Creating a great experience every time one of your customers interacts with your brand is essential for building a thriving business. But let’s be honest, sometimes this can feel like a losing battle.
With how quickly customer needs are changing, knowing how to continuously meet them isn’t always easy. Since every individual is unique, you need to know how to tune into each person’s distinct tastes and preferences, while still maintaining a consistent branding theme for everyone.
However, instead of relying solely on assumptions, leveraging your business data can be a highly effective way to extract actionable insights that help improve your customer journey in all the right places.
Sift Through Previous Customer Transactions
Any time you’ve established a good history of customer transactions, this can provide a significant source of insights about your audience. For example, you might consider marketing your restaurant by sending out newsletters or creating targeted advertising campaigns. Knowing when customers dine most often, which beverages are most popular, or the average cost of customer meals can give you a lot of insight useful for structuring these initiatives effectively.
Reviewing past customer transactions also gives your team more information they can use to create better service for guests. They can make better meal suggestions based on their previous visits or even offer special loyalty discounts.
Look for Different Website Usage Patterns
When you have a website set up for your business, this can be another great source of customer information to help improve their overall experiences moving forward. However, getting the most value from this data requires more than just monitoring analytics and trying to maximize visitor traffic. You also want to gauge how well each user is engaging with different elements of the site.
Focus your attention on how long each of your website visitors is spending on different pages of your site. Keep an eye out for pages that have a high “bounce rate,” which means they land on a page and quickly disconnect. This could point to a web element that isn’t working properly or irrelevant content.
You can also leverage site heat maps to show where individuals place their cursor most often or how far they’re scrolling down a page. Both of these monitoring tools help you to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and visualize how their journey looks from start to finish.
Understand Your Audience Demographics
When you have a deeper understanding of your audience, creating unique experiences that connect with them becomes much easier to accomplish. Knowing factors such as age, geographic location, hobbies, or household income of your customers can provide valuable information useful for engaging with them more effectively.
While demographics are useful to help you make smarter business choices, it’s also important to combine that information with your company’s own data. Striking a good balance between your internal and external market research will help you form a more comprehensive view of what your particular customers want, rather than trying to fit everyone into a single demographic category.
Analyze Data From Customer Feedback Surveys
You never want to guess what your customers want when using your apps or services. No matter how much you assume, it won’t be as accurate or useful as simply asking them directly. Getting real, honest feedback straight from your customers allows you to build a plan for making meaningful changes that will actually improve their experiences moving forward.
Encourage customers to submit reviews or comments after they’ve interacted with your brand. Once you have all that feedback, look for any patterns that might point to there being a larger issue that needs to be addressed. This will help you to prioritize the most critical issues first and prevent you from spending too many resources in the wrong places.
Monitor Social Media Activities
An important element of your public relations efforts should be tracking user interactions and conversations about your brand across different marketing channels. This helps to give you a better idea of how your customers feel about the brand and if there are other important things they’re expecting from you.
Beyond monitoring your social metrics, these platforms are also a great place to learn about the types of topics or content formats that your audience segment responds to the most. This information can be really helpful when trying to refine your marketing approach and connect on a deeper level with your customers.
Read Through Past Customer Support Tickets
Each interaction a customer has with your company should be looked at as a chance to learn from their experiences. Customer phone calls, email, chatbot dialogue, and support tickets are all common sources of this data and should be reviewed regularly by the business when trying to ensure certain levels of quality control.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software is a great example of a solution that can help you track and analyze customer data all within a single platform. These tools help you to aggregate all of your customer support interactions into one place, making it easier to analyze the data and look for patterns useful for improving your business.
Utilize Predictive Analytics
While analyzing your historical customer data manually can help you to better understand behaviors or purchasing tendencies, there are also many tools that can help you turn that data into business predictions. For example, there are now a growing number of AI-powered analytics solutions that can quickly sift through and analyze past purchasing habits while predicting how this activity will change over time.
This can be incredibly valuable for restaurants and other businesses that typically see larger spikes or dips in foot traffic based on the season. Having these predictive models built for the business can help them to create more accurate inventory forecasts and better balance their staffing resources throughout the year.
Create a More Personalized Customer Journey
Designing a more personalized journey for each of your customers is a critical step to building deeper and long-lasting connections with them. By applying the strategies discussed, you’ll be able to leverage your raw business data to drive important improvements to customer engagement and overall brand image.
Author Information
Author Name:
Chris Bretschger
Author Bio:
Chris Bretschger, Managing Partner at Bastion Agency, is a seasoned marketer with over 20 years of experience in integrated marketing. He has developed brand strategies, managed media campaigns, and built analytics tools for clients like Mazda, Adidas, Jenny Craig, and Kia. When not leading Bastion, Chris enjoys superyacht regatta racing on the open seas.
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