3 Essential Tools To Help Predict Customer Needs

Among the many things that a business needs to keep an eye on, predicting customer needs is one of the most important. Smarter customers have higher expectations and a business that wants to grow has to be able to not only meet these expectations but also predict them. Having predictive customer services might appear tricky but with the help of data analysing tools, you can monitor your customer’s buying patterns, demographics and other behaviours.

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Through enhancing your customer services, you can also offer your clients a better shopping or buying experience as compared to your competitors. In this day and age where even a single bad review can make a difference, providing good quality, predictive customer services can make a major impact particularly in your marketing strategy.

Customer Prediction Tools You Need

Data Gathering

When you’re growing your marketing campaigns, you need to gather proper data on your customers and the following are some of the best resources that let you do so.

Google Analytics

google-analytics

An old one but a gold one, Google Analytics has helped many businesses monitor the different facets of their customers behaviour. From monitoring the visibility of your website to keeping an eye on how much time the visitors are spending on the site, you can get a lot of data regarding your sites usage. The best part is that you can easily isolate the areas which are underperforming and figure out how to optimise them. Moreover, the data sheds more light on showing you visitor ‘habits’ on the site and how you can incorporate those to offer predictive customer services to them. Another good thing about Google Analytics is that it also allows you to test out any new feature and see how well the changes are being received. UpWork created a great article how to understand the customers coming to your website https://www.upwork.com/hiring/for-clients/google-analytics-to-better-understand-your-visitors/

Kissmetrics

kissmetrics

Another tool that lets you observe the habits of your visitors, Kissmetrics provides invaluable data that can be used to optimise your website and services. Individual monitoring ensures that you find in-depth information that tracks key growth in various segments as well as shows which features are wanted and not-wanted by the average visitor or customer. If you’re tapping into a new target market, Kissmetrics is the perfect tool for you as it allows you to monitor the response and provide more tailored predictive customer services that hit the mark properly. With a multitude of other features as well that are meant to help optimise your business with ease, Kissmetrics makes it easier to analyse and view all the changes being made. Kissmetrics wrote up a great article here about understanding customer data.

Inspectlet

If you find it hard to review the data you have received, you’re going to love using Inspectlet. With the aim of helping everyone, Inspectlet focuses on monitoring customer behaviour to provide credible data regarding site visitation time, areas of interest and more regarding the consumer. Inspectlet also takes monitoring to a whole other level by providing video recordings or playbacks of every visitor to the site. This in turn ensures a deeper level to monitoring. The best part is that Inspectlet is frequently used by sites such as eBay, Cisco and WordPress who are prime examples of great predictive customer services. Have a look at how to apply the Pareto principle to some of your customer analytics.

Applying learnings to use

Once you’ve got all your data in hand, you have to start using it. Anticipation of customer expectations begins here. For this reason, you need to use tools that help you create an engagement plan for future customers. The following are some of the best ones.

Rapid Miner

Rapid Miner offers an open source platform for data scientists to use with ease. With its comprehensive products that are specifically developed according to a particular industry and its requirements, Rapid Miner makes data application into credible models and their deployment easier.The best part is that it’s all open source; the team can collaborate and access the data with ease, regardless of their locality. Big businesses such as Siemens, Cisco, Samsung, Hitachiand more also rely on Rapid Miner for their predictive customer services plans. For an introduction to advanced analytics.

Angoss

Based solely on providing predictive analytics that aid in improving customer services, Angoss has services that are based not only on the industry but also on the nature of the analytics you want. From improving marketing performance to minimising any risks faced, Angoss is the complete solution for any business.Angoss is utilised by PayPal, Walmart, and eBay, TMobile, Cisco, Microsoft and MasterCard. The success of these businesses stands to testament to Angoss’s services. Moreover, with services available on a global level, Angoss is accessible for all, regardless of where they function in.

5 Customer Analytics You Should Be Measuring

Living in a time where we are so surrounded by technology, we would think that it makes sense that companies would start to take online information and use it to their advantage. Businesses around the world are using customer analytics to drive up profits and keep customers happy.

But what is customer analytics?

Customer analytics is the process by which data from customer behavior are used to make business decisions. In more simple terms, it’s businesses tracking your every move online, compiling profiles on each customer so they can improve the shopping experience. The information they take ranges from four main categories. These include personal, quantitative, qualitative and descriptive data. Now that we have the basics, read on to find out more about the top 5 Customer Analytics You Should Be Measuring to increase your businesses profits and better adapt to customers.

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See also: Prioritize Customer Conversations

Best Customer Analytics to Boost Business

1. Demographics

demographics infographic

Demographics are the basics of customer analytics. It is essentially a personal profile on each one of your customers. These consist of categories such as age, gender, race, geography and income. This information is important to marketers especially. For example, if a company is trying to target teens and young adults through their marketing campaign, they would be able to see if their advertisements are getting to the correct people. If they see that for some reason only people 40+ are visiting their site, it is easy to conclude that they need to find a new way to reach their intended customers. Demographics, although seemingly basic, are one of the most important customer analytics to track.

2. Sources of Incoming Traffic

traffic source analysis

Being able to track where your customers came from is also an extremely important factor when it comes to customer analytics. If your company has been trying to market on different platforms such as email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat, you can see what campaigns are working. This is essentially the same as the demographics analytic except the difference is in the application they are coming from and not personal qualities.

