What Is Consumer Insight—And Why Does It Matter for Your Bottom Line?

When we know better, we do better – that’s true in business as well as our personal lives. Consumer behavior insights allow us to better understand customer desires and dislikes. Once you understand what your customers want, all you must do is give it to them.

So, what are consumer insights? Consumer insights are data-driven observations about consumer behavior, needs, and perceptions. Consumer insights aren’t just numbers and data. Those things are important, but true insight is in the analysis and evaluation of the data. What are the trends? What are customers thinking and saying about your company?

In terms of examples of consumer insights, consider what PissedConsumer uncovered about customer service in the insurance industry. After analyzing more than 7 million calls to more than 140,000 companies, PissedConsumer determined that only 63% of customers can reach customer service when attempted. Only 57% of customers even reached customer service in three minutes.

But what matters most is that only 52.5% of customers are satisfied with the customer service they receive. Slow (or non-existent) customer service drives negative experiences. Finding ways to reduce waiting times would boost customer experience and insurance company satisfaction. 

So, what is consumer insight? It’s knowing how to make your customers happy using feedback analysis.

Why Are Customer Insights Important?

In the example above, the data and subsequent customer insight analysis was based on an industry. But it could just as easily be based on your own company. What is consumer insight saying about your customer service? Your products? Your delivery time? 

When you have insight into true customer opinions and sentiments, you can make impactful decisions. Good data leads to good decisions, and you want to make strategic decisions for marketing, product development, customer service and competitive positioning. 

Consumer insights can help you:

• Meet the expectations of your customers – both explicit and implicit.
• Personalize your marketing for your various customers and give them exactly what they want.
• Understand the general sentiment of customers to improve your overall marketing.
• Develop new ideas to stay on the cutting edge of what customers want now and in the future.

PissedConsumer has more than nineteen years of historical data about your company and its competitors. With more than 51 million consumers interacting with the site and leaving annual reviews or making contact through the platform, PissedConsumer is uniquely positioned to provide meaningful consumer insights about what is going wrong at your company, and what is going right.

In a consumer insights and analytics report by PissedConsumer, you’ll be able to see consumer sentiment at a glance – do customers have positive or negative thoughts about your business? You’ll also be able to see trends in satisfaction over time and dig into the data about issues that are frequently mentioned in reviews as well as customers’ proposed solutions. You’ll have information about why customers are calling and what they think when they hang up the phone. 

Customers have opinions about your business and their opinions drive their actions. If you’re not paying attention to what your customers think and want, you’ll wind up ignoring customer loyalty, miss opportunities for connection, and ultimately develop a poor reputation with customers. With so much information available through the consumer insights industry, why would you not dig into the data to see what it can tell you?

Types of Customer Insights

Customer insights are analyzed using data gathered across a wide range of sources. These are the most common types of consumer insights. 

Behavioral Insights

Technology allows us to travel customer interactions including website activity, time on pages, clicks, purchasing patterns and service engagement. This predicts future behavior. Consider, for example, how an e-commerce brand can easily adjust recommendations based on past purchases for a specific customer.

Action Tip: You can always start simple. Use website analytics to pinpoint where customers abandon their carts or exit your site and address those hurdles first to boost conversions.

Sentiment Analysis

How do customers feel about a particular brand or item? A sentiment analysis measures customer emotions and attitudes using keyword and comment analysis that digs not just into the denotative meaning of text, but the connotative meaning as well when customers leave feedback. 

Sentiment analysis can be very powerful after a public relations crisis or a new product launch to track the public or customer’s perceptions over time. This sort of consumer insight analysis can identify trends and assess potential reputation risks as well.

Customer Experience Metrics

There are several metrics that track customer experiences.

• A Net Promotor Score (NPS) is a metric that defines how many customers would recommend your company to others. Are customers hesitant to recommend you? That’s a sign of low brand loyalty and a problem that needs fixing. 
• A Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) will tell you how happy customers are with your business, typically on a scale of some kind. Five out of five stars reveals happy, loyal customers. Less than that means you have work to do. 
• A Customer Effect Score (CES) can reveal how much effort customers must exert to interact with a company or resolve an issue. A low CES score indicates your customers have smooth interactions. A high score says the exact opposite and is a cause for concern. 

Competitor Analysis Insights

Benchmarking the competition gets even more meaningful with customer insights. Not only can you see the analytics about your customers, but you can dig into what customers are saying about your competition as well. 

An industry benchmarks and competitors analysis reveals frequent complaints about your competition, giving you a significant advantage when it comes to identifying their weaknesses, market gaps, and your advantages across multiple areas of opportunity. 

How to Collect Customer Insights

Researchers know how to find consumer insights through the myriad of data collected with modern technology. Here are the most common methods used to gather and analyze customer insights. 

Customer Reviews & Complaints Data

Often underutilized, customer reviews and, especially, customer complaints can be a goldmine of information about a company. These insights often reveal the greatest customer frustrations, which, when analyzed, gives you common pain points to address along with customer suggestions for possible solutions.

Analyzing your own complaints not only helps you keep your company’s ego in check, but also allows you shift through the heaviest online material to address issues your competition might skim right over. Growth is in the struggle, after all.

PissedConsumer offers a specific analysis of complaints and commentary on your company using the millions of reviews left on the platform. A voice of the customer analysis and insight provides a deep resource for resolving issues, tracking progress on ongoing concerns, and preventing future crises that are still in development.

