Customer analysis

Customer analysis is an action which an organization takes in order to identify customers, their preferences, tastes and to encourage them to buy products or services by adjusting messages to each of them. Nowadays, it is necessary for organizations to understand what motivates current and potential customers. Customer analysis can help organizations to find the most profitable customers (ACCA P3. Business Analysis 2012, p. 79).

Investigation into customers

There are six main areas which can help organizations in investigating into customers. Consequently, they can also help to conduct an appropriate customer analysis. Due to them it is also possible to indicate which clients offer or gives most profit (ACCA P3. Business Analysis 2012, p. 79):

• Identyfying key customers. In this area the organization should name keys customers, collect information about their location and status in market.
• Gathering information about customer's history which includes: first purchase date, what kind of products they buy, what motivates them to buy a particular product or for what reason they cancelled the order.
• Collecting information about the relationship between the customer and the product. This area helps the organization to find out for what customers use the product and whether they use it for their own services or products.
• Collecting information about the relationship between customer and potential market. It can help to find answers about the size of the customer, when it comes to looking at the total end-market. Moreover, it gives the opportunity to find out if the customer is likely to expand, diversity or integrate.
• Identyfying customers behaviour and attitude. In this area the organization should look for the information about whether the customer buys competitors' products and what kind of interpersonal factors affect on buying products or services from the organization and which from the competitors.
• Collecting information about financial side of the customer. This area means that the organization should find out how profitable the customer is.

Tools which help in conducting Customer Analysis

There are some tools which can contribute to analyse customers in an appropriate way, including (ACCA P3. Business Analysis 2012, p. 375-376):

• Database. Due to it, the organization has the opportunity to collect the data that can be organised and gives a lot of useful marketing information. It can help to identify the most profitable customers, create the list of potential clients, follow-up customers after purchase, prevent conflicts.
• Data mining. This tool includes techniques which identify trends, relationships and patterns in data.
• Cookies. It is a technology which allows a particular website to remember visitors and keep information about their purchases and preferences. Due to it, there is a possibility to show the potential customer recommendations, selections, and create personalised orders.

There is also a different way of conducting customer analysis, such as segmentation. It is a technique which can divide customers into groups and give them preferable products and services. The aim of it is to satisfy needs and wants which are different in each group of customers. Also, the segmentation gives the opportunity to identify profitable segments. The segmentation is very important because the organization can adjust the message to the selected segments (O. Doğan, E. Ayçin, Zeki A. Bulut 2018, p. 2)

Customer analysis — recommended articles

Geodemographic segmentation — Analysis of customer — Information about the product — Demographic variables — Sales trend — Market mapping — Direct marketing — Product research — Consumer buying behaviour

References

• ACCA P3. Business Analysis (2012), BPP Learning Media, London
• Collica S. Randall (2011), Customer Segmentation and Clustering. Using SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS Publishing, New York
• Doğan O., Ayçin E., Bulut A. Zeki (2018), Customer Segmentation by Using RFM Model and Clustering Methods: A Case Study in Retail Industry, "International Jurnal of Contemporary Economics & Administrative Science", nr 8, p. 2
• Kennet S. Ron, Salini S. (2012), Modern Analysis of Customers Surveys: with Applications using R, Wiley, Chichester

Author: Katarzyna Krzyk, Adrianna Kuzak, Julia Kotlarz