3. Returning Customer Conversion

repeat customer pie chart

Gaining new customers is 6.5 times more expensive for a company than keeping an existing customer, so why not prioritize your existing customers? This is why using the metric of returning customers can save companies vast amounts of money. If a customer has already been on your site, you can once again track the way they got to the page. Noticing that most of your returning customers are coming from social media, you could possible scale back outside marketing or TV ads. This would most likely cut costs and allow you to focus more on keeping your old customers as well as increasing advertising in places that tend to have returning customers.

4. Page Views

website pageviews infographic

Page views, one of the more simple topics in analytics, are simply the number of visitors your website or individual page gets. It is important to get the most page views you can to bring in as many customers as you can. This function can also monitor specific blogs or PDFs that your company posts. This will allow your company to post more blogs or PDF that are on similar topics. It is important to know what part of your website interests your users the most so you can develop more of that material.

5. Average Session Duration

average session duration

When it comes to making big business decisions, such as spending large sums of money on advertising, a company will want to know who to target and why. All of this information can be found using Google analytics. It is important to know who spends more time on your website so you can gear your advertising toward them. For example, the average Facebook link stays open for only 10 seconds where average direct URL is open for closer to 53 seconds. The people who spend more time are obviously more interested in your product, but you also have to look at where the traffic is coming from to understand the true data. You can even see what pages on your website are visited the most. For example, say that a company has a blog page that attracts more views than any other page. You can have your employees focus on outputting more blogs on topics that have been getting the most clicks and highest average session duration.

Analysis of The Analytics

google analytics logo

As you can see, all of these chosen analytics work together, but a company has to find the patterns and solutions to the problems they are seeing. While it may seem that monitoring just demographics or page views will not boost a business too much, the long tail effect comes into play by monitoring more and more analytics. As the world keeps embracing the technological changes in our society, more businesses will move to using customer analytics to improve business strategy and efficiency. Google analytics makes tracking your customers habits and desires that much easier too. These analytics are the best option for a company to get a well-rounded look at who, what, and where website traffic is coming from. They lay the platform for more analytics to be built on.

5 Creative Ways You Can Use Customer Service to Amp Up Your Online Marketing Strategy

Looking for some quick and easy tips to improve your online marketing strategy? Look no further. Customer service, a once again focused upon aspect in the business world, can improve your marketing with a few simple tricks. Stick around or read 7 Online Marketing Strategies to Maximize Website Visits, The Art of Killing Digital Advertising or 5 Ways Companies Have Used VR for Marketing.

Customer Service Hacks to Kill Your Online Marketing Campaign

1. Mix Your Marketing and Customer Service Team

customer service marketing post it

Marketing is the part of the business that brings customers in, while customer service is what keeps them there. For this reason, it only makes sense that the two work together. Companies also have a 60-70% chance of keeping old customers but only a 5-20% chance of gaining new ones. When the marketing and customer service group work together, you can target existing customers and save lots of money too!

2. Use Social Media as a Customer Service Tool

social media icons

Companies should see social media as a huge opportunity when it comes to advertising and customer service. People contact companies over Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all the time. Just the other week, I was on a United Airlinesflight, and I had tweeted at them. They responded asking me how my flight was going within minutes. This is a great example of how customer service over marketing channels is so important. It shows to their followers how much they are invested in their customers and that they truly care. This also shows that the companies are up to date when it comes to interacting with customers. They are open to change and customers want to see companies that embrace change like they do.

3. Feature Customers on Social Media

customer spotlight

Another idea to boost your marketing campaign using customer service is through customer spotlights. Your company could pick a customer of the week. This could be through the amount they spent, the positive interactions they have with your company, or many other things. You could then post this through social media. This once again shows that the companies are invested in their customers and that they like to give back to the community.

4. Use Customer Reviews as Promotional Material on Social Media

customer reviews star ratings

When it comes to showcasing your customer service team, what better way to do it than through customer reviews? Your company can prove to its customers that its product and customer service teams are actually rated highly. Best Buy is a company that does this very well. They post their reviews to social media, at stores, and in other online ads. It is proof that they have satisfied customers.

5. Give Special Opportunities to Special Customers

Across different industries, companies reward their valued customers differently. One company, BMW, gives customers who recently have purchased a car the opportunity of a lifetime. They invite them to BMW Days around the world and let them race their top-of-the-line cars. They will have all different types of cars, ranging from their M5’s to their I3’s. They let their customers go all out racing on the track for hours. They record these days, sending out these clips to social media. The services they provide their customers is something they will never forget. GM and Ford have similar days too that draw new customers in and keep existing customers happy. Other industries do this through their products. Tech companies invite customers to test out new products first and give feedback. This once again shows they take customer feedback seriously and then they can boast about it online. Lastly, smaller companies such as micro-breweries around the world invite customers to their locations and give tours and tastings. Half Acre Brewery, based in Chicago, USA, gives tours of their facilities and posts their reviews to social media. Time and time again, these companies get fantastic reviews and prove to their customers through online marketing that their customer service is world class.

Customer Service and Online Marketing

online marketing diagram

A company’s marketing team gets customers in the door, while customer service keeps them there. Using these customer service hacks for online marketing is a fantastic way for your company’s teams to work together. So if you’re looking to amp up your online marketing, merge your teams together, take to social media, highlight your customers, and boast about your customer reviews (only if you can back it up with facts). Most of these include social media in some way, shape or form, and that is why it is so easy to incorporate both your marketing team and customer service teams.  This increases both employee and customer happiness. If you are looking to read more into tracking your customers preferences and habits to better target them, head to 5 Customer Analytics You Should Be Measuring.

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