How to Become a Customer Insights Manager [+Tools and Resources]

Embarking on a career as a customer insights manager involves a combination of education, skills development, and practical experience.

Whether you’re just starting out or looking to transition into this role, understanding the key steps and requirements is essential.

This guide will provide you with a comprehensive overview of the path to becoming a successful customer insights manager.

Let’s dive in!

TL;DR

• A customer insights manager is a professional responsible for analyzing and interpreting data related to customer behavior, preferences, and feedback to inform strategic business decisions.
• Here’s a roadmap outlining potential progressions within the customer insights field, along with the experience typically required for each step:

  • Customer Success Associate (1-2 years): This entry-level role provides a strong foundation. You’ll gain experience in onboarding customers, providing basic product support, and gathering valuable customer feedback. This builds your understanding of the customer journey and your communication skills. 

  • Customer Success Manager (CSM) (2-4 years): As a CSM, you’ll take ownership of a designated customer portfolio, managing their entire lifecycle. Responsibilities include proactive customer engagement, identifying upsell/cross-sell opportunities, and ensuring customer success through product adoption and value realization.

  • Senior Customer Success Manager (CSM) (4-6 years): Senior CSMs take on a leadership role within the CI team. They manage larger, more complex customer accounts, requiring a deeper understanding of the industry and strategic thinking. They also mentor junior CSMs and contribute to developing impactful customer onboarding and retention programs.

  • Customer Insights Manager (6+ years): This role focuses on analyzing customer data to extract actionable insights. You’ll need strong analytical skills and experience with data analysis tools. Here, you’ll translate customer needs and pain points into actionable recommendations for product development, marketing campaigns, and overall customer experience improvements.

  • Director of Customer Insights: (8+ years): As a Director, you’ll oversee the entire customer insights function, leading a team of analysts and other CI professionals. Responsibilities include developing and implementing customer success strategies, aligning CI with broader company goals, and driving overall customer satisfaction and retention metrics.

• Leveraging the right tools for customer insights can significantly enhance your ability to gather, analyze, and act on customer data. Here are some essential tools:
  • Best tool for feedback collection and product analytics – Userpilot: A no-code tool, Userpilot lets customer insight managers trigger in-app surveys, conduct funnel and path reports, and visualize data on custom dashboards that are easily sharable with stakeholders.
  • Best tool for project management – Jira: Jira is an excellent project management tool designed for agile teams. With robust features for sprint planning, user behavior tracking, and reporting, Jira ensures your customer insights projects stay organized and on track.
  • Best tool for team collaboration – Monday: Monday.com is a versatile project management and team collaboration platform. It offers customizable workflows, customer journey visualization, and seamless integration with other tools.
  • Best tool for customer support – Zendesk: Zendesk is a leading customer support platform that provides comprehensive solutions for managing customer inquiries and support tickets. Its robust analytics and reporting features help you track customer issues, measure response times, and improve overall customer satisfaction.
  • Best tool for customer relationship management – Zoho Desk: Zoho Desk is one of the best solutions designed to streamline customer support operations. It offers multi-channel support, automation features, and detailed analytics, making it easier to understand customer behavior and deliver personalized support.
  • Best tool for inbound marketing and sales – HubSpot: HubSpot offers a suite of tools for marketing, sales, and customer service. Its customer insights capabilities include detailed analytics, lead tracking, and customer feedback management, helping you align your strategies with customer needs.
  • Best tool for customer engagement – Custify: Custify is one of the best customer success tools that emphasizes customer engagement and retention. It offers automated workflows, health scores, and detailed analytics, enabling you to monitor customer satisfaction and intervene proactively to prevent churn.
• Looking into tools for customer insights managers? Userpilot is an all-in-one product platform with engagement features and powerful analytics capabilities. Book a demo to see it in action!

What is a customer insights manager?

A customer insights manager is a professional responsible for analyzing and interpreting data related to customer behavior, preferences, and feedback to inform strategic business decisions.

They use different tools to gather insights from various data sources, such as user interactions, support tickets, and customer surveys.

