A First Party Data Series: The Role of Qualitative Data in Your Customer Data Foundation

At this point in our first party data blog series, we’ll take a look a qualitative data and its important role in establishing a solid customer data foundation. In order to achieve true personalization at scale, it’s critical to have a well-collected, well-organized customer data foundation that can then create unified customer profiles. 

As a refresher, identity data tells us who a customer is across different devices and channels. Descriptive data describes that person at a high level, age, job, family, etc. Behavioral data describes how that customer interacts with your business, such as their preferred channels of communication and favorite products. Qualitative Data goes even more granular to includes customer preferences and opinions.

What is Qualitative Data?

Qualitative customer data refers to any data that provides insights into the opinions, attitudes, and experiences of customers, typically gathered through open-ended questions and feedback. This type of data is used to gain a deeper understanding of customer needs and preferences, and to inform business decisions.

Qualitative customer data can take many forms, including customer feedback through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and other methods, transcripts of customer service interactions, online reviews and social media posts, and customer stories and case studies.

So, identity data tells you that you have a customer named Kristina Stevens who lives in Florida with a specific login ID. Descriptive data tells you she’s thirty-five years old, married with two children, has an MBA, and works in finance. And behavioral data tells you her favorite channel of engagement and which products she likes best. Qualitative data tells you how Kristina feels about your company. Does she like the products? Is she happy with her experiences? 

How Can Your Company Use Qualitative Data?

It’s not as simple to utilize qualitative data, but its exceptionally valuable for understanding your customers true motivations and using that knowledge to produce better experiences and offerings. By analyzing and interpreting qualitative customer data, you can gain a deeper understanding of customer needs and preferences, and can tailor your marketing, product development, and customer service efforts to better meet these needs. This type of data is particularly useful for identifying areas of improvement or innovation, and for developing customer-centric strategies.

However, analyzing qualitative customer data can be more time-consuming and subjective than quantitative data, and requires analysts who can interpret and synthesize the data effectively. 

A company can use qualitative customer data in a variety of ways to gain insights into customer needs and preferences, and to improve business strategies. 

Improve product development: Use these customer insights to gain valuable feedback on product design, features, and functionality to identify areas for improvement or innovation. For example, your company might conduct focus groups or customer surveys to gather feedback on a new product or service, and use this data to refine the design or add new features.

Enhance customer service: Qualitative customer data can provide insights into common pain points and frustrations among customers, and can help your company develop more effective customer service strategies. Analyze customer service call transcripts or chat logs to identify common issues, and use this data to improve training for customer service representatives or to develop new self-service options.

Develop targeted marketing campaigns: Better understanding your customer preferences, interests, and values can be incredibly useful in developing more effective marketing campaigns. For example, customer feedback through reps or online and engagement with social media posts can help you identify common themes or trends amongst similar customer audiences. Which can then be used this data to create targeted marketing messages that resonate with customers.

Build customer loyalty: Qualitative customer data can help you understand the factors that drive customer loyalty and engagement, and can be used to develop strategies for improving customer retention. Conducting customer surveys or interviews to gather feedback is a great way to discover what your customers value most about your company’s products or services, and you can then use this data to develop loyalty programs or other incentives.

How Does a CDP Help Collect and Organize Qualitative Data into the Data Foundation?

When bringing qualitative data into your customer profiles, its important to have a customer data management tool that is flexible enough to integrate with all the different sources where this first party data type may originate. Companies large and small spend a significant amount of time and resources on getting integrations built. In fact, a report from the CDP Institute surveying marketing leaders found that integration with external systems (53%) tops things like ease of learning and use (51%) or breadth of features (40%) when choosing martech tools. 

To keep the entire journey connected, your business needs more flexibility and options from your CDP to quickly build custom “just for me” integrations, automation, and transformations for your unique stack and use cases.

For more information on how Tealium’s CDP offers the flexibility needed for collecting and organizing qualitative data, check out download our free guide, Customer Data Integration 101: How to Integrate Data from Different Sources Into Your CDP.