Customer insights and analytics

Being customer centric. Jeff Bezos and Amazon, they are famous for it. But what exactly is it? Well, by definition, it is building and expanding your business based on the outcomes that your customers want. Now honestly, it might be the only path for business growth being that we live in a day and an age where customer word of mouth, whether it's good or bad, spreads like wildfire over social media. Okay, so you as an organization, you make the decision, we are going to be customer centric. Now what? How will you design your customer experience? How can you keep in touch with your customers as the business evolves to ensure that you're calibrated to their voice, to the voice of the customer? So this is where customer insights, consumer analytics, and customer experience, they all come together to provide a real understanding of what your target market cares about the most. So when you think about the role of these disciplines, think of the part that your customer plays in informing your organization. It's almost like a hub to a spoke. As long as you keep that center point lined up with what's driving true positive customer experience then the other disciplines in the organization can help to support if. So for example, operations is responsible for managing the production of goods and services within the organization. There's a whole range of concerns that inform decision making for operations. But when you establish enhancing customer experience as a primary concern, then what it does is it strengthens how this business unit, how this business function thinks about what is important. So in other words, this is a critical set of disciplines. It combines product design, marketing, and strategy all in a way that further prioritizes how operations, production, and finance can support the company to the greatest benefit. Now the challenge for many organizations is successfully transforming how the voice of the customer is seen and how the customer insights are really brought in to action. And it's the reason why the primary pillar for marketing transformation and digital transformation efforts focus on enhancing customer experience. I think of customer insights as primarily supporting customer experience programs and companies are putting customer experience officers or CXOs in place to help lead these types of programs. At this level, the organization is looking to align and integrate customer experience with its overarching strategy. And in some instances, the chief marketing officer is being assigned to this new level of leadership. So the gravity, the impact, of this way of thinking has for the organization is really clear customer insights should fuel your efforts in agility too because becoming attuned to what lights up your customer's happy emotions, it takes trial and error. Now that's a strategic approach to designing the business in a way that will build lifelong fans, and if done right, sustain your bottom line. Consumer analytics needs to be bait throughout the entire organization to ensure the accuracy of your efforts and your programs, and your portfolio. Happy customers means a happy business. For your leadership, for your shareholders, and for your employees. And getting there means having a customer insights practice.