Knowing your customer base is crucial for informing the way your business operates. If you know who they are and what they want, you can give them exactly what they’re looking for and leave them satisfied and engaged.
Developing customer profiles backed by insightful data is an ideal way to maintain awareness of exactly who you are serving, but how do you do that?
With 59% of consumers looking for businesses to use their data to personalize their experience, it’s time to find out how.
Read on for everything you need to know about creating data-rich customer profiles for your business.
What is a customer profile?
First of all, we need to know what a customer profile is.
At its core, a customer profile is a detailed representation of a typical or ideal customer. This profile can include information such as age, race, location, buying patterns, interests, motivations, and more.
By developing these customer profiles, your business can make more informed decisions and provide higher levels of specialized customer service.
B2B vs. B2C customer profiles
The two main types of customer profiles are B2B, or Business to Business, and B2C, Business to Consumer.
For B2B, the main focuses in a customer profile are job roles and the industry in which your customers work. When offering B2B products or services, you are typically targeting the professional, rather than the individual.
For B2C, you need to dig into much more specific detail. A B2C customer profile will cover personal characteristics like age, political affiliations, gender, geography, etc. requiring a more complex approach to map out their driving factors and motivations.
Why is data important in creating customer profiles?
Whilst you can make predictions and estimations about your customer base, without specific data, you can never ensure accuracy. It’s important to remember that generalizations made regarding demographical features may lead to errors, such as suggesting inappropriate products or wasting consumer time.
Effective data tracking can provide invaluable insights for you to build comprehensive customer profiles upon. The data doesn’t lie, so by focusing on the statistics, you can tailor your customer approach with confidence.
What are the four types of customer data?
So, you need data – that much is clear – but which kinds of data do you need?
There are four main types of customer data, and we’ll break each one down here:
- Basic data
- Interaction data
- Behavioral data
- Attitudinal data
Basic data
Basic data is just that, the basics. This can include information such as name, contact information, general demographics, and location.
As the base level, this data serves as the foundation for all others and is one of the easiest ways to differentiate between those in your audience.
Interaction data
Interaction data refers to any information collected through customer interactions with your business.
This includes customer activity on your website, session replay recordings, customer service chat logs, and email exchanges. Interaction data covers not just why they interact with you, but also how, by showcasing their preferred touchpoints and methods of communication.
By studying how your customers interact with your business, you can learn a lot about their motivations and what they are hoping to achieve by connecting with you.
Behavioral data
Behavioral data is another key facet in the customer profile process.
Behavioral data covers the actions your customers take throughout their interactions with your company. This could include, but is not limited to, purchase history, browsing activity, and response to marketing campaigns.
By mapping out behavioral data, you can segment your customer base to a much higher degree and find ways to target them more effectively.
Attitudinal data
The final type of data to utilize in your customer profiles is attitudinal data.
Attitudinal data reveals the sentiment of your customers, such as how they feel about previous experiences with your brand, whether it be positive or negative.
By collecting data from selected customer preferences and feedback through reviews and surveys, you can gain a greater understanding of the way each customer group feels about your brand.
If one particular group is registering positive feedback regularly, you can keep doing what you’re doing. If you notice a particular segment of your audience reporting negative experiences or room for improvement, you can re-tailor your approach to better meet their needs.
How to collect customer data
Each type of data is important in its own right, helping to inform comprehensive customer profiles that can benefit your business. But, how do you collect this data in the appropriate ways?
Whether it’s qualitative or quantitative data, there are several ways to collect the data you need.
Quantitative data
Quantitative data is the ‘numbers’ data. As a more exact measurement of various information, quantitative data can be scaled up to represent a larger population and make accurate predictions about your wider audience.
When it comes to collecting quantitative data, there are a few common methods. Organizations looking to collect this kind of data typically utilize surveys, product analytics tools, and the evaluation of product metrics.
An example of useful quantitative data could be something like ‘25% of surveyed customers only buy a single product in each shopping process’.
Data such as this can then be acted upon and reassessed in the future to chart improvement over time.
Qualitative data
Qualitative data is based on feelings, sentiments, and customer attitudes. Whilst this is not quite as black and white as quantitative data, qualitative data can uncover more detailed insights into how your customers feel about buying from you.
Qualitative data can also be collected in a range of ways, from direct interviews and reviewing session recordings to focus groups and questionnaires.
