Managing Insights within Companies

Most companies and providers of digital products try to gather as much information about their customers and user as possible. As a matter of fact there is hardly any action performed by a customer that doesn’t generate some kind of data that can be measured, tracked or otherwise used. Of course companies do this for good reasons: information about their customer base is extremely valuable to multiple departments ranging from product development to marketing.


Because of this some companies literally drown in customer and market related data. As mentioned before nearly everything is somehow noted and saved and thus the amount of data tends to increase at a rapid pace. Yet decision-makers often don’t know what to do with the accumulated data. Most of the time they feel like they don’t know anything about their users and customers at all.

How to reap the rewards of data

Data itself doesn’t usually help you figure out what you need to do in order to improve your marketing strategy, your product or customer retention rate. In order to define the relevant steps and actions you need to take, you don’t need raw data but knowledge. The problem is that data only becomes knowledge when it’s interpreted in the right way.


This is exactly the challenge that prevents the efficient use of customer information: Manually comparing and evaluating data is extremely time consuming and most companies neither have enough qualified employees nor enough time at their disposal. With modern survey technology and the possibility to recruit participants online the problem no longer lies with the gathering of research data but with evaluating it. On top of that the existing data which can be gathered from various places such as sales, marketing, newsletter subscriptions, monitoring and web analytics needs to be managed and evaluated as well.


One possible solution for this problem is using supportive technology and intelligent tools that aid researchers. While AI and systems trained using machine learning are not yet able to analyze data entirely without human help, there is a number of tasks it can facilitate: transcribe audio files, compare and visualize data, search texts for certain keywords and tags and enable researchers to connect and annotate data in the most intuitive and appropriate way possible.

What are the benefits of insights management?

When insights management is done consistently it helps in gathering, processing, analysing and interpreting information about the customers. This way companies can gain reliable information about their behaviour, desires, needs, motivation and opinions.The goal is always to achieve deeper insight into customers. Once the relevant knowledge is acquired, questions such as “What do customers think about my product, brand or service?” “What motivates them to buy from us?” “How can I increase customer loyalty and acquisition rates?” can be answered.


Insights management also helps with identifying and discontinuing old and dated strategies and the following areas:

• Product development: New products are obviously developed for their users so the development team needs to know about and consider their needs and preferences. They should also consider the competition’s offers as well as users’ reactions to previous versions of the product or prototypes.


• Your target audiences: Do you actually know who your customers are? What about their values and opinions? Which alternative products and services do your users use? What are their needs and what do they think about you, your services and the competition?


• Content marketing: Having reliable information about the characteristics of your target group helps you to align your interests with those of your customers to form one coherent marketing strategy.If you know their interests you can determine which stories speak to them and which channels you can use to best reach them.


• Lead generation and sales: Suppose you want to figure out why your sales numbers have been dropping. it can be hard for you to figure this out on your own. But guess who knows why sales are dropping? Your customers do. They know what their motives for choosing certain products over others are. They know their preferences and expectations as well as what price they are willing to pay for certain products and services. So try asking them.


• New features: Chances are your development team tries to only implement features that are actually interesting and helpful to your customers. Insights management helps you figure out which features your products are missing and which features your customers are willing to pay for.

The challenge of distributing insights

Another challenge that insights management as well as research management is trying to solve is how to distribute gathered insights and knowledge company-wide. Everybody who makes decisions needs to be constantly supplied with up-to-date information concerning the market and the customers. Ideally they should also be able to access exactly the data they need in minutes irrespective of the total amount of existing data. If knowledge and data can’t be shared efficiently time is lost and usually multiple parties will be blocked in their work.


Ideally knowledge should be stored in such a way that everybody can access it. Teams need an unified source of data they can base their work off of and the more the amount of available data grows, the more important data management becomes.


Once the knowledge is managed it needs to be shared with the relevant stakeholders. There is a number of guides online on how to select and present data in the most suitable way for different stakeholders. However this step becomes obsolete as soon as companies start using one database or platform to manage all of their insights. Everyone interested in certain portions of this knowledge would then be able to simply search this database for the needed information.


This would help solve market-related problems, aid product development with informing their decisions and transform the whole organisation towards greater user-orientation. Also decision would be based on company-wide known facts and justification to higher-ups, managers or stakeholders wouldn’t be a problem. Insights management helps you find the needle in your haystack of data. It can lower cost of and time invested in research while improving the company’s knowledge of the market and the target group. If done right it should also improve the decision making process by making it more efficient and providing decision-makers with the appropriate information.




We’re actually working on improving insights management within companies by developing a platform to store and evaluate data collaboratively. Request a webdemo here
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