What Is Customer Analysis? Explaining Practical Data Utilization Methods

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 client companies 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 your 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, uncovering latent customer demand leads to strengthening your company's unique market position.

• Improving Decision-Making Processes Through Customer-Centricity

By focusing analysis on customer-related 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 business policies.

• Creating Opportunities and Reducing Risks Through Faster Field Decision-Making

Monitoring trends in customers, markets, and competitors helps improve business processes and operational efficiency. By visualizing common industry challenges, you can formulate versatile and effective actions. Additionally, this enables appropriate responses to customer churn risks.

Corporate Data Analysis

Corporate data can be categorized into "publicly available information" and "segment information (attribute data) derived from public sources."

• Examples of publicly available information: Corporate registration records, company websites, securities reports, and IR information.
• Examples of segment information: Presence of nationwide business locations, or increased investment in specific sectors.

By utilizing publicly available information, you can narrow down your target market and potential customers based on criteria such as industry, annual revenue, and employee count.

Furthermore, by integrating segment information, you can more clearly define your ideal customer profile—such as specific departments or regions likely to adopt your products—and gain insights into the challenges your customers are facing.

Behavioral Data Analysis

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

Online activity history can be divided into "on-site website behavior" and "off-site behavior," which can be processed and cross-referenced with corporate data.

• Examples of on-site website behavior: New vs. returning visitor status, visit frequency, categories of pages viewed, and inquiry details.
• Examples of off-site behavior: Information likely being searched and level of interest (e.g., browsing frequency).

Offline behavioral history includes business card exchange records, conversation logs, and sales opportunity statuses, which are often stored within internal CRM or SFA systems. By integrating this with online behavioral data, you can visualize customer interests and the depth of their engagement with your company.

Product Data Analysis

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 used by the customer, individual customer LTV (Life Time Value), and NPS (Net Promoter Score).
• Examples of information regarding competitors' products: Tools and technologies currently used by the customer, and products the customer is interested in.

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

By analyzing information regarding competitors' products, you can gain insights into the strategies customers use to adopt tools and technologies, allowing you to refine your approach strategy based on inferred interactions with competitors.

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:

• Gaining Market Insights

By utilizing corporate and product data for market research and competitive analysis, you can obtain information on trending products and services in the market. Additionally, by understanding the approaches taken by 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 combining 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 analyze customer behavioral data to evaluate lead quality and prioritize follow-up actions. Furthermore, it is possible to assign sales representatives based on customer behavioral characteristics and their stage in the decision-making 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 relate to marketing and sales, there are numerous other cases where customer analysis is utilized in customer success and consulting.

Conclusion

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

In the future B2B market, further integration and utilization of data will progress, and it is expected that more sophisticated analytical technologies will be introduced. Rapid, data-driven 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 engagement become possible.

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

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

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

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