With more complex information to review, the data processing stage can take more time and care to complete, as customers will likely portray their thoughts in more complex ways. However, the juice is certainly worth the squeeze as you can uncover much more insightful and actionable data with qualitative research.
What are the benefits of a customer profile?
Building and maintaining accurate customer profiles can provide a range of benefits to businesses in any industry.
Here are some of the ways customer profiles can benefit your organization:
- Efficiency
- Finding your ideal product-market fit
- Lower customer acquisition cost
- Personalized, proactive support
- Reduced customer churn
Efficiency
By more effectively mapping out your customer base, you can cut down on much of the ambiguity and initial fact-finding when dealing with customers.
Whether it’s with your support and sales teams or for your marketing department, having a great understanding of the segments in your audience can help increase the efficiency of marketing activity and reduce response times for your users.
By developing a more transparent approach across your company, customer profiles can help to break down silos between departments and keep everyone on the same page.
Find your ideal product-market fit
No matter how strong a product is, if there isn’t a market calling for it, it’s going to fall flat.
Developing strong customer profiles helps to identify not only who your audience is, but exactly what they’re looking for. Using these profiles in the product development process enables you to create offerings that people are calling for, ensuring higher levels of success when they hit the market.
Know your customer and you know the market.
Lower customer acquisition cost
Finding new customers is always a challenge for any business, but by knowing your regular customers in detail, you can make much more targeted approaches.
Instead of running mass-marketing campaigns to try and find a needle in the haystack, developing effective customer profiles helps you to identify the people waiting in the wings to hear about you.
If you know who your target audience is, you can spend less on your marketing activity and see greater results by focusing on the groups that are likely to buy from you.
Personalized, proactive support
Your customer profiles aren’t just about knowing who your customer is, they’re also about knowing what they want.
By compiling data from previous customer interactions, you can identify pain points and deliver effective customer solutions before they even ask for them.
Facilitating a proactive, efficient customer support process is a surefire way to increase customer satisfaction and ensure repeat business.
Reduced customer churn
As an extension of offering personalized, proactive support, customer profiles can help to reduce customer turnover and keep your audience on board.
By providing tailored approaches to your sales, marketing, and customer service efforts, you are offering a much more enjoyable customer experience. If your customers leave happy, the next time they need a product or service, they are more likely to return to you.
Acquiring customers is great, but keeping hold of them is where the money really is.
What should your customer profile include?
So, you’re ready to start building out your customer profiles, but what should they include?
There are three main things to ensure are included within your customer profiles.
Demographic
The bedrock of your customer profiles should be demographic information. This information helps to provide an easily segmented view of your customer base.
This information can be collected through surveys, customer sign-up details, or other data enrichment activities.
Types of demographic information to utilize can include:
- Age
- Race
- Location
- Income level
- Employment status
- Education
Psychographic
If demographic information helps to tell you who your customers are, psychographic information tells you what they’re interested in and what matters to them.
As one of the fundamental drivers behind whether a customer will resonate with your brand or not, psychographic data can help to develop personalized marketing campaigns and tailor your approach to better meet their needs.
Psychographic data can include:
- Values
- Interests
- Personality traits
- Social status
Behavioral
The third type of information to include in your customer profiles is behavioral data.
As one of the key indicators of customer preferences and needs, behavioral data can help to inform you of suitable product recommendations to make and how to deliver effective customer service.
Behavioral data is one of the more challenging forms to capture, but this can be done through website tracking, session replay evaluation, and social media monitoring.
Behavioral data can include:
- Purchase history
- Social media engagement
- Website activity
- Voluntary sign-ups for newsletters or mobile apps
How to create a customer profile
Now that we know what needs to be included, we need to know how to put it all into place.
Creating a customer profile can be broken down into five steps, which are:
- Use customer profile templates
- Identify customer pain points and solutions
- Determine common demographics and behaviors
- Gather and analyze customer feedback
- Find the right software
Use customer profile templates
One of the best ways to ensure consistency and expedite the customer profile process is to find or develop templates to use.
By outlining the relevant information to include or not include, you can ensure all of your customer profiles are comparable against one another. This allows for better analysis of your different audience groups and increased transparency across the business.
Customer profiles are useful for many different departments, so ensuring they are all consistent and easily accessible means better customer results across all fronts.
Identify customer pain points and solutions
To begin fleshing out your customer profile templates, you first need to identify your customers’ pain points and potential solutions.
The main purpose of a customer profile is to be able to deliver tailored solutions to each target group, so being aware of their issues puts you in a strong position to help alleviate them.
