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Businesses that pay attention to how their audience thinks, feels, and interacts with their products or services do better financially. Often, they use customer insight reports to understand what users —real people— really need and want, and focus on delivering those things for bigger product development and marketing rewards.
For example, a report could show typical users’ scroll depth, allowing you to understand the best place to position an offer or upgrade for maximum results. And this is just one of the many benefits. A customer service report could also show that your users want additional features for an existing product instead of an entirely new offering.
In our survey of 56 respondents, we found that almost 90% of businesses have a customer insight report. 95% of our respondents think that customer insight reports are beneficial.
Read on to learn:
Let’s begin!
A customer insight report is an interpreted account of monitored customer behavior data, feedback, and suggestions gathered to improve customer experience — and in turn, business profits.
These reports include data such as product development suggestions from customers, product preferences, and product reviews, which help your team understand basic product development concerns like:
They also provide the data that marketing and sales need to maximize their budgets for better ROI.
Related: 7 Ways to Use Customer Data for More Efficient Marketing
Done right, customer insight reports provide a deeper understanding of both what your customers need and why they need it. With this knowledge, you can build products your users will love, and deliver them with precise and emphatic marketing.
The respondents in our survey came from different backgrounds. 39.66% B2C Services or Products, 32.76% B2B Services or Products, 27.59% Agency: Marketing, Digital or Media.
In our survey, respondents said the Marketing team benefited most from having a properly developed customer insight report, followed by the Sales team.
Here are some benefits of customer insight reports typically seen:
Now that you’re ready to create your best customer report yet, what metrics and insights should you include? Our respondents say to include:
Claire Westbrook of LSAT Prep Hero, says the most important metric to include in a customer report is customer churn. According to Westbrook, customer churn will “give you an indication of how many customers are leaving your company and why.”
With that information, you can prioritize what to fix based on how much churn it causes. You can also tell how to fix it when you look at the reason for churn.
No matter your role in customer support – agent, manager, or VP – your core focus is to ensure that customers’ issues, complaints, and information requests are always dealt with promptly and efficiently. But to stay on track, you probably have to log into multiple tools and spend hours manually compiling data into a comprehensive report. Now you can quickly monitor and analyze your customer service performance data from HelpScout and Stripe in a single dashboard that monitors fundamental metrics, such as:
Now you can benefit from the experience of our customer support experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template that contains all the essential metrics for monitoring and analyzing your customer service performance and its correlation to churn rate. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in customer service reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your accounts with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
Retaining old users is often easier than trying to acquire new ones. According to Invesp, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60–70%. That goes down to 5-20% for new prospects.
No surprise then that Westbrook also votes CLV as an important insight to include in your report. “You should also track customer lifetime value (CLV) to determine the profitability of each customer. CLV takes into account the monetary value of each customer over the course of their relationship with your company. We found that there was a discrepancy between our long-term revenue goals and existing customer churn rates. This made us create a strategy to reduce churn rates so that we can meet our business goals.” says Westbrook.
The best way to get an unbiased view of customer experiences is through online reviews and feedback from social media platforms.
Bryan Philips of In Motion Marketing, explains that “The most important factors to study are actionable insights; online reviews and social media feedback. Online reviews provide a massive depth of information, drawing data from your customer and competing products to determine how your company’s service and goods compare. Positive online reviews increase customer trust, provide direct communication between the buyer and seller, and boost SEO search results.
When companies permit public reviews and respond to negative feedback, they build a stronger online presence — which plays a massive role in company success. This extends to social media feedback. Using social media, companies get real-time insights and widespread data with an overview of all the demographics they need to compile a consumer insight report.”
Philips also shared that “Using online software, you can determine socio-demographic statistics, personal lifestyles, purchasing motivations, and general brand perception. Hubspot Social Media Management Software costs $890+ a month, but it allows you to plan, share, and analyze data through one tool. You can manage multiple social profiles and schedule posts, making it an easy all-in-one marketing tool that I highly recommend for businesses trying to improve their social media presence.”
A good customer satisfaction score tells you that your customers are satisfied and will likely refer you to contacts.
