How To Get Customer Insights From Support Requests

Imagine being able to a continuously gather powerful customer insights from support requests and improve different aspects of your business in all the right ways. Since customer support tickets only come through when users have actually tried to utilize your product or service, they can bring you perceptive information and data that will help you understand your target users’ opinions about how well your company is doing in the industry. And so, with this blog, we will help you understand exactly how you can collect and analyse crucial customer insights from support requests.

Understanding What Is Meant By Customer Insights?

So let’s start with the basics – understanding what customer insights (also known as consumer insights) exactly mean. In the simplest words, this term refers to having a deep understanding of your customers based on their behaviors, preferences and needs. Interpreted from collected customer data, you can use these insights to direct your company towards improved product development and customer support. 

When customer insight research is conducted properly, it reveals how effectively a company communicates with and deals with feedback from its users or clients. These data can then be analyzed and used to form many business decisions or strategies going forward. The goal of using these customer generated insights should be to identify behavioral trends and find ways to implement them in improving marketing, sales, and service initiatives.

With a deeper understanding of consumer psychology, behavior, and preferences, you will be able to cater to the different needs of your customer base. And this will in turn, will help to boost leads, sales, and conversions.

Why Are Customer Insights Crucial To Businesses & Brands?

Customer insights provide feedback on how well your business is performing in the market, enabling you to identify any problems and fix them before they damage the reputation of your company or brand. Moreover, you can use consumer insights to improve the services you offer and develop new product lines based on what your target audiences want to see the most from your brand.

These insights can also help you in understanding how to optimize the overall consumer experience and satisfaction while adapting your strategies to create leads more effectively. Moreover, you can easily take all the required actions to outperform the competition if you have a close understanding of the behavior and requirements of your customers.

Major Components Of Customer Insights For Effective Use

For a team to be able to use customer insights effectively in their business campaigns, the following 3 major components need to be intact:

🚀 Correct, Reliable & Complete Customer Behavior Data

By using clean and reliable data you can be sure that your insights are based on facts. Ensuring that the data is complete also confirms that you are not missing any data that could change your perception.

🚀 Right Tools & Skills Needed To Analyze Insights

When it comes to collecting and analyzing customer insights, you need to have the right tools and skills in place. The tools can be of various types starting from mere feedback forms to proper support requests/tickets that your customer service team handles. 

But that’s not, along with the tools to collect the necessary tools you will also need the right skills and experience to conduct the data analysis. Essentially, the ability to find behavioral patterns in customer data is very important. Therefore, the marketers and customer support professionals involved in gathering and analyzing insight data need to be adequately trained for their tasks. 

🚀 Powerful Technologies To Act On The Collected Information

Il ‘right technology’ to act on your customer insight can vary as well – this could be a single multi-channel marketing platform or a dedicated customer service platform that focuses on improving every aspect of your consumers’ satisfaction. 

Finally, there’s no substitute for hearing directly from customers. Feedback from users and clients is a necessary ingredient for creating a balanced strategy. Perhaps the most important type of data you can gather and analyze is what your customers are telling you directly. 

The best way to do that? Start looking deep into support requests and tickets, you will find insightful information that will instantly tell you about what your customer wants from you. And therefore, gathering data from customer support requests is invaluable to your business.

7 Types Of Customer Insights From Support Requests

According to researchers, 64% of businesses say that perceptive customer insights from support requests and tickets had a significant impact on their future decision-making. Here are just a few examples of useful insights from users, drawn from real experiences faced by different customer support teams:

Source: info.amplitude.com

🎯 If there is a mismatch between the actual name of the product and what your customers are expecting it to be labeled as, there might be an issue of customers not finding the product during search. Because they will be looking for what they expect it to be named. And at times like this, consumers struggling to find or understand your product will head directly over to your customer support team with their requests. 

🎯 You will be able to derive important usage data from support requests that indicate consumer behavior, such as how customers prefer to use your products or services. And this does not just mean detecting how often the product gets used by the user. Because sometimes, you might find customers using your products in much different ways than how you have intended it to be utilized. For example, your support team might come across consumers trying to use the messaging tool you built as a unique CRM for their business. 

If your product team is not aware of such use case scenarios, it is impossible for them to properly understand, contextualize, and prioritize incoming feature requests. And this definitely would not be something you find out if not through insightful support requests. 

