Customer Insights Community: importance, meaning, purpose, gaining in-depth data & deep insights

What is a customer insights community?

A customer insight community is defined as a platform technology that enables companies to communicate reciprocally and directly with their customers. To this end, tools are available within the community platform to acquire, nurture and maintain valuable customer relationships. Such tools may include engagement tools, incentivization, survey tools, forums, chats, customer segmentation and tools by conducting qualitative market research. Implementing a customer insights platform is an important step in engaging customers in brand and product development and building healthy relationships with them.

Building long-term customer relationships

A customer insights community platform can be seen as a virtual brand home for consumers. Community members can provide candid feedback on the products or services they use. Companies use such platforms to understand their customers’ needs and expectations and make important business decisions based on the results. They help build meaningful, long-term relationships to gain a competitive advantage.

Gain real-time feedback with a customer insights community

Customer Insights Community platforms enable customers to come together and provide important feedback on various topics related to a product or service. Communities help companies and organizations get real-time data and honest feedback about what’s going well and what they may need to change, which helps them change their marketing communications or product strategy. This leads to a win-win situation for both the customer and the company.

Identify and improve customer needs

Insights can be gathered using a variety of qualitative and quantitative market research methods such as surveys, forum discussions, online focus groups, and more. Customer-centric companies use customer insights communities to develop and launch new products or improve existing products to meet customer needs. The use of customer insights platforms is an important step in creating consistently positive customer experiences along the entire customer journey.

Customer insights help companies understand what their customers’ preferences, wants and needs are.

A Customer Community also offers many advantages for your customers

A customer insights platform also offers your customers many benefits. They can exchange ideas within a community, support each other, provide valuable feedback on product improvements, or even participate in innovation programs. Customers today want to help develop and shape brands and products, and a customer insights platform supports them in this. Your customers thus become part of the brand. A high level of identification with a brand inevitably increases customer satisfaction. In addition, customers within a Customer Insights Community also gain valuable insights into the company, first-hand. For example, members of a Customer Insights Community can participate as product testers, such as in home use tests, and be valuable and honest feedback. Your customers will be proud if they get to test products or product concepts first.

Customer insights community platforms increase customer satisfaction

Customer insights can be gained using various qualitative and quantitative market research methods, such as surveys, interviews and discussions, polls, etc. Customer-focused companies rely on the insights of a customer insights platform to develop and launch new products or improve existing products to meet the needs and expectations of customers. The use of customer insights platforms is thus an important step on the road to comprehensive customer satisfaction. Because if you are constantly in an exchange with your customers, then you know their expectations and can respond to them.

Selecting the right target group with customer insights communities

You only gain valuable feedback if you survey the right target group. Feedback from random sources that have nothing to do with your products or brands won’t get you anywhere. You could end up making bad decisions that could even harm your business. A technologically outstanding customer insights community platform creates the right conditions here, because a good CI platform gives you the ability to segment and survey customers in a targeted way.

Qualitative and quantitative methods

A customer insights community platform allows you to collect data using a variety of methods. Data from market research and CX studies is collected using qualitative and quantitative methods. Depending on your needs, you can use one or both methods for data collection. The method chosen for data collection depends on the type of feedback the company expects. The fact is, however, that an outstanding and technologically advanced Customer Insights Community allows you to use every conceivable market research method.

Reward your customers for their engagement

A critical feature of a customer insights platform is recognizing and rewarding community participants for the time and effort they voluntarily invest in improving products and services. Appreciation and recognition improve the quality of the data obtained and ensure high levels of engagement on the platform. The likelihood of receiving high-quality feedback is higher if the audience is rewarded from time to time, for example, through coupons or special reward offers. This is an important motivating factor.

Make key business decisions based on real Customer Insights

The term Customer Insights, also known as Consumer Insights, refers to the regular and strategic collection and analysis of data about consumers’ behavior patterns, buying habits, customer needs, motives, attitudes and customer expectations with the aim of improving products, services and the customer experience and making them more attractive, ultimately to generate more sales and gain market share. The more knowledge, i.e. Customer Insights, companies can gain about existing and potential customers, the more likely they are to attract new customers, retain existing customers and increase repeat purchases. Customer Insights provide such in-depth knowledge about customers and consumers that it is ultimately possible to segment customer groups precisely according to socio-demographic and behavioral characteristics and to address these segments more specifically and personally according to their wishes and expectations, significantly improving brand communication.

Which important questions can be answered with customer insights?

There are many very important questions that companies can answer with customer insights, such as customer needs & preferences, customer and buying behaviour. Overall, it can be said that customer insights help to gain a very deeper understanding of consumers in order to optimise business decisions, strengthen customer loyalty and increase customer satisfaction. The following are examples of important questions that can be answered with customer insights.

• Which products or services are most popular with customers?
• What problems do customers have with our products or services?
• What factors influence customers’ buying decisions?
• Which marketing channels best reach our target group?
• How satisfied are customers with our service?
• What ideas do customers have for new products or improvements to existing products?
• What are the demographic characteristics of our customers (age, gender, income, etc.)?
• Which social media do our customers use most often?
• What trends and developments are there in the industry that influence our customers?
• Which keywords and search queries do customers use to find our products or services?
• How loyal are our customers and what factors influence their loyalty?
• Which channels and touchpoints do customers use most often to get in touch with us?

Since these are important questions that companies must answer for themselves in order to be able to operate successfully on the market in the long term, gaining customer insights is essential. In the following, we will show you examples of how companies can gain valuable customer insights.

