If you want to build lasting business relationships, tailor your products or services, or increase customer satisfaction, you have to first know your customer. Understanding your customers’ wants, needs, and frustrations will allow you to anticipate your business’s role in meeting those desires.
Here are 10 strategies and techniques you can use to better understand your customers:
#1: Customer Surveys
If you want to know what makes your customers tick, just ask! Conduct surveys to gather feedback and opinions directly from them. You can use simple online survey tools like SurveyMonkey and Google Forms or utilize a specialized customer feedback platform. In your survey, ask questions about their preferences, pain points, and overall satisfaction.
#2: Customer Interviews
For more in-depth feedback, schedule customer focus groups or one-on-one interviews. This technique will give you more detailed information that can be used to gain qualitative insights.
#3: Social Listening
“Social Listening” is when you capture conversations about your company or brand on social media platforms and then analyze what’s sparking the chatter. From there, you can gauge customer sentiment and then build campaigns and marketing strategies to address customer comments or concerns.
#4: Website Analytics
Your website is speaking to you. Are you listening? Tools like Google Analytics help you track the behavior of your website visitors. Use metrics such as page views, bounce rates, and conversion rates to understand how your customers are interacting with your business online.
#5: Customer Service & Support Data
Be sure to record and regularly analyze the questions and interactions that come through your customer support channels. Identify common issues where customers frequently seek help and address them.
#6: Customer Journey Mapping
To fully understand your customers’ experience interacting with your company, create a customer journey map to visualize their path from awareness to purchase and beyond. This will allow you to identify touchpoints and pain points along the way.
#7: Competitive Analysis
Understanding your customers also means understanding the landscape in which they’re operating. What are their choices beyond your products or services? Gather data on your competitors and their customer base, and determine your own value proposition. What sets your business apart, and why do customers choose you? In contrast, why do they choose your competitor?
#8: Data Analytics and CRM
Use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to track your customers and how they’re interacting with your company. This data will help you identify trends in customer behavior.
#9: Online Feedback and Reviews
When your customers have something to say, they often turn to online review sites. Monitor these reviews on platforms like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google Business Reviews, Facebook, or industry-specific websites. Be sure to address all feedback on the public platform and monitor any patterns in feedback that might arise.
#10: Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs are very effective in customer retention, but they can also give you access to data that allows you to better understand customer preferences and purchase habits.
Build Your Own Strategy
You don’t need to deploy all the tactics we’ve listed here, but it’s important to put at least some of these tools to use. Consider the information you want to capture and how you’ll use the data you collect. Remember that if you aren’t going to use the information, there’s no sense in gathering it.
Ohlmann Group’s team of marketing experts would love to help you sort through the tools available to you for getting to know your customers better. Drop us a note, and let’s put together a plan to better understand your customers’ needs and preferences so you can be more effective at marketing, product development, and customer service.