🎯 Looking into support tickets might also mean that you can distinguish between the different customer groups that your business might have, with their different sets of requirements and expectations. And without in-depth knowledge of this data, any plans for future improvements in your business strategies can be highly misguided or actively unhelpful for your brand. So, the best way to handle this is to look for common themes in your support requests to find areas of improvement for each group. 

🎯 Feature requests will help you understand what the users wish to see next from your team which will help you take initiatives needed to create new products, services, and projects. 

🎯 You will be able to determine how well your competitors are doing in the market and take necessary actions to make your business stand out from the crowd. These insights might include the deals they offer, how they describe and promote their products, and create their product roadmaps. 

🎯 Customer insights will also help you understand how your consumers might expect to be treated or what they think quality customer service is. This information is just what you need to compose and optimize your customer service facilities.

🎯 And most importantly, you will be able to collect data to analyze Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric for your business, which is usually considered one of the most important eCommerce metrics that a company should track. You will be able to pinpoint and identify who your company’s promoters or detractors are, and be able to evaluate the user’s brand loyalty and satisfaction. Find out more in detail from our complete guide here.

Can Customer Insights Get Trapped In Support Queues?

Even though there are so many types of insightful customer data that you can find specifically through support requests and tickets, some information still gets trapped in queues and never gets passed on for analysis.  

Easily resolved support issues might go unnoticed by your customer service team. And this is why we have mentioned earlier that a major component of identifying customer insights from support requests is having the right skills to know what to look for. 

Many customer service team representatives may not know what information from the collected data is important. This is another reason it is crucial to share the full context of what strategic decisions and measures the company is planning to take for the improvement of your brand. Only then, the support representatives will be able to properly recognize useful information. 

3 Ways To Identify Actionable Support Requests

So, how would you know which support requests you should take actions upon? Below are 3 easy questions you can ask yourself to identify actionable customer support tickets: 

Will The Action To Be Taken Boost Your Brand Image?

Support tickets might hold a lot of requests from your customers on what they want to see from your brand. But after careful analysis of all the data collected, you need to measure how helpful the actions to be taken will help to boost your company’s brand image. 

Does The Support Ticket Bring Chances To Find New Leads?

Sometimes a feature request from users can be a reasonable expansion of an already existing product, but that doesn’t mean that it will be an overall improvement for your business. And therefore, it might not help to find new leads.

Again some might require you to use more resources than are available. So you need to make a decision on how you will act to preserve a good relationship with your current users, while also acting to find leads for your business. 

Whether The Strategy Formed Will Help To Grow Conversions?

And following that, will the actionable ticket actually help to grow conversion rates in your business. Because your marketing strategies will only be truly successful if the leads bring you proper conversions or not. 

Ways To Turn Support Requests Into Customer Insights

So now, finally, how to convert support requests into customer insight in easy ways? If you’re able to identify useful information and actionable customer insights,  then you can take the necessary actions to utilize it for the betterment of your company. Here are a few measures that may help:

Train Your Support Team On How To Recognize Useful Insights

Again, you must teach members of your support team to recognize important data from the support requests that they come across. You can arrange a training session conducted by your lead support officer or whoever is qualified for any new team mates. 

Be Transparent About The Company Goals & Strategies

Once they have the necessary skills ingrained into their regular habits, direct their attention to the most important questions you are trying to answer as mentioned above. Keep them updated about what goals you want them to achieve and how they should strategize. 

Provide Tools to Facilitate Customer Insight Collection

Again, you need to ensure that your support teams have the tools and resources necessary to collect the data they need and smoothen out their workflow. You can provide them with plugins and softwares that will help them create analytic reports and write internal notes. 

Generate Insights By Having Conversations With Your Users

Get your customer support teams to converse with individual users and ask for feedback personally, whether it be through phone calls, professional emails, feedback surveys, etc. Here’s a complete guide on how you can create customer satisfaction survey forms with ease.  

Gather Powerful Customer Insights & Improve Your Business

So here’s your complete list of all everything you need to know about collecting insightful information and data by providing the right kind of customer service for your business. No matter what kind of business you may be running, using this comprehensive advice will help you gain more satisfied and devoted clients and gradually grow your customer base.

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