The little voice inside your head likely reminds you that collecting incomplete or wrong data for what you want to accomplish from varied customer analytics efforts does absolutely no good. So, why do so many companies lose sight of this? We'll tackle that in another post. In the meantime, here are a number of methods you can (and should) leverage for a wide range of customer analytics goals.
Voice of Customer:
This gives you a way to obtain the basic demographics of the people who purchase, make repeat purchases, and recommend your company and products to friends.
Customer Segmentation
Segmenting customers by demographics, behaviors, and profitability gives you better ideas on how to better serve current customer demographics. It also enables you to discover any unmet needs and deliver better products and services in the future.
Persona Development A persona embodies the key characteristics of a customer segment by highlighting salient demographics, goals, and top tasks for development teams. Personas represent fictional customers but should be based on real data obtained from customer segmentation analyses, ethnographic research, surveys, and interviews.
Customer Journey Mapping
A customer journey map helps identify problem areas customers encounter while engaging a product or service and can locate opportunities for improvement. It can also help unify often disparate and competing efforts within the same organization by providing different departments with a single document that maps the customer’s entire experience with a product, service, or company.
Top-Task Analysis
A top-task analysis helps separate the critical few tasks from the trivial many by having customers pick their most essential tasks. Targeting your efforts on significant tasks and delivering a solid experience where it has the biggest impact means more satisfied customers and customers who are more willing to repeat purchase, return, and recommend to friends.
Usability Study
You find what customers find difficult about your product or website. Observing how just a few customers use the product can uncover most of the common problems with an interface.
Findability Study
A findability study is a specialized usability study that focuses on the taxonomy (labels and hierarchy) and ignores distractions such as the design, layout, and search capabilities.
Conjoint Analysis
A conjoint analysis produces an accurate view of customer ratings by isolating which features have the biggest impact on preference. It’s typically used in the product development stages to understand which features to build or how changing price or options affect customers’ future behavior.
Key Driver Analysis
A key driver analysis identifies which features contribute the most to customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, or any other key variable of interest. Have customers rate their satisfaction with the most important features or functional areas of an experience.
Gap Analysis
In a gap analysis, customers rate or rank the most important features and aspects of a product or service. Then, customers rate or rank how satisfied they are with each of the features. For each feature, you find the “gap” by subtracting the average satisfaction rating from the average importance rating.
I'm sure we could think of numerous other methods. Yet, this is what I consider to be David Letterman's Top 10.