Ever since the inception of food and beverage stores and the food and beverage industry we have seen the field incorporate their products to suit customer needs. In fact the industry rarely used to rely on marketing budgets. They would just focus on using the right tactics and take customer feedback to provide the best to their customers. That is why we have also witnessed mere tuck shops selling burgers become a world-wide food chain that makes millions for turnovers! The credit goes to? Good food, adjusting orders based on requests and good service while also making customers feel like they are more than just a customer; a part of the brand!
You will notice that in the best food and beverage stores, where customer retention is higher than most others, the product is most definitely good but the customers also have a different relationship with the front line servers. There is an exchange of greetings or complimentary services provided. All in all - the store goes out of the way to provide the best customer experience by building a relationship with different customers and making exclusions for them.
Why is this good for a food brand?
Because there is a lot of chatter about how important any market insight is for the food and beverage industry. Leaders in the F&B industry are continuously trying to map social intelligence to make their business grow as a part of gaining customer insights in their food business. They are using it as a tool for research and making changes in their plans and menus to help create a well analyzed picture of customer needs which traditional methods were unable to collate. They are, nothing but, building on what their forefathers did in the food business and adding more technology and categories to it!
Since social intelligence is a part of customer insights let us discuss why customer insights is a big part of customer experience and customer experience management. There are many ways in which customer insights help the food and beverage industry; they provide feedback on major challenges in the food industry and showcase the problems in the system and build on the reputation of the brand. Customer insights help you develop your business, which also includes reading the data gathered to create new menus and products in the store. Or even provide new services that can help grow the business and give a steady competition to the others in the field. These insights work on building on your customer experience, creating a new target audience and allowing you to reach the right target market.
Social intelligence in food and beverage industry or social intelligence in customer experience is nothing but a deep understanding of consumer behavior translated in data. It is more than just what the customer wants. It is also about why the customer wants what they want, why they would like certain changes, what are the changes they would like, how they would like it, what channels they use to discuss these wishes and wants and thorough social listening. Many food and beverage companies today and not to miss, the leaders in food and beverage industry are using social intelligence as a method to make competitive changes and also gain market share by using it to their advantage.
Social intelligence works as customer insights in more than just one way in the food and beverage customer experience. This is because it is a great method to gain brand awareness in the market and brand recall among existing customers. Social listening is a part of the voice of customer research in customer experience management in food and beverage industry which looks at the macro and micro levels of functioning to gather a well-rounded view of the customer needs and customer expectations. It uses quantitative and qualitative methods to gather data and help the food business to use that data as an insight or a sneak peek into what the customer wants!
So how do we use social intelligence strategies to better understand your customer needs and customer preferences in the food industry?
Since social intelligence is the ability to read data altogether about each customer and most importantly data collected from social media, it helps understand what is good for your food business. It may seem daunting to look at such a vast data since each individual that visits the food store or beverage store is involved. However, this difficult task can be divided into 3 key pointers.
- Awareness – hearing out your F&B customers to decode what they are saying and what they want.
- Audience Intelligence – collecting and using data about the audience like their age, their field of work, their income and more to create campaigns and orders that they are more likely to purchase from you.
- Behavioral Analysis – finding out which customer is a detractor and which one is a promoter to not only understand who will be sharing their good opinions with others in their surroundings or potential customers but also working on the deliverables required to fix the problems the detractors are mentioning.
Following these pointers a leading customer experience company can help a food and beverage brand in the food and beverage industry to solve major challenges in the F&B market. This will also be one of the reasons, you will note eventually, that will save your food brand from disruptions even when every other brand seems to be falling apart. This is solely because you have heard the most important conversations which happen among the customers and worked on those to create a stable space for yourself by incorporating the customer demands, rightly.
Our CX solutions are focused on transforming the total customer experience through surveys, metrics, analytics and auditing by using the CXM framework to combine physical measurements with digital Platformation™ capabilities. We are committed to finding the right customer experience strategy that can lead to a competitive advantage.
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