“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” – Steve Jobs, Apple Founder
Businesses that launch products without researching and not taking into account customer needs may suffer a loss in long run. Businesses should identify the needs of customers. It must be an integral part in the organization’s marketing campaigns; this approach will definitely help businesses evaluate the product development stage, manufacture and produce innovative products, provide solutions to customer needs, improve customer retention rate and so on.
Here are the five strategies on how to effectively identify your customer needs and interests:
1. Market Research
Market research is the first step in identifying the needs of your customers. While doing market research, you can ask several specific questions to customers about your business. With market research, you can figure out your customer requirements, expectations, priorities and what motivates them to buy your products and services. You can even understand how your customers’ shop and identify the spending habits of your customers too.
An enterprise can conduct market research in different ways, which include knowing customer reviews, conducting a forum or poll on your website, and sending an online Survey.
2. Social Media
Social networking is the biggest asset for your company to build profitable relationships with customers. Integrate social media elements in your marketing strategy to reap significant benefits from your business. These days most of the customer’s hangout on social media sites either to appreciate or criticize a product. The social media criticism can be used as a powerful tool to identify customer needs.
You can take advantage of Social CRM Software. It can be used in tracking the digital footprints of your customers on social sites and identify the needs of your customers. By monitoring the tastes, preferences, interests, conversations, buying habits of your customers, you can segment them into focus groups based on their social behavior. Gaining this valuable input will further improve the quality of your business products.
3. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) enables you to gain valuable insights about customer’s needs. CRM solution helps you track complete customer information including contact details, transaction history and product inquiries, purchase and service history, complaints, and communication channel preferences. Based on the customer data obtained from the CRM System, businesses can better plan a marketing strategy on individual customer needs and preferences.
4. Collaborate with your Customers
Is your product in the development phase? Build collaboration with your customers’ during the product development stage. Set up a customer panel to test and evaluate the quality of new products. For example, IT companies can release the beta version of the product to selected customers for evaluation purposes prior to the release in the market.
Businesses can also implement the same strategy, select a specific group of customers and ask them to evaluate your product. After a few days, ask specific questions about your new product like how the product was, are they satisfied with the product features, and do they need any changes in the product. Gain the valuable feedback and implement them in your next product development stage.
Customers are the key for a successful business. Always respect your customers, learn more about their needs and expectations listen to their feedback and provide value to your customers. This will definitely help your business gain more attention than your competitors.
Guest article written by: James Maron is an author at SutiSoft, Inc. He shares his views on SaaS and Cloud-based business management solutions