Ever came across a product that made you think “Wow, it’s like they read my mind”? That’s no accident because, in a way, they do. Many successful businesses pay close attention to customer insights to keep creating products that are exactly what their customers need.
Take Coca-Cola, for example. Their “Share a Coke” campaign was a huge hit, and it all started with customer insights. They launched bottles with popular names printed on them. People loved this idea but were bummed when they couldn’t find their names. Using this customer insight, Coca-Cola acted quickly and let customers order custom bottles with their names printed on them.
This simple act of listening and responding to customer insights led to a hugely successful campaign. So, what exactly are customer insights, and how can you use them to create product innovations? Let’s find out.
What are Customer Insights?
Customer insights are information about your customers that goes beyond basic things like their age or gender. These insights tell you about your customer’s behaviours, why they make certain choices, how they feel about your product, etc.
With these insights, you can find out what your target audience actually needs but might not be getting right now.
For example, let’s say your target audience is writers and your product is an AI story generator. Customer insights will help you know which part of your product writers like the best, what additional services they’re looking for and if they’re facing any problems while using the generator.
Knowing all this will help you address the specific needs of your target audience, which in turn can give you ideas for new innovations.
How to Gather Customer Insights?
Now you know what customer insights are, but how and where do you get them from? There are several ways to gather customer insights:
1. Survey and Feedback Forms
Surveys and feedback forms are one of the most common ways to get direct feedback from your customers. Using them, you can ask your customers about their experiences with your product, what they like, what they don’t, and what they wish was different.
Tools like Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, Typeform, etc., can help you create these surveys. You can either add a feedback form to your website or send surveys through emails, SMS, apps, etc.
In the surveys, don’t just ask yes or no questions. Include open-ended questions like “What do you wish was different about our product?” to get better insights.
2. Customer Reviews and Testimonials
Another way you can get customer insights is by checking online reviews or comments left on your website, Google or any other platform. You can check them to see what people think about your product and if they’ve any complaints or suggestions for improvement. Use these insights to make necessary changes.
3. Website Analytics
You can use tools like Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity or Google Search Console to get your website’s analytics. These analytics show you where your customers are coming from, what they’re doing on your website, how much time they’re spending, what they’re searching for and when they leave. All these customer insights are really useful to optimise your website’s performance and get ideas for improvement.
4. Social Media Listening
Social media is also a great place to gather customer insights. These days, a lot of people post their opinions and reviews about products on platforms like Instagram, Twitter (X), Reddit, etc. Monitor what customers are saying about your brand or your competitors to get ideas and improve your product. You can use tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social to track your mentions on social media.
These are some of the most useful and common ways to gather customer insights. Aside from them, you can also find insights in community forums. You can set up a customer support team or run tests specifically to gather customer insights.
How to Analyse Customer Insights?
Just collecting customer insights isn’t enough; you need to analyse them and make sense of them to put these insights into use. Here’s how you can do that:
Organise Your Data
First you need to organise all of the customer insights you’ve gathered. It will make understanding them a lot easier. You can group these insights into different categories like complaints received, features to add, neutral feedback, new product ideas, etc., whatever makes the most sense to you.
Look For Any Trends or Patterns
Once you have your data sorted, look for any trends or repeating patterns in the data. Notice if there are any specific complaints that keep coming up. Do multiple people suggest the same thing? These trends are key indicators of areas that need attention or innovation.
Segment Your Customers
Not all customers are the same, so segmenting your target audience can help you create plans better. You can segment your customers based on their behaviours, preferences, or demographics and then tailor product innovations to the needs of each group. For example, younger users may demand more tech-savvy features, while older users may need simpler features.
Prioritise Opportunities
Prioritising what you want to work on first is important. Not all customer insights are going to be equally important or useful to you. Focus on insights that will have the biggest impact. Let’s say 50% of your customers are complaining about a feature, but only 10% are asking for something else entirely; it’s clear which insight you should prioritise first.
Take the Help of AI
Like many other things, AI can help you analyse your customer insights data as well. Tools like HubSpot, Zendesk, or Salesforce use AI to analyse conversations, emails, and feedback to identify any trends and patterns. They can flag common problems like a feature not working or recognise opportunities like customers asking for a new feature. So you can just take the help of these AI-powered tools instead of doing everything manually.
How to Turn Your Customer Insights Into Product Innovations?
After gathering and analysing the customer insights, you’d probably already have a sense of direction in mind for your next innovation. Now you have the data about what your customers like, dislike, what’s working and what’s not.