Customer insights manager’s main responsibilities

A customer insights manager plays a crucial role in understanding customers and driving strategic decisions based on their findings.

Their main responsibilities include:

• Data collection and analysis: Gather and analyze data from various sources, including user interactions, surveys, and support tickets, and utilize analytics tools to track product usage and customer behavior.
• Customer feedback management: Collect, analyze, and report on customer feedback to identify trends and areas for improvement and conduct qualitative research such as interviews and focus groups to gain deeper insights.
• Market and competitive analysis: Perform market research to understand industry trends and competitor strategies to develop benchmarks for product performance based on market data.
• Reporting and communication: Create detailed reports and analytics dashboards to present insights to stakeholders.
• Strategy development and implementation: Work with product teams to integrate customer insights into the product development lifecycle.
• Customer retention and satisfaction: Monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of implemented strategies on customer satisfaction and product success.

Customer insights manager career path

If you’re passionate about understanding customer behavior and translating insights into actionable strategies, this path might be perfect for you. Here’s a roadmap outlining potential progressions within the customer insights field, along with the experience typically required for each step:

• Customer Success Associate (1-2 years): This entry-level role provides a strong foundation. You’ll gain experience in onboarding customers, providing basic product support, and gathering valuable customer feedback. This builds your understanding of the customer journey and your communication skills. 

• Customer Success Manager (CSM) (2-4 years): As a CSM, you’ll take ownership of a designated customer portfolio, managing their entire lifecycle. Responsibilities include proactive customer engagement, identifying upsell/cross-sell opportunities, and ensuring customer success through product adoption and value realization.

• Senior Customer Success Manager (CSM) (4-6 years): Senior CSMs take on a leadership role within the CI team. They manage larger, more complex customer accounts, requiring a deeper understanding of the industry and strategic thinking. They also mentor junior CSMs and contribute to developing impactful customer onboarding and retention programs.

• Customer Insights Manager (6+ years): This role focuses on analyzing customer data to extract actionable insights. You’ll need strong analytical skills and experience with data analysis tools. Here, you’ll translate customer needs and pain points into actionable recommendations for product development, marketing campaigns, and overall customer experience improvements.

• Director of Customer Insights (8+ years): As a Director, you’ll oversee the entire customer insights function, leading a team of analysts and other CI professionals. Responsibilities include developing and implementing customer success strategies, aligning CI with broader company goals, and driving overall customer satisfaction and retention metrics.

How to become a customer insights manager?

Becoming a customer insights manager is not rocket science. It begins with a person’s decision to enter this career with a strong focus on building a product community. Then do the following:

• Get a basic education: Pursuing a bachelor’s degree in fields such as marketing, business administration, statistics, economics, or psychology lays the groundwork for understanding consumer behavior, data analysis techniques, and strategic decision-making.
• Get internships and entry-level positions: Gaining hands-on experience through internships is instrumental in honing your skills and understanding the intricacies of customer lifecycle management.
• Focus on professional development and specialization: Engaging in ongoing learning opportunities such as workshops, conferences, and online courses keeps you abreast of emerging trends. Are you looking to pursue your career as a customer insights manager? Here is how your career path will appear and how you can progress:
• Entry-level analyst/associate: Starting your career as an entry-level analyst or associate provides foundational experience in data analysis, market research, and consumer behavior. In this role, you’ll support senior team members in collecting, analyzing, and interpreting customer data to derive actionable insights.

What skills should a customer insights manager have?

A customer insights manager deeply understands customers, their needs, pain points, and preferences. Hence, their role is crucial in increasing customer retention and satisfaction.

Here’s a breakdown of the key skills essential for excelling in this pivotal role:

• Analytics: Whether it’s predictive modeling, regression analysis, or cohort segmentation, proficiency in analytics empowers them to extract actionable insights from a large data set.
• Communication skills: Articulating insights in a compelling and accessible manner bridges the gap between the customers and the product team, ensuring buy-in across diverse stakeholders.
• Data visualization: Transforming raw data into visually captivating charts and dashboards is a skill all customer insights managers must have.
• Leadership: Leadership allows you to inspire, motivate, and align stakeholders toward a common goal, which is instrumental in driving organizational success.

