Do you ever feel like capturing customer behavior is akin to chasing the flickering lights of fireflies, with each fleeting glow marking the lightning bug’s path? Every customer’s behavior provides a moment of insight into their journey, preferences, and needs. Just as fireflies illuminate the darkness, capturing and analyzing customer behavior—how they act—is an essential part of being a customer-centric company. Insights from customer behavior data illuminate the path to growth and success for your business. In this episode of What’s Your Edge?, we’ll explore the idea of capturing customer behavior and what behavioral data to chase.

Catching fireflies might seem like child’s play but scientists are in the chase as well. Scientists learn a lot from fireflies. The chemicals luciferase and luciferin found in fireflies’ tails have many applications in medicine and science, including detecting tumor cells and bacterial and viral infections, as well as studying diseases like cancer and muscular dystrophy. The food industry also uses fireflies’ light reaction to detect contaminated food.

The data on how your customers interact with your products, services, or brand serves a luciferase for detecting and anticipating customer behavioral patterns. That makes it important to be able to separate the signals from the noise. Capturing this data is also like trying to capture fireflies. It is not as easy as it seems since it may appear that customers like fireflies often move in random patterns.

Fireflies are referred to as an indicator species, a species that can provide information on ecological changes and give early warning signals. And like fireflies, customer behavior provides a brilliant array of insights into various aspects of business performance and customer dynamics.

For example, analyzing behavioral data can help you identify patterns and trends that explain changes in product adoption rates or which features or benefits resonate most with customers for new product development ideas. Tracking customer data can provide insight into referral rates and offer clues to the effectiveness of word-of-mouth marketing and potential areas for enhancement. Customer behavior data can provide clarity around changes in share of wallet—how much of a customer’s total spending within a category is captured by your business. Analyzing changes in how your customers act enables you to see shifts in customer loyalty and identify at-risk customers. Because the possibilities are limitless, its essential to understand what insights are worth the chase.

If as a child you were ever in a field full of fireflies, you might recall starting the chase for one firefly only to be lured into chasing another, leaving the first behind, and repeating this process over and over with the hope that eventually you’d capture one. This can be fun as a child but wasteful for businesses to chase one behavioral pattern and then be lured into another direction. Therefore, we advise customer-centric companies to focus on gaining insights from data which will facilitate decisions designed to create and expand both customer value and business value.

We’ve already established the last thing you want to do is aimlessly flit around. So, because the amount of customer data is vast—behavioral as well as other types—start by identifying the questions you need to answer to fuel your decision-making. These questions may include:

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• What insights do we need to inform product enhancements and innovations that match customer preferences and usage patterns?
  
• How can we reduce the friction or customer effort in the customer experience on our website, in our online store, with our product?
  
• What messages will be most effective at improving sales conversions, online and offline?
  
• Which offers, products, or services resonate most with which customer segments?
  
• Which offers, products, or services don’t resonate with customers?
  
• What are trends in customer behaviors we need to understand to support customer-centric strategic planning?
  

Fireflies are found all over the world; they like humid, warm environments, and are more visible when it’s dark. If you want to catch them, you need to be where they are at the right place and the right time. This is also true for finding customer behavior data.

Customer behavior manifests in various forms, online and offline, offering valuable insights. Here are a few good places to find customer behavioral data:

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• Online Analytics Platforms: Tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and Mixpanel provide quantitative data on website traffic, user interactions, and online conversion rates. For example, Citrix, which provides digital workspace and networking solutions to businesses, uses Adobe Analytics to gain comprehensive quantitative data on its website traffic, user interactions, and online conversion rates. As a result, Citrix can track how users navigate its digital platforms, which pages or features are most engaging, and where potential bottlenecks occur in the user journey. Citrix uses the insights from customers’ actions to understand which strategies drive conversions and improve the overall user experience.
  
• Offline Observations and Customer Research: Conducting in-store observations, customer interviews, surveys, or focus groups helps gather qualitative insights into offline customer behavior.
  
• Marketing and Sales Platforms: Customer relationship management (CRM) systems, email platforms, and social media platforms all allow you to track customer interactions and provide a view into customer actions over time. Unilever, a multinational consumer goods company, uses Salesforce’s CRM system to manage and analyze customer interactions across various touchpoints. This enables Unilever to personalize marketing campaigns, optimize sales strategies, and improve customer relationships based on real-time insights and analytics.
  
• Social Listening: Monitoring social media channels for mentions, comments, and sentiment analysis offers insights into brand perception and customer sentiment, online and offline. Hootsuite enables companies to monitor social media channels for behaviors such as mentions and comments, providing insights into brand perception and customer sentiment online and offline. Your company can use this data to gain insight into what messages and offers resonate best with your customers.
  
• Point-of-Sale (POS) Data: Analyzing POS data provides insights into purchasing patterns, product preferences, and transaction details in physical retail environments. Blue Bottle Coffee, a specialty coffee roaster, uses Square’s POS system to gather insights into how, what, and when customers purchase. By analyzing this data, Blue Bottle Coffee can optimize inventory management by understanding which products are popular and when, refine marketing strategies by targeting promotions effectively, and enhance customer experiences by tailoring offerings based on customer preferences and behavior at the POS.
  
• Product Usage Patterns: Understanding how customers use products or services post-purchase informs product development and customer support strategies. Schneider Electric, a multinational corporation specializing in energy management and automation solutions, uses Azure’s cloud computing services to collect and analyze data from its energy management products, such as smart meters and IoT-enabled devices. By leveraging Azure’s capabilities, Schneider Electric gains insights into how its B2B customers use energy and manage their facilities, allowing them to optimize energy-efficiency, predict maintenance needs, and deliver personalized solutions to customers.
  
• Feedback, Recommendations, and Reviews: You can use platforms such as Trustpilot to analyze customer feedback, reviews, and testimonials, gaining qualitative insights into satisfaction levels, product performance, and brand perception.
  
• Event Attendance and Engagement: Monitoring attendance, participation, and engagement levels at webinars and other online and in-person events or workshops provides insights into customer interests and brand engagement. You can use platform such as Zoom to capture this data.
  

Capturing your customers’ actions is about more than collecting data; it’s about harnessing the power of insights that drive business growth. Behavioral data provides insights for developing customer-centric strategies that are aligned with your customers’ expectations and preferences. Deep insights into your customers’ behavior provide you with a competitive advantage and enable you to offer personalized experiences and anticipate customer needs. Data-driven insights enable you to streamline operations, optimize resources, and enhance customer service. Making decisions based on insights from customer behavior fosters loyalty, reduces churn, encourages advocacy, and ultimately increases customer lifetime value.

Like chasing fireflies, each behavior captured illuminates a path forward for your business—whether it’s enhancing customer experience, optimizing operational efficiency, or shaping strategic decisions. Need help navigating the complexities of customer behavioral data? Let’s talk about how we can help.