At its simplest, Customer Intelligence is about using data to understand your customers better. Who are they? Where are they? What characteristics do they share? And what can you learn from your existing customers to help you find more of the right ones?
Most businesses already hold useful information about their customers, from transaction and loyalty data to CRM records and customer locations. Customer Intelligence brings this information together with other relevant data to reveal patterns that can help businesses improve targeting, identify opportunities and make better-informed decisions.
What is Customer Intelligence?
Customer Intelligence is the process of collecting, combining and analysing customer information to build a clearer picture of the people buying from your business.
The data can come from a variety of sources. First-party information might include customer addresses or postcodes, transactions, purchase frequency, average spend or loyalty data. This can then be enriched with demographic, consumer and geographic data to provide greater context.
For example, knowing where your customers live is useful. Understanding the demographic and consumer characteristics of those areas can tell you considerably more about the types of people your business is attracting.
Understand who your best customers are
Not every customer contributes the same value to a business. Customer Intelligence can help identify characteristics shared by your strongest customers, whether you define them by spend, frequency, loyalty, product choice or another measure that’s important to your organisation.
You might discover that particularly valuable customers are concentrated within certain demographic groups, types of neighbourhood or geographic areas.For a business with multiple locations, you may also find significant differences between the customers using each one. Understanding these patterns gives you a much stronger basis for deciding which audiences to prioritise.
Find more people like your existing customers
Once you understand the characteristics of your strongest customers, you can use that insight to identify other areas containing similar audiences. Imagine a retailer that knows its highest-value customers tend to share particular demographic and consumer characteristics. By analysing those characteristics geographically, the retailer can identify other areas where similar people live but where it currently has relatively few customers.
That could indicate an opportunity for customer acquisition. Instead of targeting a broad area or relying on assumptions about who might be interested, the business can focus its marketing on locations where the evidence suggests there is greater potential.
Understand your customer catchments
Customer Intelligence can also reveal how customers interact with individual locations.
Mapping customer data can show where customers are travelling from, how far they are prepared to travel and where the catchments of different locations overlap. This can uncover some interesting differences.
Two stores that look similar on paper may draw customers from very different areas. One might rely heavily on nearby residents, while another attracts customers from a much wider catchment. Understanding those differences can help explain variations in performance and inform decisions about marketing, territories and future locations.
Identify gaps and opportunities
Looking at existing customers alongside the wider market can also reveal where opportunities may be being missed. An area might contain a high concentration of people who resemble your existing customers but relatively few people currently buying from you. That gap between customer potential and current penetration can be particularly useful. It can help businesses identify areas worth investigating for targeted marketing, customer acquisition or even future expansion. Equally, an area with apparently attractive demographics may already have strong customer penetration, suggesting that additional marketing investment might be better directed elsewhere.
Turning customer data into useful insight
Having customer data is one thing. Being able to use it to answer business questions is another.
Customer Intelligence becomes valuable when different sources of information are brought together to reveal something you can act on. That might mean understanding why one location attracts more valuable customers than another, identifying areas with untapped potential or finding audiences that closely resemble your strongest existing customers.
Periscope® combines your own customer data with demographic, consumer and location data, helping you understand who your customers are, where they come from and where further opportunities may exist.
Discover how Periscope® can help you understand your customers and find more of the right ones.
