Truly understanding your customers is at the core of most successful businesses.
Yet many businesses still fail to see the importance of getting to know their customers. They are so busy finding ways to get higher conversion rates that they completely forget about their most important asset: Their customers.
Often customers get neglected or misled during their journey with a business. Whether that’s when they decide what to buy or once a purchase has been made.
Understanding your customers is key to achieving goals. Learning about your customers’ why and how will help you develop a better product, service and customer experience. By offering more value to your customers, you will see that their satisfaction increases. As a result, more one-off buyers will turn into loyal customers.
Today, we are uncovering 6 methods you can implement to truly understand your customers.
If done right, data from customer engagement can give you valuable insights into your customers. That’s why it is important to optimise your customer engagement strategy.
An engaged customer is a happy customer. A happy customer drives profitability. So you want to make sure that you can keep your customers engaged during their first few steps in the customer journey.
But how to best keep them engaged?
You will find the answer to that by investigating how and why a customer interacts with your business the way they do. Nowadays there are many ways a customer engages with your business. From social media to live chats, what tools do they use?
Another way is to do regular customer calls to directly ask for their feedback. That way your customers also feel more valued and cared for, which enhances their experience with you.
You could also include a short feedback survey in your email drip. Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to engage with customers, so why not use it to get to know them better?
Understanding your customers is more than throwing together a group of people based on similar characteristics and needs. You need to consider their values, feelings, attitudes, motivations, their frustrations, buying and usage behaviour. In-depth buyer personas can help you create a better experience for your customers.
You might have heard of the segmentation, targeting and positioning (STP) model. The STP model is commonly used to identify the most viable target audiences and establish strategies to best reach them.
It is also used to create detailed buyer personas.
Customers who have a bad experience are two to three times more likely to leave a bad review. With 88% of people avoiding business after reading a bad review, you want to do your best to keep your customers happy.
A good way of getting to know your customers’ frustrations and pain points is to put yourself in their shoes. Walk their journey from the first interaction with you to making a purchase. The customer journey has three stages: Pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase stage.
Throughout all stages look out for things like: Where do they seek business information? How long are customer response times? Is the customer going to get what you promised? Do you offer easy returns or other options if a customer is unhappy?
If you are a service provider, you can analyse customer pain points by analysing your service blueprint. By doing that you are looking for issues throughout your delivery process that may impact a customer’s experience. For example, long waiting times. This will help you improve your service delivery, leading to higher customer satisfaction.
The more pain points customers encounter the worse their experience will be. Addressing them is crucial to ensure a customer has a happy experience.
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Tracking tools such as Google Analytics are a great way to study customer behaviour. The data from this shows you how customers interact with your business via your website. Every customer interaction is important as it indicates what they like and dislike.
For example, it tells you what pages customers can’t look away from and on the other hand, what content they simply skip. Analysing customer interactions and behaviour gives you an idea of how your website performs.
You can then use the information gained to optimise your website and improve the end-to-end user experience.
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If you want to truly understand your customers you need to widen your horizon. Think about it: Who else could know your customers besides themselves…?
Your employees on the forefront that deal with them day in and out! Naturally they get to know your customers pretty well. From their pet’s name to their favourite song, your frontline workers know your customers on a whole different level.
The relationship between your frontline workers and customers is more friendship-like. And as in any friendship, you share concerns with each other, what annoys and what excites you.
Questioning your frontline workers can therefore give you valuable insight into customer issues that usually get swept under the carpet. Sometimes they are the key to improving customer experience
Gathering continuous feedback is good. Gathering genuine feedback is better. When you do send out that follow up email after a customer has made a purchase, you have to genuinely mean it.
Instead of the generic follow up survey (rate your experience from 1 to 10), you could ask the question: “Is there anything we can improve and how?”
When you ask for more specific feedback you will receive more detailed information. That’s what you want. Genuine, detailed feedback allows you to address and fix specific customer issues.
Therefore, asking for genuine feedback and listening to your customers will let you create a customer experience like no other.
Implementing these six methods should help you gain a better understanding of your customers. The information you will gain from it will help you develop better customer retention strategies to turn one-off buyers into loyal customers.
Achieve the business goals you set for yourself.
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