Brice Gump of Major Impact Media buttresses that, “Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is the most important metric to include in a customer insight report. If a company has a high CSAT, it means that they satisfy customers with the product or service the company offers.
A high CSAT tells companies they are meeting customers’ needs.
When I prepare a customer insight report, I always include CSAT as the first metric because it is essential to any business. For instance, I worked with a design company that had a low CSAT score. The customers were not satisfied with the design firm’s services for many reasons, including its lack of experience with certain types of projects. The problem was that the design company had little experience with luxury residential projects. There were too many challenges that they could not overcome, which led to a lot of complaints from their customers.
What we did was to include a list of all the challenges they faced on luxury residential projects. It helped us identify the gaps and where we needed to improve. These changes helped us set new goals that would help us improve our CSAT score in the future.”
Similarly, Clare Jones of Custom Neon said CSAT along with other qualitative metrics is important. Jones further explains how to use CSAT for real results.“As an eCommerce business the metrics that we focus on are our Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES). Understanding whether a customer would refer us to friends or family is very insightful in determining how satisfied they are with our service overall. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is an important metric but needs to be broken down to focus on specific elements of the business. ie, packaging, delivery, product integrity, service, etc. Simply asking if a customer is satisfied is too ambiguous and doesn’t provide any in-depth analysis on what the business is doing well and what they could improve on.” says Jones.
Related: How to Set Measurable Customer Service Goals for Your Team
Net Promoter Score measures how likely your customers are to recommend your product to a peer. That’s why Katarzyna Knothe of Displate says that they include subjective insights like NPS in their customer insight reports.
“it’s a quick and easy way (and understandable for the customers!) to get valuable insights. Our NPS includes two questions: the 0-10 recommendation and an open-ended question for comments. The comments are extremely helpful to understand the differences in NPS scores over time and to find problems with the product before they become a widespread issue. In the report, I include both the NPS score and the most interesting comments. It helps spread our customers’ voices across the company,” Knothe says.
Shawn Plummer of The Annuity Expert believes that buyer personas and customer journey maps are essential to customer insight reports, especially for different buyer segments. That’s because these two show who the ideal customer is and how they interact with your brand, so that you can personalize your offering and marketing for them.
Plummer says that “It’s essential to include buyer personas, customer journey maps for each segment that show how customers interact with the brand, the problems identified and then solutions and recommendations. All of these insights should be backed by data, including survey data or metrics such as Net Promoter Score.
In our case, we normally work on a comprehensive customer insight report in response to a specific problem such as a customer segment where we’re struggling to grow or maintain business, or a new customer segment we’re interested to expand into. In these cases, we need to understand the customer and start digging into their journey and personas, so we know how we need to shift our branding or shift customer perceptions.
We gather as much primary data as we can including survey data, focus groups, and interviews so that we can back up the points we have in our report and know that we’re deciding based on hard data.”
The average order value is especially important for eCommerce and service-based businesses. It allows you to understand how valuable your different offerings are to users. That way you can prioritize marketing efforts for more valuable offerings, while you work to improve other offerings with lower AOVs.
Displate’s Knothe says “I use it as a benchmark to compare performance across different products or Displate designs. % returning orders: this indicates how much a specific product or a design suits our core customers. This helps to keep a healthy mix of design offers for both new and returning customers. It can also be used to choose products and designs for ads that would appeal specifically to new or returning customers.”
Knothe says that purchase history is a favorite metric to include in customer insight reports for Displate. According to Knothe, the purchase history informs their survey strategy.
“…it tells me almost everything I need to know about our customers before sending them a survey. I segment customers into new, returning, buyers of specific products, high and low spenders, and based on that I distribute the surveys (be it a concept test or a brand image study). This allows for an additional angle of analysis, e.g. which customer segment is most attracted to the new product concept, are there any differences in brand appeal between high and low spending customers.” says Knothe.
Want to know how customers react to product changes? Then you should report on your customer service queries according to Displate’s Katarzyna Knothe who says that “Customer service queries is a great source of customer feedback. We track the queries by categories (website, shipping, payments, product, etc.), which I can later use in different reports.