Utilizing a session replay platform, such as Fullview, is an effective way to identify pain points. By reviewing session replays, you can identify where customers might be running into problems and how you can make alterations to help.
Session replays can reveal exactly what each user did during their session, from where they clicked to what caused them to end their session, all without the need for a direct survey or supervised session.
If your due diligence identifies a certain customer base is experiencing the same issues, you can incorporate suggested solutions into their customer profile for more efficient resolutions.
Determine common demographics and behaviors
To begin segmenting your audience, you need to determine common demographics and behavioral characteristics.
Collating customers via demographics is a simple process, as you can quickly and easily group by age, location, or other factors. For behaviors, it’s a little more complicated.
However, tracking behavior can be made much simpler with the use of a session replay service such as Fullview. A session replay can show you where a customer moved their mouse, where they clicked, as well as any bugs they may have encountered.
Another good way to segment by behavior is to analyze your customers’ purchase patterns. Grouping people who buy similar products, or similar quantities of products, can help to identify your most valuable customers or those with very specific needs.
There may be some overlap in these profiles, as you may find customers with similar purchase histories are spread across all age brackets and locations, but this isn’t something to be concerned about.
Gather and analyze customer feedback
When you’re trying to build customer profiles based on fact, not guesswork, there’s no better place to look than at what your customers are explicitly telling you.
By gathering and analyzing your customer feedback, you gain invaluable insight into their positive and negative experiences, specific needs, and feelings about your company.
With customer feedback, you can segment customers in a variety of ways, from ‘believers and naysayers’ to ‘satisfied and unsatisfied’.
Find the right software to integrate data across tools and systems
The final step of the customer profile process is to actually put this data to work.
Finding the right software solutions to effectively integrate the data across the tools and systems you utilize is the best way to maximize their impact. For example, software that instantly presents all available data and profile information about a customer as they call your customer service team can be invaluable when you’re trying to lower your first response time rates.
Another example is sales-focused software which sorts each order into their assigned customer profile, showcasing which specific profile types are high-performing at any time.
There are many software options on the market to consider, so make sure you spend time finding the ones that will provide tangible benefits to your team.
8 customer profile templates you can use
To get you started, we’ve put together eight customer profile templates for you to choose from. Whether this is your first time developing customer profiles or you’re a seasoned vet, we recommend looking through these options to help you make your next move with confidence.
1. Retail Customer Profile:
- Name:
- Age:
- Gender:
- Occupation:
- Shopping Habits:
- Preferred Products:
- Budget Range:
- Preferred Shopping Channels:
2. Tech Enthusiast Profile:
- Name:
- Age:
- Occupation:
- Favorite Tech Devices:
- Gaming Preferences:
- Social Media Platforms:
- Tech Communities:
- Budget for Tech Purchases:
3. Health and Wellness Customer Profile:
- Name:
- Age:
- Occupation:
- Fitness Level:
- Dietary Preferences:
- Wellness Goals:
- Preferred Fitness Activities:
- Health Concerns:
4. B2B Decision Maker Profile:
- Name:
- Position/Title:
- Company Name:
- Industry:
- Company Size:
- Challenges Faced in Business:
- Preferred Communication Channels:
- Decision-Making Process:
5. Travel Enthusiast Profile:
- Name:
- Age:
- Occupation:
- Travel Preferences:
- Favorite Destinations:
- Travel Budget:
- Preferred Accommodation Type:
- Travel Booking Habits:
6. Fashionista Profile:
- Name:
- Age:
- Occupation:
- Fashion Style:
- Favorite Brands:
- Shopping Frequency:
- Preferred Social Media Platforms for Fashion:
- Fashion Influencers Followed:
7. Small Business Owner Profile:
- Name:
- Type of Business:
- Years in Business:
- Target Audience:
- Challenges in Business:
- Preferred Business Solutions:
- Marketing Strategies Used:
- Future Business Goals:
8. Foodie Profile:
- Name:
- Age:
- Occupation:
- Cuisine Preferences:
- Favorite Restaurants:
- Cooking Habits:
- Dietary Restrictions:
- Food-related Hobbies or Activities:
Conclusion
Developing comprehensive customer profiles is a crucial part of driving long-term business success and supercharging customer satisfaction.
Whilst the process may seem daunting, there’s no better time to start than right now. Use the information and templates we’ve provided to begin mapping out your customer base and delivering new levels of specialization to your audience.
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