Are You Solving Your Customer’s Problems?
Regardless of the type of business you’re running, you’re ultimately trying to solve your customer’s problems. This problem-solving is usually more complicated than it sounds. Using data is the best way to understand your customer and what they’re looking for in the modern business environment. Power BI reporting is a great way to easily visualize and interpret all the data and details you need to keep track of.
What are the most significant customer challenges facing companies?
- Answering challenging customer questions
- Understanding customer needs
- Managing and exceeding customer expectations
The quality of customer support is a major factor in deciding how much to trust your company for 38% of customers. A power BI reporting tool can help you manage all of these challenges. Your customer support team will be able to search for relevant terms or keywords to find the answers to tough questions. Your marketing team will be able to analyze customer data at a more granular level so they can understand what customers are looking for. You’ll also be able to provide accurate and up-to-date delivery estimates despite supply chain challenges.
Why Data Is So Critical
You can’t solve your customer’s problems if you don’t understand exactly what those problems are. If you don’t have access to clear, easy to interpret data, you might overlook problems because of your assumptions or emotions. Data can help make sense of your customers’ real-world behavior. This lets you see what might be obstructing your progress as a company. Intuition is great, but data helps you see into your blind spots. This can help your company adapt to supply chain backlogs, stand out in a crowd of competitors and understand what your customer’s problems really are.
Fulfillment Issues
Just about every business is experiencing some type of supply chain challenge in 2022. Several factors are involved in supply chain delays, all of which you can understand better by looking at your business data. First, there’s a current shortage of around 80,000 truck drivers, which means slower delivery, both to your warehouse and your customers. As a retailer, you can’t actually fix the shortage, but you can use data to adapt. Monitoring your inventory and orders in real time lets you get an up-to-date sense of how quickly your supply chain is moving now. If you have a clear picture of the newer, slower process, you’ll be able to coordinate shipping better. If you do need to extend your promised shipping times, you’ll be able to communicate a realistic timeframe to your customers.
Next, many retailers are overwhelmed with inventory in storage. With delivery backlogs, products need to be stored in your warehouse for longer. Since almost all retailers are experiencing the same problem at the same time, new warehouse space is expensive, difficult to find or both. This means that you can’t fix the problem simply by buying more space. Looking at your inventory and fulfillment data can help you work with the space you have. This might mean reallocating other space. For example, four out of five retailers repurposed some of their store space to handle storage for online orders in the past few years. Looking at your data will help you decide if this is a good decision for your business.
At the same time as these other challenges, customer expectations are expanding. Customers are buying more, shopping in more places, and wanting their items delivered faster. It can be difficult to meet these demands, but you need to do so to stay competitive. With good data management and visibility, you can predict demand and ensure you have the products you’ll need in stock.
Standing Out in a Noisy Marketplace
Integrating data analysis into your marketing plan helps you figure out how to stand out in a crowded market. When new technologies or products are released, they’re subject to the hype cycle. Customers start with unrealistically high expectations. Once they try out the product, they realize their expectations were too high and become disappointed. Then, they start using the product and finding ways to be productive with it. If you offer clear and consistent value, your company can stand out among the ups and downs of the hype cycle.
You can use your data to understand your customers through detailed segmentation. If your monitor performance and customer behavior, you’ll be able to see what your customers really want. This means you’ll be able to communicate realistic ways that your product solves a problem for them, which lets you avoid the cycle.
Develop Strategies Based on What Is and Not What Should Be
When you create buyer personas and plan your marketing communications, you make assumptions about your customers. These assumptions can be a good place to start, but they don’t provide a complete picture of who your customers are and what they want. For example, if you’re selling a children’s product and you assume only married adults are parents, you’ll be missing single parents and frustrating childless couples.
By looking at more detailed, individualized data, you can eliminate your biases and assumptions so you can understand your customers better. This lets you focus on the right problems, so you can solve them effectively. Everyone is limited by their own experiences and worldview. Objective data can help you see what is actually going on with your customers, and whether that fits with your expectations or not.
The Close
Data is incredibly useful, but it doesn’t help if you don’t look at it. With ChristianSteven’s Power BI Report Scheduler, you can set up automated delivery of your data reports to the people who need to read them. Download a 30-day free Power BI Report Scheduler trial to see how it can help you solve your customer problems.