Why do they buy? 6 practical ways to understand your customers’ needs and wants
- Feb 2, 2022
- 8 min read
Updated: May 26, 2023
Marketing and sales usually go hand in hand. Consumers are always vital participants in this marketing and sales journey that is created and implemented by your company.
How much do you understand your customers? It is not uncommon for us to hear frustration from some business owners regarding ever-changing consumer behaviors.
“My customers have changed. They don’t like what they used to be. It’s just been two years!”
“Why do my clients like that new company? It is so young and inexperienced!”
“I really do not know why my customers buy less from us now. What’s wrong?”
Many of you have probably noticed consumers’ behaviors shift more frequently than a decade ago. Nevertheless, their shopping or decision journey can still be projected and traced as long as you can closely monitor and engage with them.
Thank you to the digital trends; consumers are way more proactive and genuine in expressing their opinions towards brands online or offline. However, collecting valuable and relevant data or customer insights becomes more complex as digitalization evolves. Therefore, to improve your understanding of your customers, businesses should use their data well.
In the following sections, we will cover six crucial steps for you to go deeper and fully understand your potential and current customers’ changing preferences and needs from your businesses. It can also help you generate more profits and spend your marketing budget wisely.
1. Identify and collect your consumers’ comments and feedback
The first question is usually about where the sources of customers’ insights are.
Even if you run a small enterprise, companies often have multiple data sources externally and internally to collect their customers’ comments and feedback. These are some common sources:
after service surveys and questionnaires
This kind of feedback is usually on a point scale. The surveys/ questionnaires can be in an email format or an invitation to leave an online review after a customer purchases a product or a service. Some organizations also send a more in-depth survey to repeat customers after a period so that they can have a more comprehensive view of their buying journey.
comments (written)
Written form comments can be found on the company’s blog posts, social media, emails, other online forums, live chat, or even letters from current or past customers. Although they are in words, the collected data are very useful and can also be analyzed scientifically.
phone-in (verbal)
Some businesses are more likely to interact with their clients via phone or teleconference. Therefore, their customers are more likely to express their satisfaction or dissatisfaction on the phone verbally. In this case, frontline staff should be reminded to summarize or document such inputs as part of customer reviews.
online ratings and reviews
These types of feedback can be found on a company’s official website, social media accounts, the industry’s consumer websites, and business profiles on search engines (e.g., Bing, Google).
focus-group sessions
Many of our clients from different sectors prefer the focus-group approach. This approach requires organizations to identify a group of clients or customers with their set criteria to have one or a couple of interviews with a consultant regarding their comments and experiences from the beginning to the end of the entire buying pathway. A customer’s insights expertise is highly recommended to conduct those sessions because they can design the interview, set appropriate criteria to invite the right types of customers to the sessions, question relevant interview questions and records the data professionally.
frontline staffers’ interaction with inquires (user’s experience from both sides)
Our consulting firm always emphasizes the user’s experience component in running a business; your team’s comments are also critical. Therefore, you should also ask your employees about what the customers like or dislike with an open-minded attitude.
What do you need to achieve those tasks?
For all these multiple sources of consumer inputs, as you have noticed, a company should have the best-fitted digital organizational structure with a digitally capable team working collaboratively. A user-oriented internal digital structure can help businesses to react to the market in real-time efficiently and engage with their customers flexibly.
Here are two real-life examples of companies collecting and recording consumer feedback.
For quantity data, such as point-scale feedback, a staff would run a summary of the point-scale survey or questionnaire according to the time given by the supervisor.
For quality data, such as comments from a review website, a staff would select the texts and transfer them to the company’s database.
If you are still determining whether your business is equipped with an integrated digital business structure, you are welcome to discuss your concerns. We are pleased to help you design or improve your internal processes that can constantly collect relevant feedback and allow your employees to work more effectively and promptly.
2. Sort and organize the valuable data effectively.
Now you have a collection of relevant data of customers’ comments and feedback. This is the time to sort and organize the data systematically. When dealing with data, we always emphasize clean data. A clean data set is essential to analyze for better validity, accuracy, and reliability (although our data science and statistics cohorts prefer even higher standards :). One of the common ways to clean the data is to remove duplicate or irrelevant data. For example, a client submitted the survey 2-3 times, or a questionnaire was filled out by someone who had never had a customer of yours.
For semantic data, you probably saw some ‘weird’ or ‘unreal’ data from the customers’ reviews. This is what we identify as ‘outliers’. These outliers can be unreasonable or mistaken comments. For example, a consumer complained about your live chat while you do not yet have a chatbot installed on your website. Or have the same emotional short sentence repeatedly, e.g. ‘the service is horrible; never go back.’
Even though they are outliers, they might not be entirely incorrect; therefore, you can take them aside and decide if they are legitimate after analyzing the clean data set. Remember, your goal is to focus on constructive feedback with an open-minded and respectful attitude toward your customers’ opinions.
