What Are Customer Needs?
Customer needs are the motivating factors that lead someone to buy a product or use a service. Companies learn about customers' needs by identifying who their customers are. This includes defining a target audience and segmenting them based on demographics and other attributes. Once a business knows its target audience, they have a better view of the specific needs that drive them to buy.
Why Is It Important to Talk About Customer Needs?
According to a Salesforce survey, 76 percent of consumers expect companies to understand their expectations and needs. Talking about customer needs helps ensure that businesses meet their expectations. Specifically, when organizations understand customers' needs, they have the information they need to position their brand persuasively. This allows businesses to:
- Provide Solutions. Many consumers want real-time support, especially with a new product or service. When companies identify a customer's needs, they can provide better customer support that truly solves issues.
- Improve Your Products and Services. A company's success, in large part, broadly depends on its unique selling position [USP]. What sets a business apart from its competition? When businesses learn what motivates their customers, they can enhance their product and service offerings to satisfy their customers' needs and develop a strong USP.
- Reduce Costs. Meeting and anticipating customer needs increases customer satisfaction and reduces the time and resources businesses need to spend to support customer issues. Ultimately, this saves the company resources that can be redirected to other critical areas or
departments.
How Do You Identify Customer Needs?
The best way for a business to identify customer needs is to take an organized and systematic approach, often referred to as a customer needs analysis. A comprehensive customer needs analysis provides valuable insights into your target market. This information, coupled with brand positioning, allows companies to meet or exceed customer expectations.
Different organizations rely on various methods to conduct consumer research, including:
- Customer Interviews. Direct communication from customers provides the most reliable information compared to other methods of research. Businesses might ask specific questions of those who have used their products or service and get open-ended feedback.
- Surveys. This is another way to reach customers, but it involves using multiple-choice or ranked questions to acquire data that businesses use to understand customer needs.
- Focus Groups. Companies use a small group of people to drill into specific issues or products. Many businesses use focus groups to fine-tune information they have learned from more extensive interviews or surveys.
- Social Listening. Most of today's companies have some sort of social media presence. Social listening is the act of monitoring social media channels to track conversations about a product, brand, or competitor to gather useful data.
Businesses use the above methods to identify two broad types of customer needs: product needs and service needs.
Product Needs
- Price: Consumers decide how much to spend on a particular product or service.
- Features: Buyers are looking for a product or service with features that solve their problems.
- Effectiveness: Customers do not want empty promises; they want an effective product.
Service Needs
- Empathy: Customers want to feel understood when they make purchases.
- Clarity: Customers want transparent and reliable information about pricing, return policy, sizing, and other potential attributes of a product or service.
- Information: Customers need information throughout their entire journey, including instructions, how-to videos, and other methods that educate them.
How to Meet Customer Needs
When you focus on your customers, it's easier to meet their needs and expectations. The first step to meeting customer needs is to map your customer's journey, whether online, in-person or a combination of the two. Using what you have learned from a customer needs analysis allows you to develop a unique selling proposition [USP] that sets you apart from your competition. This enables you to deliver exceptional customer service and user experiences.
Businesses succeed and make more profits when identifying and meeting their customers' product needs and service needs. You can reap these benefits by working with a media partner to conduct a customer needs analysis and create a winning marketing strategy for your business.
As a highly experienced media executive, Val is passionate about growing business for advertisers. She has helped customers achieve their goals through strategic planning and effective solutions that are relevant to today’s marketplace. Her comprehensive knowledge of revenue-growth strategies has led to long-term customer partnerships.