For your company to be successful, it must stay relevant at all times. To achieve this relevance, organizations look at other successful brands, emerging industry trends, and the latest products on the market. However, there is one more component that your eyes must always be trained on: customers.
Customers are the primary determinant of your company’s ability to reach its targets and achieve significant progress both locally and internationally. Simply put: happy customers will culminate in more sales, better retention rates, and growing profitability. To make your clients happy with your products, the first step is to understand their needs.
This post is a closer look at customer needs to answer two main questions, “what are they?” and “how do you identify them?”
What are Customer Needs?
Whether you are starting a new business or have been in the game for some time, this question should always be at the back of your mind. So, what is a customer’s need?
This is a motive that makes a client want to buy a product or service. Therefore, the need is the driver of the customer’s decision to purchase that service/ item. Brands look at clients’ needs to help address the original intention. Let’s highlight this with an example.
Every noon, people get the need to eat – hunger. This need makes them decide to walk to a restaurant to purchase some food. Therefore, a company that identifies this need will be waiting with the right delicacies to help quench it. Although not new, the concept of customer-centricity is still hazy in many companies. This is why your business plan should have one of its main parts dedicated to identifying and addressing clients’ needs.
How to Identify Customers’ Needs in Business
Now that we have demonstrated what a business need is, the next step is identifying it. Here are some useful tips that you can employ to identify the right customer needs.
Use the Already Available Data
If your business uses a customer relations management (CRM) system, the chances are that you already have some data. Using this data, check for issues or pain points of your clients. Then, try to establish if there is a specific pattern related to the issue you have identified.
Using data, it is possible to know where the customers are coming from. You will also be able to gather crucial details, such as what their preferences are. You might even want to reach out to a sample of the customers to determine what they value more or would want to see in your products or service.
Gather Feedback from the Customers
Because you are working on the needs of the targeted clients, why not go straight to them? This will give you a direct account to work on and improve the user experience. Some good methods of gathering feedback from customers include surveys on your site or sent directly through emails. You can also use focus groups for in-depth insights into clients’ needs or experiences with your company’s products.
Map Your Customer Journey
Before a customer purchases a product, he/she follows a specific journey. Often, the process starts with an ad, perhaps on social media or downtown. Then, customers follow the company on its social media accounts and website to gather more information. Therefore, you need to establish this journey and ensure that your customers are getting the right information to make the right decisions.
For example, you need to ensure that the information on social media is the same as on the company website. Also, it has to be consistent with what is available in the shop for smooth conversion when the client finally comes to make a purchase. Consider extending the journey to the product used to demonstrate to the customer that your brand is committed to delivering value at all times.
This post has demonstrated that the most important component in a business is the customer, and your organization should be focused on addressing its needs. According to Adrian Cheng, the General Manager of the New World Development and Founder of the K11 brand, every business should target identifying customer needs progressively because clients change. This is why he changed the business model of New World Development to combine the art and retail experience because that is what the new customer wants.