Turning these customer insights into new innovations would require a lot of trial and error. It starts with,
Brainstorming Solutions
With the collected customer insights, you know the pain points of your customers. Now, it’s time to brainstorm solutions to these problems. Before you start brainstorming, know what exactly you’re trying to solve. Consider answering questions like:
- What specific pain points are you addressing?
- Are you improving an existing product or creating something new?
- What is your ultimate goal (e.g., increased customer satisfaction, improved functionality, etc.)?
After you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have a clear goal for your brainstorming session. Here are some brainstorming techniques that you can use to come up with ideas for your new innovation:
Mindmapping
Mind mapping is a visual brainstorming technique where you write the main issue or pain point in the middle of the whiteboard or whatever you’re using and then create branches of ideas and solutions as they come to your mind. You can use tools like Miro or Lucidchart to create such visual mind maps.
Scamper Technique
SCAMPER is a structured brainstorming technique that helps you come up with new ideas by looking at a problem from seven different angles. Each letter in SCAMPER stands for a different question:
- Substitute: What can you substitute in the product (e.g., materials, processes)?
- Combine: Can you combine any features or functions to improve the product?
- Adapt: How can you adapt or modify the product to work better for customers?
- Modify: What aspects of the product can be changed or scaled up/down?
- Put to another use: Can the product be used in different ways or markets?
- Eliminate: What unnecessary features can you remove?
- Reverse: Can you reverse or rearrange certain elements of the product?
These questions will help you think creatively about how to improve something or solve a problem.
Brainwriting
Brainwriting is another commonly used brainstorming technique that you can use with your team to come up with ideas. In this technique, each person writes down 3-5 ideas related to solving the problem. Then, they pass their ideas on to the next person, who builds on them or adds new ideas.
These are just a few of the many brainstorming techniques you can use to come up with solutions for your problems.
Prioritise Ideas
Once you’ve a list of ideas, the next important step is to prioritise the best ones out of them. You can do this by voting on ideas with your team and ranking them. Here are some criteria you should think about before prioritising ideas:
- Effort vs. Impact: Rank ideas based on the potential impact they’ll have on customer satisfaction or your business goals and how easy they are to implement. Focus on ideas with high impact and low effort.
- Cost and Resources: Consider the amount of money, time, and resources you’ll need to put in to make the idea happen.
- Customer Value: Rank ideas based on how much value they’ll provide to your customers.
- Long-term Impact: Consider ideas that might take longer to implement but could have a big, lasting effect on your business.
Look at your customer insights to see which idea would best resonate with your target audience and their needs. You can also take help from AI chatbots like ChatGPT-4, Claude, etc., for this task.
Create Prototype and Test
After you choose the best idea for your next innovation, create a basic version or mockup of it. This is called a prototype. Here’s how you can do it:
- Create an MVP (Minimal Viable Product): Build something that only has the most important features of your product. It doesn’t need to be perfect. This prototype will help you test your product idea first before you develop the final product. You can use tools like Figma or Proto.io to create such prototypes.
- Test your prototype with a small group: Show the simple version of your product to a small group first. Collect their feedback and monitor how they use it. This will help you create your final product faster.
For example, when Airbnb started, they just tried their idea with a few travellers in San Francisco. They wanted to see if people would actually stay in strangers’ homes. Once they tested their idea out and confirmed that it could work, they launched their final product. - Try A/B Testing: For digital products, you can create two slightly different versions of your product. Show each version to different people and see which one works better.
By starting small and getting feedback, you can improve your product idea before spending too much time or money on it.
Iterate Based on Feedback
Last but not the least stage in converting your customer insights into product innovations is collecting feedback from test users and making changes in your product.
This is an ongoing process- you’ll have to keep making changes to your product until customers are happy with it. Keep track of metrics like how satisfied customers are, how much they use new features, and how often they use your product. These numbers help you see if your changes are working. The goal is to keep adjusting your product until it meets what customers want.
Conclusion
To sum it all up, customer insights are really important for making products that your customers love. Here are the key takeaways to remember:
- Listen to your customers through surveys, reviews, website data, and social media.
- Look for patterns in what customers are saying.
- Come up with ideas to solve customer problems.
- Pick the best ideas that will help customers the most.
- Make a simple version of your product and test it.
- Keep improving based on what customers tell you.
This way, you’ll create things people really want and need. It might take some time, but it’s worth it to make your customers happy and grow your business.
