to get pointers on how your product is perceived, evaluate the findings against your customer personas, and update it when necessary. Additionally, if you are not sure what to make of the customer behavioral data – conduct focus group testing to understand customer behavior more effectively.
3. Look for Patterns in Your Analysis
Each customer is unique and won’t have the same experience or buying intention as another user. However, overcomplicating and categorizing customer behavior can do more harm for your business than good. Simply look for commonalities in behavior, and segment your audience accordingly to understand the main motives of making a purchase.
Find particular patterns and trends using data from CRM and segment your audience based on their characteristics. Find social trends that influence buying decisions, and coordinate peer recommendations, cultural fads, societal norms, and more into your product promotions, and offerings.
4. Create a Voice of Customer Program
Find behavioral patterns of your customers using a voice of customer program, and understand their needs and suggestions on a personal level. Understanding the minds of your users can not only help in increasing traffic and sales, but also help in product planning, and developing marketing strategies. The data collected using VOC programs can help improve customer journeys and reduce pain points. VOC can help brands understand their customer behaviors to:
- Find pain points as to why sales aren’t up to par.
- Modify customer personas to better cater to their desires, needs, and preferences.
- Prioritize key actions needed to create or enhance the value proposition.
- Identify areas where your product can be branded and when rebranding is necessary.
Having a voice of customer program can open many doors to understanding the minds of your user base, and developing a marketing and social media strategy to foster conversions and brand loyalty.
5. Connect Data Across Platforms
The more data and insights you have about your customers, the better decisions you can make. Understand the behavior of your customers by connecting data sources from various platforms to get a holistic picture of what your user base thinks of your brand and its products.
The added connectivity helps in further categorizing events of behavioral data, finding customer attributes more effectively and linking transactional data for sound decision making. You can also view results of customer engagement metrics across the platform as well as customer service data to understand interactions, query frequencies, and more.
