Five Ways to Discover What Your Customers Want

Customer satisfaction and happy customers are the most sustainable source to drive business growth; cross-selling or upselling to existing customers is significantly cheaper than new user acquisition. So when you create your customer retention strategy, you must evaluate you provide your users with value-added services, but how would you know your exact customer needs? Understanding and knowing what your customers want is a significant way to continue growing your business.

So, how do you figure out what they want? There are some easy ways to discover your consumer insights, which means their wants, needs, sentiment, and attitude towards your business. We’re going to go over four easy ways to discover what your customers want.

Meet Them in Person

Reaching out to your customers through a direct message on social media, phone calls, video chat via zoom, or other similar tools, or meeting in person is a great way to find out what they think about your business. The people you reach out to should cover a variety of customer profiles. You should include loyal customers and new ones.

Have some questions about different aspects of your business. Having these personal connections with them will make it known that you genuinely care about what they say and think. It will create a positive effect on the reputation of your business for being interested in customers’ opinions.

Send a Customer Satisfaction Survey

If meeting your clients in person will take too much time for you, or they’re unwilling to talk with you, sending out an email with a survey can also work. It’s less personal, but it could get you more accurate results.

When you meet someone face to face, it’s harder to express negative comments than through an email. However, don’t make the process impersonal. Send out emails written by you or an employee with personal details, like their name and shopping history.

With the survey, make sure the questions are simple but informative, and that it only takes a few minutes to fill out. Leaving an area for them to write in something is a nice touch as well. Some of the best surveys to provide are customer satisfaction scores, net promoter scores, milestone surveys, and customer effort scores.

Offering a discount or a gift after completing the survey will give your clients more reasons to fill it out. You’ll likely see a better turn out and a possible boost in sales by offering this.

Apply Sentiment Analysis on User Generated Content

Sentiment analysis is evaluating the text sentiment: Whether the tone is positive, neutral, or hostile but where will you get the text to analyze? This is where user-generated content comes in handy, for example you can take online reviews of your products, comments on social media and other sources to determine if your clients are overall happy with their experience or not.

You can then look just at the negative opinions and figure out what ways your business is lacking and fix it. Doing sentiment analysis saves you a lot of time because you won’t have to read all the comments. Also, it will give you actual data to go off of, not just feelings.

This can be hard, though, because some comments will state something like “the service was not bad,” which means it was good. However, some sentiment analysis will pick up the word “bad” and put it in the harmful category. It’s essential to look back at the data for yourself to make sure no errors were made for the most accurate data.

Track Their Activity

There are ways to find out how people use your website and other online platforms. You can see how many times one user clicks on your website as a repeat customer or those who click once and never come back. If you have a social media account, it’s easy to track your content’s likes, shares, and views.

All of these things give you insight into what your customers think and how they interact with your digital assets. If one aspect of your website or social media pages gets more clicks and views, you know that it’s something they like. This will tell you to invest more in something or post more about that topic.

When a lot of people are leaving your site after visiting for a few seconds, there could be a problem with your website. It could take too long to load or be confusing when they view it. It was reported that you’d lose 32% of your clients if your website takes anywhere from 1 to 3 seconds to load. Now, if that increases to 5 seconds, you’ll lose 90% of your potential clients!

The Bottom Line

You can find out a lot about what your customers think of your company in many ways. Discover what your customers want – depends on how personal you want to get with them. The most personal would be meeting them in person and asking them directly. But since it’s not scalable, the best alternative is to apply automation to personalize your messaging via email and social media.

However, there are other ways, as well. You can send out a survey in an email, use data analysis, or track their behaviour online to get consumer insights on what your customers want.

Efrat Vulfsons is a data-driven writer and freelance publicist, parallel to her soprano opera singing career. Efrat holds a B.F.A from the Jerusalem Music Academy in Opera Performance.