Quality Digest: Balancing Customer Insights With the Bottom Line

The following was written by Greg Kihlström for Quality Digest. Read the original article here.

Customer loyalty and lifetime value are highly prized in today’s competitive environment. Smart businesses know that a major point of competitive advantage (or failure) can be the type of customer experience they provide.

The need to balance what customers want with what the business needs to thrive requires knowing what you want to achieve, gaining meaningful insights into customer needs and expectations, translating those insights into action, and then balancing what your customers are asking for with what benefits your business.

Asking the right questions

For most organizations, the main challenge with customer insights isn’t having enough data. You’re probably flooded with information. The challenge is determining what information is meaningful and what is noise.

It isn’t possible to make the most of your data if you don’t have clear questions relating to what you want to know. In other words, if you don’t know why you’re collecting or reporting on specific data, how can you possibly know what to do with them when you have a report in front of you? You’d just be grasping at straws and hoping you find answers. Thus, before you even begin looking at the numbers, formulate a series of questions about your customers that you want answered.

The following was written by Greg Kihlström for Quality Digest. Read the original article here.