What is a customer profile? A complete guide (+ examples)

Lead capture forms and surveys collect the data that make up the building blocks of your ideal customer profile. They can also give insights into customer loyalty and engagement.

1. Lead capture forms: Embed a sign-up form into your website and ask site visitors to fill it out with their contact information. In exchange, they’ll get access to something, such as a special discount code or a white paper. You’ll learn which products or subjects each visitor is interested in while also gathering basic information about them.

2. Surveys: Send surveys to customers who’ve used your product or service (and/or interacted with your support team) to understand what they like and dislike about your offerings. You can use that valuable customer feedback to make improvements and build stronger relationships with your audience.

Information collected from communication platforms can show you exactly how consumers are interacting with your brand.

3. Email marketing platforms: Capture data directly from your customer email interactions to inform your targeted marketing. For example, if a client clicks on an email about a specific product they haven’t purchased yet, it might be a sign that it’s time for an upsell. Email marketing platforms can also integrate with your CRM software to give you an overall picture of a customer’s engagement level with your brand.

4. Social media: Are your clients following your social media channels? If not, then it’s time to think about how to attract their attention. Have they liked a lot of your Facebook posts or shared them with their friends? Do they regularly respond to your tweets? If so, you know they’re loyal fans. All this information can be merged into a CRM for your marketing team to use.

5. Conversational data: Conversational data can provide information about what your customers want and what they like or dislike. Live chat and messaging apps or voice assistants can be used to engage with customers and further improve their experience.

Web analytics illustrate how your customers engage with your business online.

6. Google Analytics: This tool provides deep insights into customer interactions on your website, so you can identify what’s working and what’s not. You can see the most popular pages, learn about your audience’s interests, and get a sense of how visitors engage with your site.

7. Customer accounts: A customer’s registered account on your website or company platform offers basic information (such as name, email, or preferred method of communication). If a customer is logged in to their account while they’re browsing your website, you’ll be able to see how they interact with each of your products.

Use these tools to facilitate interactions with customers, learn about their purchases, and gather and house consumer details.

8. Ecommerce platforms: Tools like Shopify collect information about how a customer makes purchase decisions. They also obtain key data like what your customer purchased, how much money they spent, and how frequently they place orders.

9. Billing systems: Your company’s billing system gives you visibility into a customer’s spending habits and patterns.

10. CX platforms: Open, flexible platforms allow you to integrate all your data from different sources into your CRM, giving you a complete picture of the customer. When you have the information you need in one place, you’ll have a better idea of how you can build a great customer experience.

Even if you use these types of tools, you don’t necessarily need to integrate every data point into a CRM at once. You can choose what to include based on your company’s objectives.

Regardless of what information you obtain, the centralization of data will help your team provide a consistent customer experience.

You wouldn’t market to a 20-year-old social media manager in New York City the same way you would to a 45-year-old banker in Tokyo. Instead, use demographic data to tailor your messaging so it’s relevant for each customer.

Geographic data: Use lead generation forms to collect a customer’s location information. You’ll want to know what city, state, and/or country they live in.

Age: Learn a customer’s age from their account on your website, from surveys, or from feedback forms you might ask them to fill out.

Income: Get this information from surveys and other forms. Then, you can strategically promote high-end products to customers with higher incomes and more affordable options to lower-income customers.

Hobbies: Ask customers about their hobbies through surveys, forms, and social media. Or, learn about their interests through web analytics.

Sales data provides a peek into a customer’s past purchasing behavior so sales team members know how to approach them with recommendations.

Loyalty status: Every company will have its own way of scoring a customer’s level of loyalty based on the ways the customer interacts with the brand.

Service-level agreement (SLA) terms and conditions: Your team can use SLAs to deepen their knowledge about what a customer expects from your company’s services. This information can be found in the contract and can be stored in a CRM.

Buying patterns: Knowing what a consumer bought—and when—is essential information for addressing their problems. This data can be gathered in online customer accounts and then integrated into a centralized platform.

Warranty info: This will tell you how long ago a customer made a purchase, so you’ll know when to follow up on renewals. The warranty information is included in a customer’s account or contract.

This data provides valuable insights into what a customer needs from your business and when. With this information, your support team can personalize their interactions with individual customers instead of using a one-size-fits-all approach.

Conversational data: Form a detailed record of why consumers contact your support team and how your team assists them. Your CRM should also track past support tickets for every customer.

Returned items: Use this information to ensure your marketing team doesn’t try to sell the customer those products again. Your support team will also understand what didn’t work for the customer previously. The data will be stored on your ecommerce platform.

Customer lifetime value: This helps teams recognize whether they’re dealing with a VIP or a first-tier customer so they can treat them accordingly. There are numerous ways to calculate customer lifetime value based on previous sales and purchases.

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score: When sent out after a support interaction, a CSAT survey indicates whether or not the customer’s needs and expectations were met. Again, different companies can come up with their own ways to measure customer satisfaction, but it will help to have all your information in one place.

Every phase of the customer journey produces data that can be used to create customer profiles. For companies, it’s critical to know what data is most relevant and to have the right tools to obtain, analyze, and act on that data.