CUSTOMER NEEDS & IDENTIFYING THEM
What are customer needs?
Customer needs are defined as the influential factors that trigger them to buy your product or service. In order to identify customer needs, it is important to understand the reasons behind their decision making.
In order to understand customer needs better, it’s very important to know who your customers are. By defining your target audience and segmenting them based on their industry or other attributes, you not only get a clear view of what’s your selling proposition but also identify their needs.
There are several simple steps to follow in order to meet customer needs successfully.
1.) Identify – Follow customer needs analysis via surveys, interviews, focus groups, or social listening.
2.) Distribute – Once identified the needs, you can distribute it across the right teams and departments.
3.) Create – Tailor product features, create detailed content that speaks about customer needs.
4.) Collect – Obtain customer feedback regularly to learn how your efforts meet their expectations.
Businesses are taking strides to understand customer needs and meet them as early as possible to align with internal teams. 76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs.
With business operating under a cyclical process of anticipating, and meeting customer needs, you can have quick and positive results. Prior to your business promotions or product launch, it is vital to know your customer needs and wants.
Benefits of knowing more about your customers:
a.] Provide faster solutions – One of the common things customers want is real time support. By identifying the needs of your customers you can provide faster and effective support.
b.] Improve your products & services – Customer research helps understand the motives behind the buying process. You can learn about the areas you are missing out and create an effective USP. The insights can be used to enhance the products or services to satisfy customer needs.
c.] Reduce the number of support tickets – Building the product and services considering the needs of the target customers ensures effective solutions to customer issues.
How to identify customer needs?
Recognising customer needs includes deep research across your industry and asking your customers lots of specific questions. It is very important to gather in-depth details from your customers through regular communication and be sure you can deliver on their individual needs.
Understanding customer psychology can act as a catalyst for your business to deliver better customer service, build long-lasting relationships, and maintain a consistent source of revenue.
Type of customer needs:
Customer needs are about delivering a better experience by exceeding their expectations. This can be done by carrying out research to get a better understanding of your customers through surveys, focus groups and interviews.
A.] Product needs
If your product matches your customer needs they become your potential buyers and vice-versa. The main attributes of product needs can be:
Price – Customers generally set their budgets for any product purchase.
Features – Customers look for features that would solve their problem and reliability in functioning while using the product.
Effectiveness – The product should be effective in streamlining the process to save time.
B.] Service Needs
Being able to quench the customer service needs, can give your business a competitive edge and set good examples for other brands to follow. The key attributes of good service can be:
Empathy – Customers stick to brands that serve them with an empathetic attitude.
Clarity – Customers look for transparent information from the brand related to pricing, refund policy, etc.
Information – Customers need information from the point of interaction until the end.
Best practices of how to meet customer needs:
- Deliver quality customer support
- Map your customer journey
- Measure customer satisfaction regularly
- Be consistent in customer communication
- Develop a customer centric culture