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Of course you should automate your insights work

January 22, 2017

Sam Richardson

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Actions speak louder than words

as we keep talking a lot about creating customer-centric organizations and the importance of bringing the customers to the center of your business. In order for your organization to get a significant commercial effect of your insights work, you have a lot to win by automating the entire process. If not, this is what you will be missing:

  1. The momentum in your business development throughout your organization
  2. The commitment from your organization
  3. The commercial drive that sets you apart from the competition

Importantly, these are all crucial accelerators in successful businesses. However, there are many and extensive benefits of insights automation.

READ ALSO: Power-up your Marketing Mix with brand expertise and data science

6 killer reasons to automate your customer insights work:

1. You will keep your customers close.

Knowledge will be fed to you with the latest and customer-based insights on a daily basis.

2. Your entire organization will keep running in the same direction.

A new customer insight might have a different meaning to different stakeholders in your organization. Imagine doing this continuously while using the automated insights process to always distribute relevant insights and the next best actions to relevant decision makers – where the point of action is.

READ ALSO: Brand tracking – your most valuable tracking tool

3. You will have a full understanding of the customer’s symptoms and the root-cause of problems.

Let’s call it a valuable by-product of every customer insight. This new insight can feed directly into product development teams to support continuous innovation and improvements. This often exterminates customer issues that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. You can iteratively prototype, build, test, and adjust accordingly to meet the changing consumer requirements. Iterating fast lets you economically test ideas and change them until you find the recipe to achieve better business outcomes.

4. Less costs and errors.

You substitute human weaknesses with the accuracy of smart and reliable machines. Therefore, you will bypass the expensive costs associated with manual errors and inefficiencies. In addition, automation done right also saves a number of administrative labor costs.

5. Stay updated of the ongoing process.

You will not only have a detailed view of each and every individual and their needs and footprints, but you will also have a bird’s-eye view of your whole insights process and results – wherever and whenever you like.

READ ALSO: Benefits of Path to Purchase analysis

6. Spend your time where it generates the best effect.

The automated process will save you a lot of manual hours because you can make changes more quickly and frequently. Therefore, you can spend more time on perfecting the business processes and empowering your colleagues about profit driving daily actions.

Constantly changing consumer habits calls for constantly new insights

The behavior of the consumers and the buying public has changed and will keep changing dramatically. Additionally, consumers can come from any part of the world and they all value very different things. Therefore, this will take a deep understanding of the consumer insights that shape the buying patterns of your customers.

Consequently, without gaining insights into these continuously changing individuals, groups, and their needs and behavior, your organization will never be able to efficiently develop the processes, products and services the consumers want from you. Hence, you risk spending vast amounts of money trying to promote offerings they don’t want in a way that won’t gain their attention.

A speedy process of automated insights supports more relevant decisions. So, you need to accept the fact that needs and behavior today changes often and fast.

7 insights proving the need of automated insights management:

  1. Social media has made the response from consumers quick and unrelenting.
  2. Social media influencers can swiftly “build up” a product that they like to their own circle of influence, or just as easily bring it down.
  3. What appeals to customers one day may not work the next. Consumer-centric marketing is not just a buzzword, it’s hardcore reality.
  4. There is a growing desire for multiplicity and customer experiences are expected to offer more than before. People are craving more active participation.
  5. We want to be hyper efficient. We are seeking ever-smarter and more efficient ways to manage our day and solve issues.
  6. There is a new appreciation of the digital as a source of inspiration. The means to create and participate are now in the hands of everyone.
  7. Personalization is booming. Advances in technology mean that products are able to read consumers and give them what they want; sometimes without even being asked.

READ ALSO: Optimise your marketing budget with Marketing Mix Modeling

To what level are your customer insights-actions automated today?

Launching products or services without digging into the reasons why consumers want them is putting you out of competition. To become a successful customer-centric business, there are of course a number of tricky tech issues, complex analysis, specific understanding of your industry and more to consider. We are good at that here at Nepa. So, why not get in touch with us and we promise to get you on track.

Ola Bergfeldt
Head of Global Communications

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Customers decide what lives or dies – building towards customer-centric growth

January 19, 2017

Sam Richardson

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Towards customer-centric growth

in a drive to achieve goals, organizations tend to lose sight of who their customers are. They start to see them as “things” that need to be optimized for different purposes. To turn your business into a customer-centric and profit-driving mode, you have to bring your customers to the center of your business and make them feel your honest intentions.

What´s your centricity?

Turning your business into full customer-centric mode, you have to walk the walk. Can you recognize yourself in any of these crucial don’ts?

  • Staying fully sales-focused in fear of losing business deals hence making it hard to deliver necessary customer-oriented experiences. You just want to sell and deliver your short term reports.
  • Insisting on a strict marketing focus. You will most likely end up being more or less brand- or product-centric; not customer-centric.
  • Consumers are fed up with corporate, ungraspable messages, and advertising. They want to find what they need fast and without hassle. That is in relation to the navigation of your website, the interactions with a shop/contact center, and more.

If you recognize yourself in any of these crucial don’ts, then maybe you should reconsider your strategy. Becoming a more customer-centric business will result with better alternative results.

Becoming customer-centric makes commercial sense

Consequently, without changing your own mindset or treating customer centricity as a business strategy, you will most likely fail. Becoming customer-centric is not a temporary campaign. When handled correctly, it can become your continuously growing and positively differentiating money machine.

According to the bestselling author and consultant, Peter Fisk in his book Customer Genius: Becoming a Customer Centric Business (great book by the way), you have some heavy stats to lean on in your decision:

  • 98 % of dissatisfied customers never complain, they just leave you.
  • 65 % of lost customers are due to negative experiences.
  • 75 % of the negative experiences are not related to your products.
  • The biggest reason people leave is because they don’t feel appreciated.

Your business objective should be to provide great experiences for your customers at the:

  • point of sales
  • point of service (after an actual sale)
  • different points of innovation and development in your organization

From doing this, you will benefit a lot from incorporating the voice and footprints of your customers in early stages of innovation and development. You will drive profit and gain competitive advantages that your business most certainly haven’t touched before.

Who is the right customer for your business?

Who are your most valuable customers? How do you make sure they stay happy? When you have found the recipe of success, you want to copy that recipe and apply it to more customers and prospects.

It’s your customers who decides in what way your organization should be organized to “please” them. After all, they are the source of your profits and the ones who dictate what lives or dies – eventually. In organizations with outstanding business success, corporate strategies ARE customer-centric strategies.

6 steps on the way to customer-centric growth

Let’s stop talking about fluffy business opportunities and let’s start talking about a customer-centric approach that will get your business going:

  1. You must access more data than what is generated from the static survey reports and the “experienced” gut feelings you might trust today.
  2. Start gathering customer data from multiple channels from both feedback and actual behavior – the footprints of your customers.
  3. Gather and analyze the data continuously – more or less on a daily basis; as today’s consumers tend to change their behavior very often and unexpectedly.
  4. Combine the data and analyze it deeply to better understand and categorize the needs and actions of your customers. Ask your research/insights supplier about their data science skills as well as how they solve this “issue”.
  5. Distribute the customer insights throughout your organization and provide your different stakeholders with the next best actions. This should be accompanied by the financial value that comes with the action being performed and that is related to your own KPI´s.
  6. Automate the entire process and begin to harvest the fruits of your investment.

Overall, I have only scratched the surface. To become a true customer-centric business, there is of course a number of tricky tech issues, complex analysis, specific understanding of your industry and more to consider. That’s actually our area of expertise at Nepa. So, why not get in touch with us at Nepa and we promise to get you started.

Ola Bergfeldt
Head of Global Communications