Customer support data is extremely valuable. Especially when integrated with other relevant sources, it can help users gain key business insights and better focus their marketing campaigns. Let’s take a look.

The Power of Customer Support Data

You get a lot of great data from customer support solutions like Zendesk, Freshdesk and Salesforce, including:

  • Customer demographics

  • Spend per customer

  • Customer buying behavior and product trends

  • Customer satisfaction and pain points

  • Length of time from customer contact to sale

  • Net promoter score (NPS)

The more robust the customer support system, the more helpful and complete this information is. A well-rounded tool like Zendesk, for example, has email, web chat, social media and knowledge base support, all of which can be used to gain an up-to-the minute, actionable understanding of your customers’ habits, interests and pain points. From there, you can use this information to streamline your strategies, target your customers, focus your campaigns and make informed business decisions.

Integrating Support Data For Stronger Insights

That said, this ability to focus your strategies becomes even stronger when you use a data integration platform like Integrate.io to integrate your customer support data with other relevant sources like:

  • Analytics tools: Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Appsflyer

  • Advertising tools: Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, Bing Ads

  • CRMs: HubSpot, Salesforce, Intercom, Close.io, Pipedrive

  • Cloud services: Shopify, Basecamp, Clearbit, Fullstory

  • Marketing automation tools: Autopilot, Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot

  • Survey tools: Delighted, Wootric, Satismeter

With these integrations, you can fill in any gaps that might exist with customer support data alone to get a more comprehensive understanding of your customers and the effectiveness of your efforts. What gaps are we talking about exactly?

Well, when they only analyze customer support analytics and data tracking, companies can run into a few problems, including:

  • Duplicate data

  • Incomplete data

  • Out-of date data

SEE ALSO: WHY CLEAN YOUR CRM DATA

These problems cause one overarching issue: they prevent businesses from seeing the the big picture when it comes to their data - and this is especially true when their sources exist independently of one another.

The goal, then, is to avoid these problems altogether and make the parts bigger than the whole with comprehensive integrations that will ensure the most effective implementations and strategies possible.

Once you have these comprehensive integrations, you can avoid these common data pitfalls and use your customer support data to better understand your customers and gain meaningful, actionable insights.

Then, you create better-focused, highly effective marketing campaigns that will actually increase your conversions and your ROI. Here’s how it’s done.

How to Use Your Data to Focus Your Marketing Campaigns

Define your customers and your campaigns

For your marketing to be effective and focused, you have to understand both what you want to say and who you want to reach with your message. So, the first thing you have to do is clearly define your campaign and your target audience. To get this right, you need to analyze your customer support data - otherwise, you are working on conjecture rather than on factual insights.

Use all of your integrated analytics - Google Analytics, social media, etc. - along with your customer support data to build a fact-based understanding of your target audience and their interests or pain points. What words are they using? What products are they searching for? What questions are they asking? All of this information is important when it comes to building a well thought-out persona that you can effectively speak to and engage.

Focus In

The more targeted your marketing, the better. It’s much easier to look at your audience in big groups - visitors, leads and customers, for example - and to target them based on those larger criteria, but doing so tends to be a huge strategic error. The more general your information, the less likely it is to effectively reach each individual that you’re addressing - and if you can’t speak to your customers and catch their attention, you can’t do anything.

Say, for example, that you have an online vacation tour website. You have two leads visit your site - Jenna, who is in college and wants to plan an adventure trip with her friends, and Robert, who is retired and wants to go on a relaxing getaway with his wife. Clearly, these two people are going to be looking for different blogs, products, services and information, which means that, if you have them both classified as “leads” and send them the same marketing material, you’re likely to lose both.

Perhaps at this point you’re thinking “Well, can’t I just send something middle-of-the-road that will appeal to both leads?” The answer is yes, but it’s not going to be as effective. The modern consumer wants to work with businesses that truly understand them and cater to their specific needs, which means that if your information is less focused than your competitor’s, you’ll lose the lead.

Use your data to create the most highly segmented groups possible and customize your marketing material accordingly. Specifically, start by looking at customer demographics, age range, search queries, geographic location, and products purchased. Then, automate your marketing to each segmented group based on specific triggers and events i.e. a visit to a particular page on your site, an abandoned cart, a specific number of emails read, etc.

While this will call for more effort up-front, it will save you time and convert your leads in the long-run.

Track and Modify

The final step is to try new things out, track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and make strategic pivots when necessary. Use your customer support data to gauge customer perception, and modify any efforts that are having negative reactions or, even worse, no reaction at all.

This is both the most important step and the most commonly overlooked. The key, though, is to use your data to inform and control your decisions, rather than your own ideas and insights.

In the long term, this can increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty, which, in turn, can improve your business’ effectiveness and your ROI.

With so much data out there today, you have more power than ever at your fingertips to understand your customers and get your marketing right. Your customers will tell you what they want, what’s confusing, what’s off-putting and what gets them excited about your brand. Your job is to declutter and accurately understand your customer support data so that you can listen to them and make your business bigger and better than ever.