Customer intent: What it is and how to use it

Customer support agents manage numerous inquiries daily, often making it hard to determine the intent behind each one. For example, when a customer contacts support after a purchase, your team must quickly identify whether they need help with returns or product usage. Recognizing intent is key to delivering accurate responses and improving customer experiences.

Understanding why your customers behave the way they do involves identifying the goals, motivations, and triggers behind their actions. Uncovering the “why” behind each interaction allows you to deliver personalized and practical solutions, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction, improving their overall experience, and fostering long-term loyalty. It can also allow businesses to devise more in-depth strategies to improve user experiences and customer loyalty.

Unfortunately, deciphering what a customer truly means, feels, and needs can be challenging, especially through a screen. However, understanding customer intent, identifying it, and leveraging the right tools can significantly enhance your ability to provide efficient, seamless, and impactful customer experiences.

This article examines customer intent, how to find and utilize customer intent data, and some of the best practices for improving customer experiences (CX).

What is customer intent?

Customer intent is the reason why a consumer interacts with your brand. It is the “why” behind any customer interaction with your brand. Some examples of intent include:

• Looking for information and wanting to find detailed blogs and articles
• Purchasing a service for themselves, for their friends, or family
• Contacting customer service agents for help with a return
• Using FAQs and self-service resources to learn how to use a product

Customer intent is often confused with customer preferences. However, customer preference refers more to the specific inclinations and choices they may make (for example, preferred communication channels). It is often referred to as user intent. User intentions can change depending on their immediate requirements.

Why is customer intent necessary?

Customer intent helps businesses understand and respond to their audience’s immediate requirements, meet customer expectations, and improve customer experience management (CX). Companies can structure their interactions to be more personalized and valuable to the consumer. About 55% of organizations that utilized intent data have witnessed positive results. Some reasons why it is important include:

1. Identifying and understanding customer requirements quickly

Understanding customer intent helps businesses design a smoother and more streamlined customer experience journey. For example, an angry customer who only speaks Spanish contacts you requiring technical support. AI tools understand the intent of their request and can route them to the appropriate support team, finding an agent who speaks Spanish. At the same time, it can discern that the customer is angry and prioritizes their ticket. This positively affects customer sentiment and loyalty, providing a better customer experience.

2. Create a smoother experience using AI

Artificial intelligence models are sentiment and intent-aware and can be used to identify the intent behind a customer request to provide efficient assistance. For example, customers may approach your website’s virtual assistant to exchange an item. The AI can determine their intent, search your knowledge base, and ensure the customer’s items are eligible for exchange. So, using AI in customer service eliminates the need for customers to contact live agents, saves time, and creates a smooth experience.

3. Personalize customer communication

Customer service tools can also personalize customer communication. For example, a customer may need to contact your support team shortly after purchasing a product. Support agents can access data from a customer’s first interaction with your site until their purchase to provide a well-tailored, personalised support and experience.

How to find and use customer intent data?

1. Insights from user analytics

User analytics can provide actionable insights into the customer journey. For example, DevRev’s analytics feature gives businesses a comprehensive view of their customers, products, sessions, and users to make confident data-driven decisions. Data from analytics can be used to understand customer intent by collecting and analyzing past customer behaviour, interactions with your company, purchase behaviour, and more. Customer support teams can use this data to provide better support to users who reach out with queries.

2. Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots

Artificial intelligence (AI) is also a powerful technology for identifying and utilizing customer intent. AI chatbots can analyze customer interactions to create personalized customer experiences and responses and predict customer requirements. DevRev’s PLuG chatbot is a leading example of automating responses to routine inquiries and reducing tickets for customer support agents. PLuG can also accurately understand the intent behind customer inquiries, efficiently providing the correct information.

3. Customer feedback

Collecting and analyzing customer feedback enhances your understanding of their intent and empowers you to deliver superior customer service. For example, questions like “Was our customer support team able to resolve your query?” or “Did our chatbot provide the information you were looking for?” provide valuable insights into how effectively your teams identify and address customer intent. This feedback helps pinpoint areas for improvement, ensuring a more efficient and satisfying customer experience.

What are the most important ways to capture customer intent?

Understanding customer intent is key to improving customer experiences. Use competitor analysis to spot trends, live chatbots for real-time insights, feedback tools to learn expectations, knowledge bases to track common queries, and engagement reports to analyze behavior. These tools help you better meet customer needs and boost satisfaction. Let’s take a look at some of these:

1. Create knowledge bases

Knowledge bases act as internal search engines for your website, providing in-depth information regarding consumer queries. Essentially, they are centralized repositories of company information, storing past support tickets, common FAQs, necessary documentation, and much more. They allow customers to easily find information, reducing the burden on support teams and limiting repetitive tickets. They can also capture customer intent by recording and analyzing search queries and questions.

2. Use in-app feedback and surveys

Having short, easy surveys and creating customer feedback loops can be distributed to customers using your app or website. These must be clear-cut, simple questions like “How satisfied are you with our customer service?” which can be answered on a numerical or Likert scale. The data collected from these surveys can be analyzed to determine whether your support teams and chatbots can understand and respond to customer intent.

3. Use live chat and chatbots

AI chatbot software can provide users with 24/7 help and collect valuable insights regarding customer queries and requirements. Live chat also allows support agents to gain a more in-depth, human understanding of consumer preferences, pain points, challenges, and requirements.

4. Generate engagement trends and reports

Analytics tools are invaluable for generating engagement reports and tracking customer interaction trends across your app, products, website, or support teams. Shifts in engagement patterns can reveal changes in customer intent, enabling your CX teams to adapt strategies and respond proactively to evolving customer needs.

5. Monitor product usage

Monitoring product usage can help you find deviations, which may signify the intent for churn. Customer experience and support teams can reach out to users showing churn intent, address their queries or complaints, and encourage usage. CX and communication strategies can also be re-strategized and adjusted to prevent customer churn.

Wrapping up

Consumer intent provides the basis for solid customer service practices. Understanding and using it effectively can help businesses create more positive relationships with their audiences, improve loyalty and retention rates, and establish themselves as industry leaders.

Finding, analyzing, and using customer intent can help you improve your CX, reduce churn, and strengthen customer relationships. The right software and platforms can streamline and optimize this process. DevRev’s AI-native, cloud-based platform is exactly that, with features that allow you to create detailed knowledge bases, utilize analytics features to track trends and have access to an intent-aware AI chatbot.

DevRev’s AgentOS can offer customers personalized solutions to resolve their use issues. Our AI chatbot, PLuG, can cater to intent and sentiment. Its Turing AI can also infer intent and sentiment and access knowledge bases to solve queries independently. This allows businesses to give users quick, accurate, and practical solutions to their queries.

To know more about how our platform can improve your customer service operations, book a demo today!