Did you know more than half of customers have switched brands due to poor customer service? Or that 86% are willing to pay more for a better experience?
The current business landscape is fiercely competitive. Inadequate service levels or experience are likely to be punished by customers making alternative buying choices. While businesses with the strongest customer service and experiences are likely to profit.
It’s not enough to offer a positive experience some of the time either. 33% of customers would consider switching to a competitor following a single instance of poor customer service, while 75% expect a consistent experience across multiple channels.
This is perhaps the reason why 89% of businesses expect to compete primarily on the basis of customer experience by 2025 – up from just 36% in 2012.
So how do you create and maintain a positive and competitive customer experience? How do you ensure you’re not being left behind by competitors offering higher service levels and better experiences?
Increasingly, businesses are turning to data and competitor intelligence software to monitor customers and improve their experiences. While intelligence platforms are more commonly used by businesses to track their competitors and the market, they also offer a solution to customer monitoring.
The data captured gives them the opportunity to understand customer sentiment, beliefs, pain points, hopes, dreams and more. These insights can then be used to improve customer experiences and protect and grow their revenue.
But why is competitor intelligence software specifically important to the customer monitoring process? Let’s take a closer look.
3 Reasons Why CI Software Is Used For Customer Monitoring
1) It saves time and energy
The alternative to competitor intelligence software is often a manual approach to customer monitoring, tracking social media channels and review sites in isolation. This is a slow, laborious process that doesn’t produce the outcomes to make it worthwhile. For instance, key insights are easy to miss and hard to analyse.
Intelligence software, by comparison, uses automated tracking to monitor every customer interaction with or about your brand in real-time. It turns a difficult process into an easy one and ensures nothing is missed.
2) It gives you fast access to insights
If you’re manually monitoring your customers or using multiple software tools, your data is likely to be stored across multiple dashboards or documents, making it hard to access, analyse and share. Using a single competitor intelligence platform keeps all of your insights in one place and easy-to-access via an online dashboard.
Speed of access is critical for moving fast in your market to capitalise on opportunities and minimise threats.
3. It makes sharing intelligence easy
Having all your customer monitoring data in one place has another key advantage. Through third-party integrations, you can quickly and easily share any insights you gather with other departments and individuals.
Alerts and reports can be managed and fed into people’s existing workflows by integrating with tools such as Slack, Microsoft Teams and Power BI. Your organisation will be mobilised to use customer monitoring data to make informed strategic decisions across areas such as product, marketing, sales and – of course – customer service.
Next, we’ll look at the value of customer monitoring itself.
Customer Monitoring: Why It’s Important
a) A real-time understanding of customer sentiment
At any given time, real conversations about your brand, products, and services are taking place online. Likewise for your competitors, and the product category in general. Customers are discussing how they feel about features, brands, customer service and more.
By monitoring these conversations with competitor intelligence software, you can gain real-time insights about sentiment. You’ll identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats quickly and have the data to make informed decisions about how to respond.
b) Respond to feedback fast
79% of consumers expect brands to respond to their social media messages within 24 hours. Without a response, 30% said they would go to a competitor if a brand while 36% would publicly shame the brand.
Customer monitoring ensures you know about potential problems early. While individual social media platforms will alert you to tagged mentions and direct messages, using intelligence software ensures you know about every relevant conversation. Your customer service teams will be empowered to respond faster and avoid issues from escalating.
c) Identify opportunities for growth
Without customer monitoring, organisations are reliant on sales data, experience and intuition to guide their strategies. While that may provide some levels of success, businesses that use data-driven customer insights to inform their decisions are up to 6% more profitable than those that don’t.
By gathering intelligence using automated tracking software, you can identify and respond to customer trends, needs that aren’t being catered for and other commercial opportunities – all before your competitors know about them.
d) Reduce client churn
If you manage a large client base, having a clear view of what’s happening in their organisations and markets can help you to adapt your sales and client services approach. It can help you to support them with key challenges or mitigate the risks of them leaving.
One of the key factors driving the adoption of competitor intelligence solutions is the need to reduce customer churn by understanding and addressing customers’ needs and preferences. Companies that use competitor intelligence software are 2.6 times more likely to have a process in place to reduce customer churn.
e) Improve your understanding of customer needs and preferences
Ultimately, customer monitoring is a way of getting to know the people you serve better. What do they want? What’s standing in their way of getting it? Who or what do they want to become? What needs aren’t being met by the market?
Through automated customer monitoring, you’ll build a clearer picture of the opportunities and risks in the market, so you can devise effective strategies to fulfil customer needs.
Now, let’s cover off some of the most frequently asked questions about customer monitoring.
Customer Monitoring FAQs
1) What is customer monitoring?
Customer monitoring is the process of collecting and analysing data on customer behaviour, needs, and preferences. It involves tracking customer interactions with and about your brand across different channels to gain insights into their sentiment, pain points, and expectations. The goal of customer monitoring is to improve customer experience and satisfaction, reduce churn, and identify opportunities for growth.
2) What is competitor intelligence software?
Competitor intelligence software or platforms are tools that help businesses track and analyse data on their competitors, the market and their customers. It enables organisations to gain insights into their competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, market share, and overall performance. Competitor intelligence software can be used to monitor social media, website traffic, pricing, marketing campaigns, and other metrics to help businesses stay ahead of their competition.
3. What is automated tracking in relation to customer monitoring?
Automated tracking is the process of collecting data automatically, without the need for human intervention. It involves using AI-powered competitor intelligence software tools to monitor customer behaviour, competitor activity, and other relevant metrics. Automated tracking can help businesses save time, reduce errors, and get real-time insights into their performance and that of their competitors.