Social Media Listening

Social media consumer insights can be especially powerful. Customers leave feedback all over the various social media channels with direct complaints as well as commentary on the complaints or compliments of others. Social media listening monitors those conversations and effectively scrapes the data from them to track brand sentiment and identify trending concerns. 

Surveys & Feedback Forms

Customer feedback forms and surveys have been a staple of customer service for years, with good reason. A survey, sometimes just a single question or two, at specific points during a transaction can reveal information about the transaction process, customer sentiment, and the customer effort for a particular purchase.

Of course, it should be noted that there is always a challenge when it comes to response bias. If a survey feels cumbersome, many customers will simply bypass it rather than respond, limiting results to those who already had a lot on their mind which can skew results overall.

Conversation Analytics

We know that “calls are recorded for training purposes,” but those recorded phone calls to customer service are also a hotbed of information about customer sentiment, issues, resolutions, and pain points. 

With millions of customer service phone calls through PissedConsumer, that platform already tracks and receives data about calls, including interactions. The data from their conversation analytics is then processed into analytics to help companies identify issues and resolutions in authentic interactions. 

Action Tip: Combine multiple data sources (surveys, reviews, call transcripts) for a holistic view. A single channel might miss critical points, such as issues customers mention on review platforms that you are unlikely to find on social media.

How to Use Customer Insights for Business Growth

Once you have the data, its evaluation and the analysis provided by consumer insights, it’s time to put them to use. Companies use consumer insights in many ways to improve operations.

Improve Customer Experience

Companies can use sentiment analysis to identify issues and conflicts between customers and their business. The sentiment analysis can spot areas where customers are comfortable with your products and services and where you need to improve to enhance offers and retain customer loyalty.

Enhance Product Development

Customer insights can easily identify the market gaps where customers aren’t pleased with any offerings from you or your competition. These gaps are simply opportunities for your company to develop solutions your customers are already hoping for and fill those market gaps.

Strengthen Marketing Strategies

Customers are seeking personalized shopping opportunities, and customer insights provide the information you need to develop some of that personalization when it comes to marketing. Use targeted messaging to personalize marketing campaigns and increase engagement.

Competitive Benchmarking

With competitive benchmarking you can learn from the mistakes of your biggest competition. Benchmarking analytics helps you understand the industry as well as the specifics of your own company and its competitors. 

A PissedConsumer heatmap allows you to spot the highest areas of consumer dissatisfaction immediately with increasingly dark shades of color. A heatmap is comprised of common complaints and company feedback across the industry, giving you data-driven competitor analysis to help you refine your strategy. 

Source: The PissedConsumer Report Customer Experience in Insurance Market: 1st Half of 2024

Challenges in Leveraging Customer Insights

Customer insights are tremendously valuable, but they don’t come without a few challenges of their own. The most common challenges when trying to leverage customer insights are the sheer volume of data, biases that may be present in the data, and trying to bridge the gap between knowing and doing.

Consumer insights require a tremendous amount of information. That information is processed, evaluated, and analyzed to produce trends, sentiments, metrics, and reports. This process isn’t always streamlined, and the cumbersome task of analyzing data can quickly become overwhelming. 

There is always a natural bias when trying to survey consumer sentiment. Depending on the type of feedback requested, customers may want to avoid giving negative feedback when it is warranted, or they may be angry and skip any positives in favor of blasting their opinion about whatever it was that went wrong most recently. 

You can avoid biases in data by using a wider range of input types and by working on a larger scale. Thousands of reviews and posts are more effective than hundreds. Millions are better than thousands. But for that to work, you need access to millions of customers and their voices.

Finally, it’s one thing to know what the data is saying and a completely different thing to figure out what to do next. Too often we can see the problem without identifying a clear solution. This creates a gap between knowing and doing, and customer analysis can help fill this gap. 

High quality customer analysis looks beyond what customers are saying and into what customers mean and their overall sentiment. Customer service call and solution analysis can reveal what customers seek as solutions to common pinch points at your company and may shed light on your best next steps to long term solutions. 

While it may be tempting to try to compile and analyze data in house, a company often does not have the resources to collect all the necessary information from various review platforms, much less social media. Even if you have all of the data required, sorting through feedback, mitigating biases, and determining company versus industry trends may be challenging as you’re working through a single business lens. 

It's not necessary to try to implement systems in house. You can skip the complex and expensive systems that gather data you won’t have time to process and jump right into analysis through PissedConsumer reports. With the reports, you’ll get detailed, ready-to-use insights across the industry as well as feedback specific to your company. 

Compiled from the feedback of millions of platform users, customer insight analysis from PissedConsumer represents the true voice of the customer, processed by season, using data analytics supported by advanced AI algorithms. 

The Value of Consumer Insights

Customers have opinions and feelings about your company, your products, your services, and your brand overall. While some of those customers may be willing to share feedback directly, many more leave markers through reviews, phone calls, and social media posts and comments. This is essential data that your company should be leveraging for active growth. 

Collecting and analyzing this commentary can have tremendous long-term value. While it can be challenging to try to collect and evaluate the data needed on your own, using the resources and metrics provided by PissedConsumer can help you identify issues, spot possible solutions, and track trends in your industry and your business.

Customer insights are a critical component of business success. Your customers already know what they want you to do. They are telling you their opinions in many, many different ways. All you must do is find the right way to listen.