Just How Smart is your Customer Intelligence?

How well do you know your customers? Do you know what causes people to buy from you? Better yet, do you know why people sometimes choose not to buy from you?

Answer such questions, and you will be well on your way to maximizing your company's potential. But such customer intelligence is hard to come by. All too often, companies proclaim a desire to improve their understanding of their customers and better target them, yet when push comes to shove, they know little to nothing about who their best customers really are.

So just how smart is your customer intelligence? 

Customer Intelligence Defined
Customer intelligence refers to the gathering and analysis of information about your customers. Such information can come in many different forms, including:

• Demographic information
• Preferences, wants and needs
• Shopping habits
• Purchase history
• Satisfaction level with your compamy

When you have detailed customer intelligence, you can use it to cater your operations to appeal more to current and prospective customers. Among other things, customer intelligence can be used to:

• Create buyer personas
• Identify your best prospects and score new leads
• Build customer loyalty
• Increase conversion rates and overall sales
• Design new products or servicesConve
• Improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns

Improving Customer Intelligence

As most marketers know, improving customer intelligence can often be a challenge. The online realm creates a lot of possibilities, though, since it provides a way for you to automatically gather and analyze a large amount of data. You can even collect data on people who are not customers--those who browse but do not buy--to help you identify and fix problems in the sales cycle that are holding you back.

There are many potential ways to improve online customer intelligence, including: 

• Make full use of website analytics. You can use website analytics to track how people view your site, including the flow of traffic and where people tend to exit the site without buying or responding to a call to action.
• Use online surveys. The most obvious way of finding out what is going through someone's head is to ask him or her. You can use online surveys to find out what your customers like (or do not like) about your company, your products and your marketing efforts.
• Engage in social media. The social aspect of Facebook and Twitter allows you to engage directly with customers and build a real relationship with them. Not only can you use social media to pose questions or solicit feedback, but doing so is often appreciated because it shows that you care about your fans and followers.