Best certifications for customer insights manager

Here’s a list of certifications for customer insights managers, considering both insights from professionals and industry trends:

Customer Insights Certifications:

• Professional Certificate in Customer Experience Management (CXM) (American Marketing Association (AMA)): While not customer insights specific, this AMA certification demonstrates a solid understanding of customer experience (CX) principles. It’s often recommended for CX knowledge to understand customer data and use it for actionable insights.
• Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) (Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA)): This broader certification validates your proficiency in various aspects of customer experience, including collecting and analyzing customer insights. CXPA is a recognized organization in the customer experience field.

Data Analysis & Research Certifications (Valuable for Customer Insights):

• Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate (Google on Coursera): Earning this practical certification equips you with skills in data collection, analysis, and visualization using Google tools like BigQuery and Looker. Customer insights managers heavily rely on data analysis to uncover customer trends.
• CompTIA Analytics Analyst (CSA+): This certification validates your foundational knowledge of data analysis concepts, data mining, and data visualization. These skills are crucial for analyzing customer data.

Business Intelligence Certifications (Valuable for Customer Insights):

• Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Associate: This certification focuses on using Microsoft Power BI, a popular business intelligence (BI) tool. Customer insights managers often leverage BI tools to transform customer data into actionable insights.
• Tableau Desktop Specialist: This certification validates your ability to use Tableau Desktop, another popular data visualization tool. It underscores the critical role of data visualization for effectively communicating customer insights.

Best resources for customer insights managers

Working as a customer insights manager requires one to stay updated with information and tools. There are books, webinars, podcasts, blogs, and more to help augment knowledge. Here is an overview of these resources:

Best books for customer insights managers

Here are five books that every customer insights manager must read:

• Customer Relationship Management: The Foundation of Contemporary Marketing Strategy: Here is a book that balances the behavioral and database aspects of customer relationship management. It offers students an in-depth introduction to important areas of marketing.
• Managing the Customer Experience: Turning Customers into Advocates by Shaun Smith: This book highlights companies that have turned customers into advocates, something every customer insights manager must understand.
• INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products that Customers Love by Marty Cagan: dives into unique approaches that giant tech companies use to attract their customers. The insights in this book can be key to creating satisfied customers for your products.
• This is Marketing: Seth Godin: In this book, you will learn how to build trust and permission with target markets, and the art of positioning.
• The Nordstrom Way of Customer Experience Excellence: For Nordstrom, employee experience determines customer experience, and this is reinforced in this book.

Best webinars for customer insights managers

As a customer insights manager, understanding your customer base is crucial for business success. Here’s a curated list of helpful webinar sources for growing your career:

• Userpilot Events remains your go-to for user onboarding and product growth. Their webinars delve into user journey mapping, feature adoption analytics, and user sentiment analysis – all providing valuable data points for customer insights.
• Qualtrics offers webinars on using their experience management (XM) platform to gather customer feedback and analyze customer journeys. Learn how to identify customer pain points, optimize touchpoints across the customer journey, and improve customer satisfaction.
• Services like CustomerThink and CX Accelerator offer premium subscriptions with access to exclusive webinars and research reports on customer insights and best practices.
• CXPA (Customer Experience Professionals Association) offers webinars and resources on best practices in customer experience management. Gain insights from industry leaders on building a customer-centric culture and using data to drive customer loyalty.

Best blogs for customer insights managers

Blogs are a great source of information for customer insight managers. Here are several blogs that you should not miss:

• Userpilot: This blog has hundreds of articles on various topics linked to customer insights. Learn what customer insights are, how to leverage customer insights AI, how to create robust customer insights and much more.
• Intercom: Intercom is a popular software company specializing in customer support software. They conduct original surveys on what customers want and can help you create a better experience for them.
• ClientSuccess: This award-winning software company’s blog is filled with useful insights for customer success managers.
• Zendesk: The customer service solution provider Zendesk provides this blog to offer insights into customer behavior, customer experience and strategies to improve customer experience.
• CustomerThink: Here is another thorough blog from a community of business leaders that covers everything from customer experience management to customer success and much more.