Now you have a collection of relevant data of customers’ comments and feedback. This is the time to sort and organize the data in a systematic way. When dealing with data, we always emphasize on clean data. Having a set of clean data is essential to conduct an analysis for better validity, accuracy, and reliability (although our data science and statistics cohorts prefer even higher standards :). One of the common ways to clean the data is to remove the duplicate or irrelevant data. For example, a client submitted the survey 2-3 times, or a questionnaire was filled out by someone who had never a customer of yours.
For semantic data, you probably saw some ‘weird’ or ‘unreal’ data from the customers’ reviews. This is what we identify as ‘outliers’. These outliers can be unreasonable or mistaken comments. For example, a consumer complained about your live chat while the fact is you do not have a chatbot installed on your website yet. Or having the same emotional short sentence again and again e.g. ‘the service is horrible; never go back.’
Even though they are outliers, they might not be completely incorrect, therefore you can take them aside and decide if they are legitimate or not after analyzing the clean set of data. Remember, your goal is to focus on constructive feedback with an open-minded and respectful attitude towards your customers’ opinions.
3. Dive deeper to understand their preferences
Alright, you can put your quantities and qualitative analysis side by side. What did your customers say about your products, services, support, and brand image? What are the good things they mentioned to you? How about the negative parts? Any suggestions from them? Any new pain points you have noticed?
At this point, business owners are tempted to defend themselves over those negative comments or come up with immediate solutions. Hang on, and now you should review the analysis before making any decisions or suggestions.
4. How about your team’s input to the customers?
When consulting with our clients for consumer engagement, we always stress the humanistic components. Apart from your customers, your team is also the users. Therefore, your team’s view of the customers is also essential. This can help you boost morale and loyalty within your organization.
Some companies would call a meeting for all teams, while some would ask them to email a summary to their supervisors. You can ask the following questions to capture a snapshot of your team’s view of the customers’ preferences and needs:
What do you usually hear from our customers?
What should we keep retaining our customers?
What could be changed or removed to make our customers happier?
What do our customers think about us?
Anything to add?
5. How satisfied are your customers?
With the analysis in hand, as a business owner or executive, you now know how satisfied your customers are. It would be best if you were honest with what you found out. If they are overly pleased, that’s great; keep the momentum. However, if they think your brand is average, mediocre, or even below the average, don’t be discouraged. You and your team or a consumer’s insights consultant can identify the underlying problems and develop possible improvement solutions.
We encourage our clients to carry out their consumer insights analysis regularly. How often should you do that? It depends on the size of your business and the scale of such analysis. For example, if you want to know the engagement rate, you can do that monthly with one or two employees involved. If you are intended to see the effectiveness of all your paid marketing strategies relating to consumer inputs, you can do it bi-annually or annually with more time and workforce involved.
If you have an extensive data set, analytics tools such as Power BI can be beneficial for generating a comprehensive analysis.
6. How to attract them more and make more profits?
If your overall feedback is very satisfactory, there are multiple possible factors contributing to your success. These can be your agile digital business model, collaborative and digital-capable teams, outstanding services and products, high standards from upper management, and effective marketing strategies that include a high-quality website.
As we have mentioned, marketing, sales, and customer attitudes toward your brand are correlated. Regardless of your marketing expense, it can be as little as $100; it is vital to have a set of marketing strategies in place and review them from time to time.
You need to know that having many ‘likes’ or ‘dislikes’ or ‘shares’ on social media is not the key indicator to decide whether your marketing strategy is successful. Instead, companies should review their Marketing ROI to see if they have optimized the effectiveness of marketing expenses across platforms. This evaluation can assess a particular marketing campaign or an overall marketing strategy. Digital tools include search engine analytics, content analysis, conversation rate and engagement calculation.
It is suggested that you can consider freeing up 10 – 20% of your marketing investment to reinvest in growth or take as bottom-line savings – For smaller enterprises, 5-10% is preferable.
For those you are not happy with your consumers’ feedback, do not worry; it means that there is room to improve:
a. Stop being judgmental – do not blame your team right away
b. Identify the possible loopholes – internal communications, front-line support, quality of the products or services, change of customers’ preferences, pricing-promotions, marketing effectiveness.
We are passionate about helping businesses sustain, grow, and excel.
This mini guide lets you focus on the key components to determine if you generated more than you spent on your marketing campaign. More importantly, you can also attract new customers and increase repeat purchases. For a more comprehensive, reliable, and customized analysis, please get in touch with us so we can see how to help you further.
7. Bottomline: Take a proactive role to respond to customers’ feedback
At last, the outcomes of your consumers’ insights should be well communicated and shared with you team. In addition, develop simple protocols and train front-line to actively engage potential or current customers at each stage of their shopping journey(). Do you know that each organization has its unique customer shopping journey? Thus, to understand your customers inside out and their entire customer decision journey will help you stay ahead in the industry and forecast the related trends.
Remember, keep reviewing your external and internal user’s experience alongside with your marketing effectiveness regularly. Furthermore, digital upskilling and coaching are also beneficial for business owners and their teams in the long run for continuous success in the evolving digitalized market.
We understand that your might lack the resources for digital strategies and upskilling within your company. We invite you to schedule an appointment with us so that we can advise you on your concerns and answer some of your pressing business questions.
