There's no denying it: your customers and users are your company's most valuable assets. After all, all departments work together to attract, convert, and retain users. But they generate much more than revenue for your business: customers are a source of data and intelligence to continuously improve your product or service.
Knowing the customers who consume what you offer is crucial for obtaining data that helps make better business decisions. With this data, every strategy can be calculated and based on real data, making it possible to direct efforts towards more assertive tactics aligned with the ideal customer profile.
We are now in the data age. We are able to discover customer information through various touchpoints, from filling out a form, to user interaction within the system, or a satisfaction survey.
The question is: What do you need to know? The challenge is to gather the information about your customers that is fundamental to planning your business strategies.
The art of extracting insights from information.
Even though the goal of this content is to list the most relevant data for SaaS product customers, it's good to make it clear that other companies can also benefit from this method.
All the information we present can also be acquired and analyzed from physical companies, such as service providers and retailers. However, the methods for collecting and analyzing the data are different.
Extracting insights from data is subjective, as each business may reach different conclusions. Therefore, keep in mind that data analysis provides resources to evaluate the performance of past actions and plan your next strategies, based on the objectives your company seeks to achieve.
Benefits of knowing your customers in depth
Understanding your customers in depth isn't just a competitive advantage—it's essential to your business success. When you know your audience's needs, preferences, and behaviors, you can make more informed decisions, offer personalized experiences, and build lasting relationships.
1. Improved customer retention:
Satisfied customers are more likely to return and recommend your company to others. By understanding their consumption patterns and expectations, you can create specific strategies to retain existing customers, reducing acquisition costs and increasing value over time.
2. Personalization that delights
In today's market, personalization is not just a differentiator—it's an expectation. From product recommendations to communications more aligned with individual interests, customer data allows you to create unique experiences that set your brand apart.
3. Increased ROI and Operational Efficiency
Data-driven decisions ensure that your resources are directed toward what truly works. More targeted campaigns, products aligned with market demands, and more effective customer service are just a few ways to maximize results based on concrete information about your customers.
Practical example
: Consider a retail store that uses customer purchase data to identify the most frequently purchased products during specific periods of the year. With this information, the company adjusts its inventory and creates specific promotions, increasing sales and reducing waste.
In short, investing in understanding your customer is not just about understanding who they are, but about transforming those insights into strategies that drive your company's growth.
7 pieces of customer information you need to know
As we said, understanding consumer behavior allows you to find new opportunities, discover situations where the competition has an advantage, and, most importantly, solve problems. This improves the product and helps you gain more market share.
No matter what your business is, there is information you need to have about your customers:
1. Who are your customers?
Some people underestimate customer business data, but the truth is that information about job title and department is the first step in understanding your user base. This data may vary depending on your segment and business, but it says a lot about the audience you attract with your strategies.
Why it's important: Determining the professional profile of your clients is useful for discovering who sees value in your product/service. More than that, you gain more insights to create strategies that will attract more professionals like these.
How to collect data: Generally, professional information can be acquired early in the customer journey, whether through a completed form, at the time of purchase, or when signing a contract. Depending on your prospecting process, it's possible to acquire this data through the client's profile on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook.
2. Are they using what they bought?
Just as important as acquiring new customers is knowing if they are actually using your product or service. Believe it or not, customers who buy software and stop using it after a few weeks are more common than you might think. It's a binary situation: the customer can be active or inactive, mainly depending on the number of logins and time spent on the product.
Why it's important: Discovering whether or not customers are using your product is a simple and quick way to predict potential churn. Customers who demonstrate daily and weekly activity with your product are more likely to see value in it.
How to collect the data: There are free tools that make it possible to track the daily, weekly, and monthly activity of users and discover if there is engagement with your product, such as Heap Analytics and Google Analytics. This way, you can create a macro segmentation of active and inactive customers.
3. How do they interact with your product?
Beyond identifying user activity and inactivity, another piece of information you need to know about your customers is the type of interaction they have on your platform. At this point, you should consider the actions taken, resources accessed, and decisions made.
Why it's important: When you know how your customers use your product, you can help them get more out of your solution, whether by suggesting new features or best practices for achieving better results with what they already use. This information can also identify up-selling and cross-selling opportunities, where customers purchase an add-on or a better plan to have more possibilities with what you offer.
How to collect the data: Tracking specific user activities requires more data than just the number of logins and time spent on the platform. After listing which actions are most important for identifying engaged customers, software with event tracking capabilities and real-time engagement metrics is needed to collect activity data.
4. What are your expectations?
Customers purchase a product or service with a goal in mind. It could be to alleviate a pain point, solve a problem, or achieve better results. Before buying, they have an expectation and hope that it will be met with your help.
Why it's important: Knowing what the customer expects, as well as their perception of value, is crucial to understanding how you will contribute to achieving that goal. Knowing expectations provides data to promote improvements in the customer follow-up process, in order to guide them towards that result.