Best podcasts for customer insights managers

Here are some podcasts that will make your journey into this career path very easy:

• The consumer insights podcast: You can hear how leading brands are creating strategies for business development.
• Getting to aha! with Darshan Mehta: No business can thrive without customer insights. Learn more about the topic from this podcast by experienced professionals.
• Happy market research podcast by Jamin Brazil: Listen to interviews with top minds in the world of market research on tech and industry trends. This is a podcast that can help you uncover more ways to gather and use customer insights.
• Reel talk: The customer insights show: Christoph Trappe shares valuable ideas to help you understand your customers better to avoid churn. He discusses insights and how to use the data most effectively.
• Conversation with Zendesk: Listen to amazing conversations as Zendesk experts bring you the latest news, market trends, and marketing tactics in customer experience.

Best tools for customer insights managers

Leveraging the right tools for customer insights can significantly enhance your ability to gather, analyze, and act on customer data. Here are some essential tools:

• Best tool for feedback collection and product analytics – Userpilot: A no-code tool, Userpilot lets customer insight managers trigger in-app surveys, conduct funnel and path reports, and visualize data on custom dashboards that are easily sharable with stakeholders.
• Best tool for project management – Jira: Jira is an excellent project management tool designed for agile teams. With robust features for sprint planning, user behavior tracking, and reporting, Jira ensures your customer insights projects stay organized and on track.
• Best tool for team collaboration – Monday: Monday.com is a versatile project management and team collaboration platform. It offers customizable workflows, customer journey visualization, and seamless integration with other tools.
• Best tool for customer support – Zendesk: Zendesk is a leading customer support platform that provides comprehensive solutions for managing customer inquiries and support tickets. Its robust analytics and reporting features help you track customer issues, measure response times, and improve overall customer satisfaction.
• Best tool for customer relationship management – Zoho Desk:  Zoho Desk is one of the best solutions designed to streamline customer support operations. It offers multi-channel support, automation features, and detailed analytics, making it easier to understand customer behavior and deliver personalized support.
• Best tool for inbound marketing and sales – HubSpot: HubSpot offers a suite of tools for marketing, sales, and customer service. Its customer insights capabilities include detailed analytics, lead tracking, and customer feedback management, helping you align your strategies with customer needs.
• Best tool for customer engagement – Custify: Custify is one of the best customer success tools that emphasizes customer engagement and retention. It offers automated workflows, health scores, and detailed analytics, enabling you to monitor customer satisfaction and intervene proactively to prevent churn.

Customer insights manager FAQs

• What is the role of a customer insights manager? The role of a customer insights manager involves analyzing customer data to understand behaviors, preferences, and trends. This position requires collecting and interpreting data from various sources such as surveys, social media, and sales data to derive actionable insights.
• What are the 6 techniques to gain customer insights? To gain valuable customer insights, managers typically use six key techniques: surveys and questionnaires, social media monitoring, customer interviews, focus groups, product analytics, and customer support tickets.
• Who does a consumer insights manager report to? The reporting structure can vary depending on the organization’s size and structure. It generally involves close interaction with top-level management such as the Director of Marketing.
• How can I be a good insight manager? To be a successful insights manager, it’s essential to combine strong analytical skills with effective communication and strategic initiatives. Develop proficiency in data analysis tools and techniques to accurately interpret complex data sets.

Conclusion

Becoming a successful customer insights manager requires dedication, continuous learning, and a proactive approach to developing relevant skills.

By following the outlined steps and leveraging the resources available, you can effectively navigate your career path and achieve your professional goals.

We hope this guide has provided you with valuable insights and practical advice to help you on your journey to becoming a proficient and impactful customer insights manager!

Looking into tools for customer insights managers? Userpilot is an all-in-one product platform with engagement features and powerful analytics capabilities. Book a demo to see it in action!