What Is Customer Analysis? A Guide to Practical Data Utilization

The Importance of Customer Analysis

Customer analysis is considered essential for understanding customer needs and behavioral patterns, but what specific benefits does it provide? Based on feedback from clients of uSonar Co., Ltd., we introduce several advantages of conducting customer analysis below.

• Establishing a Value Proposition

A value proposition refers to the unique value a company offers that addresses high-priority customer needs and cannot be provided by competitors. Analyzing customers and aggregating common requests is the first step toward clarifying your company's points of differentiation. Furthermore, highlighting latent customer demand leads to strengthening your company's uniqueness.

• Improving Decision-Making Processes Through Enhanced Customer-Centricity

By conducting analysis focused on customer information, companies can make faster decisions in customer interactions. By combining internal and external data and gaining insights into customer behavior through statistical processing, it is possible to strategically improve policies.

• Creating Opportunities and Reducing Risks Through Faster On-Site Decision-Making

Monitoring trends and developments regarding customers, markets, and competitors helps improve business processes and efficiency. By visualizing common industry challenges, you can formulate versatile and effective actions. Additionally, you can respond appropriately to customer churn risks.

Corporate Data Analysis

Corporate data can be categorized into "information publicly disclosed by companies" and "segment information (attribute information) assigned based on public information."

• Examples of information publicly disclosed by companies: Corporate registries, corporate websites, securities reports, and IR information.
• Examples of segment information: Having business locations nationwide, or strengthening investments in specific areas.

By utilizing information publicly disclosed by companies, you can narrow down your target markets and customers based on criteria such as industry, revenue, and employee size.

By further cross-referencing segment information, you can clarify your ideal customer profile—such as the specific departments or regions likely to adopt your products—and gain insights into the challenges your customers are facing.

Analysis of Behavioral Data

Behavioral data can be categorized into "trends and interests inferred from online behavioral history" and "offline information exchange."

Online behavioral history can be divided into "actions taken on your company's website" and "actions taken outside of your company's website," which can then be processed and matched against corporate information.

• Examples of On-Site Behavioral Data: New vs. existing status, visit frequency, genres of pages viewed, and inquiry details.
• Examples of Off-Site Behavioral Data: Information likely being searched for and level of interest (equivalent to browsing frequency).

Offline behavioral history includes records such as business card exchanges, conversation logs, and sales negotiation status, which are often stored in internal systems like CRM or SFA. By integrating this with online behavioral data, you can visualize the level of interest and the depth of the relationship with your company on a per-customer basis.

Analysis of Product Data

Product data can be categorized into "information regarding your own products" and "information regarding competitors' products."

• Examples of Information Regarding Your Own Products: Features or services currently being used by the customer, as well as individual customer LTV (Life Time Value) and NPS (Net Promoter Score).
• Examples of information regarding third-party products: Tools and technologies currently used by customers, and products in which customers have expressed interest.

By analyzing information regarding your own products, you can identify trends in features and services that customers prefer, as well as discover key selling points and use cases that provide a competitive advantage.

By analyzing information regarding third-party products, you can gain insights into the strategies customers use to adopt tools and technologies. This allows you to infer the engagement status of competitors and refine your own approach strategy.

Integrating this information organically contributes to a more robust value proposition.

Customer Analysis Use Cases

Specific use cases for conducting analysis based on customer data include the following:

• Acquiring Market Insights

By utilizing corporate and product data for market research and competitive analysis, you can obtain information on products and services that are trending in the market. Furthermore, by understanding the approach strategies of competitors, you can evaluate your company's market positioning and develop appropriate strategies.

• Customer Segmentation and Customization

By leveraging corporate and behavioral data to assign segments to customers and cross-referencing these segments, you can narrow down your target audience and provide marketing messages and services tailored to each specific group.

• Lead Scoring and Sales Forecasting

You can evaluate lead quality and prioritize responses by analyzing customer behavioral data. Furthermore, it is possible to assign sales representatives based on customer behavioral characteristics and their specific stage in the consideration process. This enables sales teams to approach acquired leads with the most appropriate representative and develop customized account plans for each prospective customer.

While the above examples focus on marketing and sales, there are numerous other cases where customer analysis is utilized for customer success and consulting as well.

Conclusion

Through customer analysis, such as customer segmentation and lifecycle analysis, companies can provide more suitable services and products to their customers. Additionally, the results of customer analysis play a vital role in optimizing the cycle and direction of product development, production, and feature enhancement.

In the future B2B market, further integration and utilization of data are expected, leading to the adoption of more sophisticated analytical technologies. Data-driven, rapid decision-making and action will become a Key Success Factor (KSF). By recognizing the importance of customer-related data and grasping customer behavior and market trends in real time, rapid decision-making and customer responsiveness become possible.

The customer data integration solution we provide, uSonar, includes a vast corporate information database that allows for the visualization of all corporate, behavioral, and product data.
Many of our clients use uSonar to build the environment necessary for customer analysis by integrating its data with tools in the CRM and SFA domains.
Furthermore, uSonar provides various visualization functions to efficiently grasp rising market needs and the approaches of competitors.

It is possible to realize the construction of a customer-centric analysis environment and the streamlining of sales and marketing strategy development based on a single integrated database.

For more details, please feel free to contact us via this page.

Accelerate Sales and Marketing with the Power of Data
Customer Data Integration Tool uSonar