Imagine you are reviewing the sales pipeline. The end of the quarter is only 2 weeks away, but you are nowhere close to your revenue target.
The clock is ticking. You are stressed because you have just missed out on the upsell opportunity, once again. That's the third time this quarter!
So, what can you do?
Here's one:
Leverage customer data to extract Customer Intelligence (CI).
Data is everywhere, and it's only getting more important to businesses of all sizes. In the world of SaaS (Software as Service), data fuels new business decisions to keep your company thriving daily. Data can be numerical or non-numerical such as email, support tickets, feedback, and reviews. But gathering data isn't enough. To maximize its full potential, you will need to process such raw information into more meaningful insights.
Here are 5 reasons why Customer Intelligence is the new growth engine for businesses!
Getting Started
While collecting data is the simple first step, turning raw data into actionable insights is quite challenging. There are plenty of rabbit holes that can easily lead you off track, such as:
Neglecting non-numerical data: when it comes to data, many analysts only pay attention to the numbers. Quantitative studies are valuable to provide descriptive data, but they lack the context to explain "why."
Correlation vs. causation: many analysts quickly jump to conclusions when they see 2 data points coexist, but correlation does not mean causation.
Fun fact: High Support Tickets don't cause customers to churn.
Focussing on the wrong metric: for example, concentrating on improving NPS doesn't increase Net Revenue Retention (NRR).
Not cleaning data before the analysis: data can get duplicated and mislabeled; some might be irrelevant. For accurate interpretation and actionable insights, you must clean data!
Frankly, unlocking Customer Intelligence for your business often requires technical skills, domain knowledge, and resources. Dealing with data is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Especially when your data is widely dispersed, it could take days even weeks to complete this process.
Therefore, it's critical for top management needs consider your capabilities and prioritize essential tasks before sending your team and resources on these projects.
Let's say you and your team have successfully gathered customer data and turned it into actionable insights. It's time to achieve your revenue target and more!
5 Ways Customer Intelligence (CI) Can 5x Your Revenue Growth
1. Lower Your Cost and Improve Efficiency
Research from Boston Consulting Group shows that businesses are getting 30% in cost savings and 20% in revenue increase from adopting a full data-driven model.
Analytics play a significant role in monitoring business activities, campaigns, and resource allocation across channels. As a leader, data allows you to monitor and measure business performance accurately. These insights will help you prioritize tasks, double down on what works, and eliminate inefficient activities that deplete your resources.
Instead of spending thousands of dollars on acquiring new customers to outrun churn, you can focus on customer retention and get higher ROI (more on this later).
2. Help Customer Success
Understanding customers is key to business growth. Your goal is to help customers become successful using your product. But how can you help them without knowing their needs?
Customer Intelligence lets you examine customer behaviors (explore when and how they use your product). These insights enable your firm to segment customers, strategize business offers, and improve retention efforts. In other words, understanding your customers allows you to create the personalized customer experience that promotes customer loyalty and satisfaction. A study by Startup Bonsai shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from companies with a tailored experience instead of one-size-fits-all solutions.
Customers desire customized offers, but not enough businesses offer them. A whopping 52% of customers demand personalized recommendations, with 66% expecting companies to understand their specific needs (Salesforce).
3. Support Decision-making
As a leader, you make important decisions daily. While your intuition and experience are valuable, you need data to make impactful decisions. You can't scale your company by going off gut feelings.
Imagine your firm has a $10M ARR, and you seek 5x revenue growth in the next 3 years. It would be best to consider different factors such as hiring, pricing strategies, marketing strategies, new product development, etc. Without data, you are essentially betting on gut feelings and luck. And that is just the right recipe for disasters. Analyzing numbers help you choose the best course of action to achieve your goal.
4. Increase Customer Retention
Another vital strategy for revenue growth is to focus on improving customer retention.
Having to manage a large customer base, you might catch your representatives going off of their gut feelings because there's so much information for them to process. They often get overwhelmed with account details and spend days catching up on notes.
To avoid such hassle, you can implement an intelligent data tool that unifies all data and presents it in 1 single dashboard. Insights will empower Customer Success representatives to be proactive and more effective when talking to customers. A study on customer success shows a 5% increase in retention rate can result in 25%-95% revenue growth.
5. Strategize and Forecast with High Accuracy
Wouldn't it be awesome to predict demand and know what customers want in advance?
The good news is that Customer Intelligence unlocks these prediction capabilities for your firm. With access to rich data, analyzing it will unlock a plethora of predictive information. Data reveals customer patterns and trends that allow your company to stay ahead in the game by preventing churn and capturing upsell opportunities before they slip away from you! With CI, you can proactively strategize to optimize your company's effort in growing the pipeline.
Achieve Revenue Growth in 2 Weeks NOT Months
With such benefits, there's no doubt that many large companies like Amazon, Netflix, and LinkedIn are leveraging Customer Intelligence to maximize their revenue and stay competitive.
But there's one thing that these tech giants are doing, and you are not:
Harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI)
AI provides a scalable and automated process with high accuracy and continuous improvement. Connect with our team of experts one-on-one to get started and accelerate your revenue growth in just 2 weeks here.
To recap, Customer Intelligence provides your business with the predictive/prescriptive insights needed to help grow your revenue by
Lower your operating cost
Help boost customer loyalty via personalized experience
Support high-level decision-making
Increase customer retention
Accurately forecast upsell opportunities