Are your customers driving your business… or is your business driving away your customers? As Intuit Accounting Software’s co-founder, Scott Cook knows the importance of customers and their impact.
“Instead of focusing on the competition, focus on the customer.”
But don’t let the word “customer” fool you. Even if your department is not customer-facing, customer insights are still affecting your performance and results. While customer insights may, by their name, seem to fall squarely under the concern of marketing and sales, customer insights have reverberating effects within other teams, too.
The Cross-Department Impact of Consumer Insights
As an organisation grows in size, complexity and number of departments, cross-department collaboration often becomes a roadblock. In large organisations, information may become siloed, preventing departments from cooperating and collaborating effectively, meaning a wise move by marketing may be a disaster for the recruiting team. Without customer insights, marketing budgets are misdirected, hiring decisions are misled and time is misspent on activities and priorities that don’t reflect customer data.
From the finance department to HR to executive leadership to customer support, customer insights can be used to drive decisions and strategies more quickly because everyone has access to the same research. Determining who to hire, how to structure payment agreements or even when to acquire other businesses can be informed by customer insights.
By focusing on customer insights and drawing this data into an organization, this becomes a rallying point and common thread that weaves together seemingly disparate departments. Customer insights empower your organisation to create and celebrate accomplishments that foster love, loyalty and collaboration—and create a truly customer-centric company culture.
Every successfully analysed email marketing blast gives you data to leverage for next month’s social media campaign which creates further insights for how to staff your customer support team next quarter.
Imagine knowing not just who your customers are by demographic data and online behaviour, but identifying which action will most likely lead to their first sale or continued business. Imagine being able to market and sell to your customers as they prefer to be marketed and sold to. It’s the difference between spending $10k in Facebook Ads only to discover your customers are on LinkedIn—and that the 20 hours you spent creating and scheduling those ads were wasted.
