As a small business owner, paying attention to customer needs and expectations is crucial to growth and will make you have so many returning customers.
What are customers' needs?
Customer needs are things that motivate customers to purchase a product or service.
Four (4) basic customer’s needs:
- Pricing: As a small business owner, the group of people you are looking to reach out to i.e. (target audience) is crucial regarding how much you want to charge for your product or service. Every target audience has their needs when it comes to pricing, if you are selling premium products obviously pricing is not a problem for them, they don’t care about the price as long as they get value for their money. But when you are now selling to low-income earners, they are very price conscious, you have to make your price as affordable as possible. For example, if a hair vendor sells bone-straight hair, customers will expect a high price. In this instance, having a low price could put people off. However, if another vendor sells its hair for a cheaper price customers may assume the product is of low quality.
- Quality: Quality is essential to attracting customers and building their trust. As a small business owner, every time your product satisfies a customer, there's an opportunity to develop a long-term relationship with that customer and retain their loyalty.
- Choice: As a growing business it is very important to have a range of products and/or services available to suit different groups of customers within your target audience. Customers have different needs and desires when buying items. For example, a clothing shop may need to stock a range of styles of clothing and a range of sizes for each item of clothing it offers. Businesses that operate through e-commerce can have a wider choice available, as they are not restricted by the display area in a physical shop.
- Convenience: Customers and consumers want convenience and are often willing to pay more for it. Convenience relates to something being easier, quicker or less hassle for customers. An example of this would be buying hair or hair products online rather than going to a physical store. customers are often happy to pay an additional delivery fee for the convenience of being able to shop from the comfort of their bed.
What are Customer Expectations?
After handling customer needs, customer expectations follow. Expectations simply means the belief that something will happen in a certain way.
How a customer forms an expectation depends on various factors;
- Previous Customer Experience with the business owners: If a customer already used your service or product and they were satisfied with the experience, they will expect the same level of experience the next time. The same goes if the experience is poor – the customer will lack confidence in your brand and the expectations will not be as high.
- Previous Customer Experience with a Competitor: Even if the customer never interacted with your brand in the past, they will also have certain expectations from you. A customer experience that one had with other Vendors that sell the same product or render the same service will have a huge impact on their perception of your business.
- Opinions of Others: How other people see you and what they say about you can also shape a customer’s expectations of your business. Reviews, or simply word of mouth are great indicators of what to expect when interacting with a business owner. For example, if your Facebook page is covered with complaints that it’s impossible to reach your customer service agent, one probably won’t presume you will exceed their expectations while trying to resolve a problem.
- Business Identity: Finally, customer expectations highly depend on how you present yourself on the market. This covers multiple factors, including how you advertise yourself and how you communicate with your customers. If your image is trustworthy and powerful, customers will not only have high expectations of you but may even expect you to exceed them.
Being aware of the causes and the importance of customer needs, the next question is "How do you identify them?" This leads us to the first step in discovering your customer needs, which is knowing who your customers are.
After you’ve gathered all the necessary information about the customer such as gender, age etc, you need to ask them the right questions to figure out what their needs and expectations are.
There are lots of ways that can you collect customers' feedback and understand what influences their purchasing decisions as listed in the bullet points.
●????Direct Interview - By conducting a customer interview, you can learn a lot about their needs and buying patterns. Such as: Lifestyle activities etc,
●???? Focus group - focus groups consist of a targeted group of individuals who are selected based on specific criteria like age, location, gender etc.
●???? Surveys - using surveys as a method of collecting valuable data may be the most convenient way when you want to learn what a larger population of respondents think about your service offering, what their challenges are, or what they desire the most.
Lastly, implement what you have learnt - After you defined your customer persona and collected all the needed data, it is time to put those findings into action!?
Your business works, when you put in the work - Pama
