Why Customer Behavior Matters For A Digitally Empowered Business?

2017 was an excellent year for technologies like IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Twins, Augmented Reality and so on to haul its potential out of the shed. Organizations living in the disruption age are required to reinvent their business, deliver a unique customer experience and have a substantial insight to understand their customer behavior. Survival is no more a concern today. Digitally empowered enterprises are required to adopt agility. Only an agile enterprise who understands their customer and can reply rapidly to their evolving behavior are going to thrive in this disruptive era. It is also necessary to embody a culture of innovation into your customer experience framework and build partnerships to amplify your company’s outreach and connections.

“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.”

– Steve Jobs, CO-Founder, Chairman Apple

Importance Of Customer Behavior

Emerging technologies have empowered both buyers and sellers. It has improved the way both the parties connect and behave. Customer behavior is nothing but a buyer’s actions that can be monitored, which include buyers looking for a product, their opinion, and ultimately consumption. Analysing and measuring the entire process will help businesses to uncover if customers are satisfied or not with their offerings. With this valuable data, business leaders will be able to recognize the features that provoke buyers to complete the buying process.

For example, if a customer spends 25 minutes on average, browsing online for products, deciding what to buy, gives the digital marketer a very little time to have their brand impact on customers and influence customers to complete the buying process. In fact, more than 50% of online shopping remains undecided. Here digital leaders have to spend a lot of time and money to understand the customer behavior and come up with a design that pushes customers to buy.

A successful digitally empowered business should be able to drive digital transformation by measuring the most valuable customer data and analytics. There are countless potential customers out there and reading their mind is not that easy because everyone will have a  different style, requirements, and shopping attitude. Living in a digital age you know nothing is constant, be it people’s lifestyle, technology or fashion. The way products are designed today, and their consumptions, everything is changing continuously. However, if you can comprehend the concepts, study, and excel on all these factors, this will help you master in understanding customer behavior and build products or services accordingly and publicize them more efficiently.

Strategies To Understand Customer Behavior

Emerging technologies are still changing customers’ shopping behavior, and only businesses who are focused on serving the real needs of the customer are not only going to survive but thrive.

Now customers have access to multiple devices to connect with their favorite brands and stay updated. This gives challenge as well as an opportunity to the digitally empowered businesses to thrive on being active and accessible across all devices. Embrace technology and connect with your customers where they are and meet their needs. Today around 80% of customers say being available across all devices is very crucial.

Technology today has turned the table to the customers’ side. Increasing power has raised the expectations, and now customers get to decide what product they want to buy, from where and at what time. As a business being accessible is not just enough, you have to be available for your customer 24/7 or else they will replace you with the one who meets their expectations.

Social media platform have given customers the power to make or destroy any brand image. If you fail to meet their expectations, even a single review or rating on social media can damage your entire brand reputation. Another way is, if you can successfully make use of this platform, then you are going to have access to vast amounts of data. Having access to millions of peoples’ data will help you quickly research the customers’ behavior and utilize the data more efficiently.

Key Focus Areas

Customers have become sophisticated in this digital era. Understanding each customers journey and reinforcing individual zone adds excellent value in personalizing the business offerings. Figure out the complexity, the opportunity and then take the floor. To be able to offer personalized service you should be able to observe your customers’ behavior more closely. This means predicting your customers’ action and their interest will help your offer a personalized approach which will amplify loyalty, driving long-term value for your business.

For example, if it’s a weekend and it’s raining outside. Customers more likely to prefer staying home and tempted to order mouth-watering food. Predicting customers actions under such case is critical to target the right audience, at the right time and sending them the notifications with the latest offers will give the brand the potential to automate marketing responses.

Data plays a key role. Using big data will help the digital leader to analyze and calculate customers’ behavior and uncover the patterns, trends along with the pre-sales operations report. As a decision maker of your company, this will help you to take the right steps, build an effective customer experience transformation framework and underpin that individual’s advancement throughout their journey.

Final Upshot

As per Forbes survey report, “a vast majority of executives who have been overseeing predictive marketing efforts for at least two years, reported an increase of 86% in their return on investment (ROI) as a result of their predictive marketing.”

Knowing your customers and predict their action becomes unavoidable to survive in this competitive digital world. If you can do it right then, you will be the disruptor of this digital era. 2018 is going to be an active year in tech and are expected to make waves in businesses and our living. A lot of research and innovations have already set in technology like AI to understand customers behavior and to meet their expectations for personalized experiences.