The Importance Of Customer Insight

4.1 Customer Insights

In general, customer insight means having knowledge about customers and markets that helps structured thinking and decision-making (SOURCE). It is a compilation, analysis and interpretation of customer information, which enables companies to understand the customer’s needs and to identify trends. Customer insight aims to identify solutions in order to solve the customer’s problems by the own company’s offering. (Bruhn 2004, S. 24 ) Customer insight can be seen as the key that unlocks the value of customer data such as CRM data. (Accenture). It allows businesses to segment their customers based on different variables and to take suitable actions adjusted to these specific segments. If applied correctly, customer insight

Thereby, already existing and recently gathered data will be analysed and synthesized. Eventually, conclusions and insights will be generated through the thorough analysis of information across sources. In the best case all research questions can be answered at this point. In addition, the final step serves to develop actionable recommendations. Findings and recommendations, based on the previous analysis, should be presented and discussed with stakeholders. Finally, an implementation plan with specific actions needs to be developed and executed accordingly. The execution of the implementation plan needs to be controlled in order to ensure that all actions are implemented therefore responsibility needs to be allocated to management or individual functional departments that are impersonating the actions.

The customer insight process does not end with providing recommendations it is only complete, successful and valuable when actions or corrective actions take place based on the finding and results of the analysis. Companies invest a lot of time and money into research and analysis but the deployment is often incomplete. Etwas umständlich formuliert und hast du das nicht schon im vorherigen Pragraphen

Mostly, the data, existing or gathered, provides details on the customer’s needs, wishes, attitudes and behaviour. Industrial reports provided by external parties and other data sources provide very detailed information on customer in every random perspective. This trend is increasing in the last years and enables companies to cluster customers and identify emerging trends on very sundry criteria. The Bain & Company survey revealed that 56% of the companies did not have the right systems to capture the data or were not collecting the right data that was relevant for their specific purposes SOURCE.

Organizational intent can be seen as the engine of a data driven customer insights process. Beginning from the top management and the CEO the importance and value of customer insights needs to be communicated and accepted. The company has to make sure to communicate and control the internalization of the customer centricity regularly. Businesses have to build their organisations around data and a commitment to make data-driven