How to gain Customer Insights

Gaining Customer Insights into consumer behavior can be done in many different ways. The pure raw data itself, obtained for example from customer surveys, inventory data or touchpoint analyses, cannot yet be called Customer Insights. This is because these raw data only become real Customer Insights when they are intelligently combined and interpreted with other data, such as that obtained from market research studies, with ratings from rating portals, or with master data from a CRM or ERP or sales system. Data for obtaining real Customer Insights can be generated in the following ways.

Use qualitative and quantitative market research

Market research uses a variety of methods to gain countless qualitative and quantitative insights into consumer behavior and markets. Today, market research is indispensable for successfully establishing oneself in target markets in the long term or for opening up new target markets. And market research is indispensable for really getting to know one’s customers in depth. After all, only those who really know their customers, their needs and their expectations can actually meet them. Companies conduct online surveys, concept and product tests, launch panel studies or obtain qualitative data through focus group discussions or in-depth interviews. Market research data is an important part of gaining real and in-depth insights from your customers to make valuable business decisions. Companies that dispense with market research or pay only secondary attention to market research will never be able to gain genuine insights from their customers.

Every company has master data of its customers, which can become real insights

Every company has a wealth of master data about its customers, usually data on purchases and repeat purchases, socio-demographic data such as age, gender, place of residence or telephone, mail and chat logs, support data and data from inquiries and returns of goods, and so on. This master data is already quite valuable for gaining Consumer Insights. Therefore, this master data is of great importance for gaining real Customer Insights, as it can be used to determine e.g. customer value, customer lifetime or purchase forecasts. Customer segments can also be formed on the basis of this master data, but these should be regarded as rather static. Nevertheless, master data, for example from ERP, sales or CRM systems, form a valuable and important basis for gaining real insights from customers.

Customer Insights Community

Online communities are an excellent means of gaining insights about customers. Whereas communities used to be merely a place for exchanges via forums, they now technologically represent the entire range of market research methods, both qualitative and quantitative. The great advantage of Customer Insights Communities is committed and loyal community members who want to help their favorite brand to establish itself and develop and permanently improve. Identification with the brand is particularly high among members of a Consumer Insights Community, as companies involve community members in decisions and thus convey appreciation to them. With Customer Communities, you can ask your community members for feedback directly in the community, for example via surveys, video interviews or discussions. mypinio offers you the opportunity to create your own Customer Insights Community in the mypinio universe. Invite your customers to participate in your Customer Community on mypinio.

With mypinio you can easily gain qualitative customer insights 

Gain Customer Insights with Touchpoint Analyses

Touchpoint analytics provide valuable Customer Insights at the touchpoints between customers and the company. Here you can easily determine a number of key performance indicators, such as the Net Promoter Score, the Customer Satisfaction Score or the Customer Effort Score. The advantage of touchpoint analyses is that the data obtained is always closely related to the respective touchpoint, i.e. the direct interaction of customers with the company. This means you know exactly where your company’s strengths and weaknesses lie.

Conduct customer surveys

Customer surveys are a suitable instrument for gaining Customer Insights. Unlike touchpoint analyses, which are conducted partially at each interaction point between company and customer with only one or a maximum of three questions, customer surveys are more complex and are generally not conducted as often as touchpoint analyses. Nevertheless, customer surveys offer an excellent opportunity to gain data on your customers’ satisfaction, wants and needs, which can enrich your existing Customer Insights. Conducting customer surveys is basically a very easy way to gain valuable data. You simply email your customer survey to your existing customer base, or you distribute your customer survey within your Customer Insights Community. This is exactly what you can do on mypinio’s Insights Community platform and thus gain data of a very high value within a very short time.

Online reviews on rating portals offer in-depth insights

Rating portals also provide first-class data that should be included in your Customer Insights. On the one hand, there are classic star ratings that can be quantified. But also the comments, i.e. the textual ratings themselves, are excellent for drawing valuable conclusions about the satisfaction and annoyances of your customers. With tools such as text mining or semantic text analysis, qualitative data can be easily quantified. For example, you can determine the sentiments of comment writers or uncover word frequencies. The most important rating portals are Google Business Profiles (former Google My Business), Yelp, golocal, Trustpilot, TripAdvisor, G2 or Facebook. In the medium term, mypinio will also become an important rating portal, which is why it is very important that your company is also represented on mypinio.

Rating portals not only have a significant impact on customers’ purchasing decisions. They also provide valuable and in-depth data that should be part of your customer insights.

User data from your website becomes valuable Customer Insights

Of course, statistics about the user behaviour of your website are also very important and should be included in your Customer Insights in any case. For example, you can use data from Google Analytics to draw valuable conclusions about what your customers and prospects are looking for and which pages they visit, how often and for how long, and which pages they leave quickly without further interaction and are therefore less important for your customers.

Gain Customer Insight data with mypinio

mypinio offers a variety of ways to collect data to gain valuable insights about your customers. For example, you can publish surveys on mypinio and ask a broad mass of community members about their preferences for brands and products. mypinio users are very engaged, so you can obtain valuable data for gaining Customer Insights particularly quickly and in real time. In addition, with mypinio you can set up a micro-community and invite your customers to join it. These micro-communities can be short- or long-term. With mypinio you can also gain Customer Insights using qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews or online focus group discussions. Because with mypinio you can select your target group with pinpoint accuracy and make them available for qualitative market research methods in the shortest possible time thanks to the high level of engagement through above-average incentives.