How to collect the data: since this is qualitative research, the best option is to request this information at the end of the conversion process using smart forms, or immediately after the purchase/contract using a survey. We suggest using customer experience management software to accelerate and facilitate the analysis of the responses.
5. Do they achieve results?
You already know that expected value is information you need to know about your customer. Now answer this: is your company delivering the results they expect? Whether your business is B2B or B2C, every user expects to meet their expectations and obtain results from purchasing a product/service. It's no coincidence that many products focus on the word "solution" to describe their features and possibilities for use.
Why it's important: When a company has control over how it fulfills those expectations, it becomes easier to provide a good customer experience. Customers who achieve good results can become case studies, and those who have difficulties need attention. After all, customer satisfaction is directly related to whether they achieve their initial goals and expectations. The name says it all: Customer Success, and it depends on delivering true success to the customer!
How to collect the data: In this case, it is recommended to combine a Customer Success Management tool with customer survey software. While the former helps to track the customer during use to know whether or not they are obtaining the expected results, the latter can use the customer themselves as a source of information. By analyzing this data, it is possible to extract insights into which resources bring the best results to your customers and improvements that help to accelerate and/or improve the process.
6. How satisfied are they?
The main goal of companies is to create a legion of loyal customers. When a user is satisfied with the solution you offer, it means your company is doing a good job. Even more so nowadays, where customer experience should be a priority in business strategies.
Why it's important: Satisfied customers are much more likely to recommend your product/service when the time comes. When you identify who is satisfied, this can be used to acquire new customers. Otherwise, the user may be having trouble achieving success.
How to collect the data: One of the best ways to measure customer satisfaction is by using NPS, the Net Promoter Score. This is a simple and reliable metric for measuring customer loyalty, where customers answer the following question on a scale of 0 to 10: "How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?" Because it's a widely used methodology, there are software programs that help collect and automate the extraction of satisfaction reports.
7. What do they say about you?
Customer feedback is valuable. When users have a channel to express their opinions and have their voices heard by the company, they feel encouraged to share their experiences with the product or service, whether positive or negative.
Why it's important: Regardless of the customer's situation, feedback is invaluable for the product, service, and the company offering it. User comments can provide ideas for improvements in the acquisition and implementation process, customer service, and even the development of new features. No one is better suited than the customer themselves to tell you how your product can be improved!
How to collect the data: Again, a survey is key to obtaining customer feedback. When creating the questionnaire, aim to formulate objective questions that help determine how your customer views your company. This facilitates the analysis of results and the extraction of ideas to strengthen your strategy. The data will be essential in deciding your next steps.
Key mistakes to avoid when collecting customer data
Collecting customer data is crucial for strategic decisions, but doing it incorrectly can cause more problems than it solves. Avoiding common mistakes ensures that the information collected is useful, relevant, and, above all, respects consumer privacy. Here are the main pitfalls to avoid:
1. Collecting irrelevant data:
Many businesses make the mistake of collecting information that has no practical application. Asking for more data than necessary can generate distrust among customers and create a volume of information that is difficult to organize and analyze. Make sure that each piece of data collected has a clear purpose.
2. Failure to ensure data accuracy.
Outdated or incorrect data is one of the biggest enemies of a successful strategy. Be sure to validate and regularly review information to avoid decisions based on flawed data.
3. Ignoring security and privacy:
With the increase in data protection regulations, such as the LGPD (General Data Protection Law), data collection must always comply with the law. Neglecting data security can lead to legal penalties and loss of customer trust.
4. Lack of transparency in data collection.
A common mistake is failing to clearly communicate why and how data is being collected. Being transparent not only fulfills legal requirements but also reinforces customer trust in your brand.
5. Not using the collected data.
Perhaps the most frustrating mistake is collecting data and never using it. Valuable information about customer behavior and preferences needs to be applied to strategic actions to generate value for the business.
How can we avoid these mistakes?
- Collect only the data that you actually intend to use.
- Update and analyze the data regularly to ensure its validity.
- Invest in secure storage and analysis tools and practices
- Be transparent with customers about how you collect and use their information.
- Transform data into actionable insights that improve decisions and customer experience.
By avoiding these mistakes, your company not only ensures efficient data collection, but also builds a relationship of trust and respect with your customers, which is essential for long-term success.
Believe in the power of information
Knowing how to collect and use customer information is crucial to your business's success. Companies need to apply data intelligence to their processes to remain in constant evolution. The mission of being responsible for customer success must be aligned with the expansion of tracking and data analysis technologies.
So now that you know what information and data you need to know about your customers, it's time to get to work. Remember that you need to use smart tools that make it easy to collect and analyze activity, engagement, and satisfaction data.
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This is a guest post written by Saulo Sobanski. Would you like to post your own article on our blog as well? Send an email to marketing@harmo.me.