Studies indicate that consumers value companies that prioritize customer service, sell quality products, and have a transparent business policy. From a marketing and supply chain standpoint, companies should determine what their customers want from a product or offer.
While guessing what customers want is easy, their needs still need to be addressed. It is, thus, crucial to talk to them and understand their mind.
Consumer research involves a synergistic work of gathering and using relevant data regularly. If you are doing it occasionally, could you break the habit?
A comprehensive understanding of customers is the key to achieving your business goals. Whether you want to build a customer base, optimize user experience, increase sales, or create engaging content, you must know your customers better, understand their needs, and deliver accordingly.
According to Teradata research, 41 percent of marketing executives use customer engagement data to inform marketing strategy.
However, marketers and organization heads must pay more attention to this essential pre- and post-sale aspect. Due to a lack of in-depth understanding of customers, they need to include this crucial feature. Customer experience optimization is the best way to acquire and retain new customers. It is also a great way to foster customer loyalty.
Step-by-step guide for how to find out what your customers want!
1. Conduct consumer research
Consumer research is the basis of relevant and crucial information. When trying to figure out how to find out what your customers want, it helps businesses determine their consumers, understand their preferences, and deliver their needs. Here’s how to go about it:
- Contact customers: To know your customers, you must contact and speak to them. There is no better way to understand their needs. Personalized communication also works best because it breaks the ice and conveys much about customers, their profiles, and personas. You can email, phone, or send an online survey to them.
- Meet them: Can you meet your customers? It is a more informal and approachable format of trade in modern business. You can encourage your customers to attend industry events where you can interact with them one-on-one. You can learn much from their needs and expectations when you meet them. For more tremendous success, send your proficient employees to your customers for data gathering.
- Online activity tracking: When customers visit your website, track their behavior. Each customer is different from the other. While some may purchase on the first visit, others may take longer. If they leave a feedback or error report, follow it up.
- Role-playing: How would you rate your products and services if you were a customer? You can just place an order anonymously and check out the process. If the experience were seamless and authentic, you would get adequate information.
2. Introduce clever customer engagement tactics
Provide value throughout your customer’s experience, increasing retention and revenue. If you deliver value right, it could be a potential source of customer insight.
Real-time customer engagement is now accessible with the latest tools and advanced technology. Messenger is a popular customer service channel, and tools such as Drift enable you to speak to your customers as they visit your website.
You can collect customer insights and understand their minds using these channels. As a result, you can work with the customer service team to develop patterns to deliver better.
Design surveys in such a way that your approach is neutral. Ask customers for their opinions without any bias. Seek their impartial and uninfluenced opinion. After all, you are looking for genius insights, both positive and negative. You can ask questions like, “How can we improve?” or “What do you think could be better?”
In simple language, your approach should be concrete, asking for feedback on a particular product or service. For instance, “How did the product improve your business?”
Surveys focusing on a specific area of customer experience are the right approach. Instead of asking too many questions about everything, ask for insights into particular products and services.
3. Understand the dynamic buyer and create robust personas
Don’t just go with the crowd using basic demographics like age, sex, location, and profession as buyer persona determinants. That’s what rookies do when trying to figure out what customers want… These pointers often fail to provide adequate information to create a message that connects with your customers emotionally.
To get deeper into your customers’ preferences, start using the Google Analytics Acquisition Tab. It allows you to determine the social media channels, professional forums, and industry blogs from where your site receives traffic. You can apply all the information to the personas to determine when and where to reach them for more effective results.
Acquiring keyword data helps you discover the terms buyer personas use to describe your services. You have to segment customers based on their keyword searches. Use Google Webmaster Tools to list common keywords driving high traffic to your site. You can then group those keywords into themes. Then, assign these themes to various personas based on available data.
4. Use customer analytics to get valuable insight
People visiting your website may click and go; others may stay and read a webpage. Every action of your prospects provides valuable insight into their behavior.
You can select any user behavior tracking tool to understand how customers interact with the website. Of course, Google Analytics is the most reliable of all. It gives you insight and helps you gather information like the bounce rate and time spent on a page.
Behavioral data plays a crucial role in deducing conclusive data. It helps you find out what your customers want and what they don’t understand, what they like and don’t like, and what you can add or deduct to create a more robust website and offer a better experience.
For instance, if your visitors have navigation issues – say technical glitches in visiting a page, make sure the interface allows a better, seamless, and user-friendly experience.
If your audience spends more time on one page than others, analyze that page and its content to see the reason for retention. If a page has a high bounce rate, investigate what is causing your audience to leave.
5. Develop a plan for customer engagement
The only way to truly figure out how to find out what your customers want is to ensure they remain engaged. Customer engagement also allows you to plan and utilize the present optimally. Your customer experience specialists develop the correct path and take the best approach to respond to your audience, even during challenging and stressful situations.
The latest range of predictive modeling software is fantastic in identifying cyclical trends and patterns in existing customer data. It also improves decision-making. These tools help experts to create realistic future models.
Predictive modeling is based on using historical behavioral data for analysis. It analyses which features were valuable to customers over time and which customers did not use. Understanding the most frequently visited and most popular pages also informs the content strategy while focusing on formats and topics that are best to resolve the challenges raised by your audience.
Using the exact model, you can also determine trends of the features most commonly used and why your audiences liked them. Furthermore, looking at the market trends and analyzing them would also give you an idea of what similar companies in your industry have accomplished. You can explore various areas and devise new and advanced features based on these.
6. Map the customer journey
Take your time to map your customers’ journey. Identify those areas where they might need your assistance. Do they need help with navigation? Do they need assistance when they reach your web page? Are there issues with signing up for a free trial?
Any or all of these events trigger a unique opportunity to provide an excellent user experience, anticipating what customers may require.
7. Be social using the online media
Social media is no longer a mere platform to promote your industry expertise and brand message. Instead, social media is an incredible opportunity to get closer to your customers and understand what they want, what they like, what they don’t like, and how they prefer to express their opinions.
Have a social media plan with a dedicated team and time. Log on to a channel, promote your business, read comments, monitor keywords, analyze hashtags, and see how the industry reacts.
Please examine the interests, conversation subjects, demographics, and customer interactions with the brand on social networks. Such general insights are invaluable assets for future promotions.
You can find out what your customers want.
Customer experience is the heart of any customer’s journey. Often, it is where companies want to save some money at their customers’ expense.
A PwC research shows that 60 percent of all customers would stop doing business with companies due to their unfriendly service. The same study further revealed that customers across several industries were willing to pay as high as 16 percent premium for better customer service.
You can use the tips and tools outlined in this article to find out what your customers want and ensure you meet their expectations.