It’s especially useful whenever we make changes to our products (new packaging, different forwarder, major change to the website). Adding these comments to product performance reports allows me to better explain the changes in the objective metrics.”
The whole point of creating a customer insight report is to understand how customers view your product and brand. For Shaun Heng of Coin Market Cap, that means including customer feedback in the report is non-negotiable.
“A comprehensive customer insight report will always include data on customer feedback, sentiment, and behavior, as well as comparative data regarding product reviews, performance, and ratings over time.
We’ve found particular value in statistics that compare our average consumer sentiment versus competition over time, helping us to understand consensus opinion on certain design elements of our website in comparison to our competitors. In addition, behavioral data regarding website navigation, in general, has been a significant metric within customer insight reports for us.” Heng says.
Gary Warner of Joloda Hydraroll takes a similar approach. “We tweak and update the information included in our Customer Insight Report regularly, and it is an essential component of our marketing strategy.
In short, it provides an overview of our customers, their preferences, feedback, likes and dislikes, and how they use our products. We use it as a basis for our marketing to existing customers and to potential future customers. It includes research on our competitors, case studies, our reviews and feedback analysis, net promoter score, customer personas, data from customer surveys, and customer journey maps. It also includes analytics information showing what our customers are searching for, how they find us, and where they are in the world. It is invaluable in helping us to deliver targeted and effective marketing campaigns that appeal directly to our ideal customer.” says Warner.
How hard or easy it is for customers to accomplish the desired task can influence business success. Hence why you should include the Customer Effort Score in your customer insight reports.
Clare Jones of Custom Neon shares “…Customer Effort Score (CES) again, as an eCommerce business in a very competitive space, we need to understand how effectively and easily the consumer can navigate our site to place their order. We utilize other data to understand dwell times and bounce rates, but look to customers to understand individualized feedback. If the process is arduous or staccato, the customer experience will be diminished, and we need to understand if this is a site issue, or an external issue such as poor WiFi coverage.”
On how to access your CES, Jones says “For most accurate results, CES surveys should be delivered immediately following interactions, such as a product purchase, quote request, complaint etc. After a customer has had correspondence simply asking how easily they found it to deal with us, whether they fulfilled their needs or gained a resolution will quickly help us understand how likely it would be for them to work with us again.”
Insights into search volume help you position your offer to leverage existing and emerging demand.
Teresha Aird of Offices.net frequently includes this metric in their customer insight reports and says “As an online business, we find that data surrounding search volumes for terms relevant to our offerings is a key element of a quality customer insight report.
Knowing what our customers are searching for, and the types of terms that are relevant to our market, is vital information for our marketing team, as it shows them which webpages to optimize and promote in order to generate higher potential for deals.
It’s also essential to include information about emerging trends and current market projections, particularly as we’re currently witnessing rapid technological growth.
Knowing the trends and market moves that have the propensity to suddenly drive change in your industry will help your workforce be better prepared for all possible outcomes. Including deep market projections and analysis of emerging trends in our customer insight reports has helped us pivot to capture new markets, most recently allowing us to alter our customer service and marketing strategies to focus on the large number of businesses looking to switch to a flexible workspace.”
Related: How to Build a Comprehensive SEO Keyword Ranking Report
Jarie Bolander of The Story Funnel shares that product market fit is an important insight to include in your reports.Bolander says it helps to understand customers, “We use Product Market Fit as our metric to understand customers. The metric is pretty simple. We ask customers how Disappointed they would be if they could no longer use the product. The three choices are: Very Disappointed, Somewhat Disappointed, and Not Disappointed. The percent that is Very Disappointed is what we care the most about because those are our best customers.”
In today’s competitive landscape, businesses big and small need all the advantages they can get. One of the best methods for gaining this advantage is by getting to know your customers better. Create a customer insight report and make it a central piece of your strategy—this will be key in understanding what your audience wants to improve the quality of your product.
Databox allows you to create custom reports depending on your business goals. If you don’t have time to create a report from scratch, you can also download one (or more) of our prebuilt customer service dashboard templates. Want to start creating actionable customer insight reports that move your business forward? Sign up for a free trial today!
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