Customer Understanding, Explained

Author: Brittany Thomas

Think of the brands that make you feel known, seen, and heard. The ones that provide you with a seamless, personalized experience whenever you interact with them. The brands that recommend your next favorite product and anticipate your needs. How do they do this?  

The most beloved brands invest in understanding their customers’ wants, needs, and behaviors. They leverage customer insights to create elevated experiences that keep people happily coming back, increasing customer loyalty and customer lifetime value. According to Forrester, companies that make customer needs the primary driver of business decisions boast higher revenue growth, increased employee engagement, and greater customer retention. With customer needs and digital behaviors continuously shifting, this is easier said than done. This is where RevGen can help. 

RevGen’s Customer Understanding practice helps companies identify their customer’s evolving needs and create a holistic view of their customer’s interactions with their brand, uncovering top pain points and enhancement opportunities that matter most to your customers. We tailor our approach to the unique needs of our clients and equip them with insights that help them confidently focus their efforts to improve their customer experience in a way that will add the most value and impact.  

Offering components include: 

• Customer Intelligence 
• Customer 360 Profiles
• Customer Value Analysis 
• Current Customer Journey Map  
• Customer Pain Points 
• Moments that Matter Definition 

What value do these offering components provide? Let’s look at a few examples of how we have helped companies better understand their customer’s needs and behaviors to elevate customer experiences and enable their sales teams. 

Customer Intelligence  

When it comes to understanding customer needs and behaviors, we often find that one of the biggest challenges organizations encounter is the siloed systems and datasets where their customer data lives. In addition to disconnected datasets, there is often an enormous amount of customer data. So where can an organization begin to extract valuable insights? We have helped companies at all levels of customer data maturity leverage their available data and generate actionable insights. 

In Practice: 

A F500 telecom company wanted to enhance their omnichannel customer support by better understanding their customer needs and behaviors. They knew there was more they could do with their large customer data set stored in disconnected sources. To help the client generate insights from their data, RevGen brought together disparate data sources to create common dataset and prioritized the various categories of customer data.  

After categorizing the data, we combined our data science and customer experience expertise to define the support needs and behaviors of four key customer types. The client knew they had three customer segments, and this analysis uncovered a fourth: the Silent Lurker. These profiles were used to inform product development, omnichannel sales interactions and marketing to the specific behaviors and needs of their customers. We enabled the in-house data science team with a customer data science playbook that documented the process and approach so they can adapt and expand on these methods for future projects.

Customer 360 Profiles  

Consumers have rising expectations for personalized shopping experiences. To provide a personalized shopping experience with seamless interactions across channels, companies need a consolidated view of their customer’s data, also known as a Customer 360 Profile. These profiles create a connected view of customer level data that can be shared across Sales, Support, Marketing, and more.  

In Practice: 

RevGen creates Customer 360 Profiles that aggregates available data including: interaction history (digital and in-person), transactions, purchase behaviors and preferences, digital behaviors, and social media activity. The Customer 360 profile enables sales and support teams with a snapshot of the customer so they can tailor their interactions based on the customer’s interests.  

• For example, the sales associate can recommend relevant accessories based on the customer’s phone purchase history. The Customer 360 profile provides an evolving view of the customer’s behaviors and helps eliminate the customer pain point of having to provide the same information multiple times. 

Customer Value Analysis 

Does your company know which prospective customers are the most valuable to your bottom line? When a company has a clear picture of who their high value customers are, they can tailor their experience and route them to the appropriate support and sales channels, providing cost effective support.  

In Practice: 

RevGen helped a healthcare client understand the customer value score of each customer group that it serves. With their annual cost to serve clients rising, they needed to understand the cost of the different customers they serve. RevGen assessed and outlined the cost to serve per customer group, enabling the client to dedicate support resources based on the highest value customers.  

Whether you have an overwhelming amount of customer data or are just beginning to collect it, RevGen can help you better understand customer’s needs and behaviors so you can confidently prioritize customer experience efforts that will add the most value and impact. 

Want to learn more about customer understanding and the other CX services we offer? Visit our Customer Experience page. 

Brittany Thomas is a Manager at RevGen Partners specializing in customer experience. She helps organizations build customer-centric teams and data-driven solutions that create positive experiences for both customers and employees.