1. What are customer needs?
A customer need is a motive that prompts a
customer to buy a product or service. Ultimately,
the need is the driver of the customer's purchase
decision. Companies often look at the customer
need as an opportunity to resolve or contribute
surplus value back to the original motive.
2. Most Common Types of Customer Needs
Product Needs
1. Functionality
Customers need your product or service to function the way they
need in order to solve their problem or desire.
2. Price
Customers have unique budgets with which they can purchase a
product or service.
3. Convenience
Your product or service needs to be a convenient solution to the
function your customers are trying to meet.
4. Experience
The experience using your product or service needs to be easy —
or at least clear — so as not to create more work for your
customers.
3. 5. Design
Along the lines of experience, the product or service needs a slick
design to make it relatively easy and intuitive to use.
6. Reliability
The product or service needs to reliably function as advertised every
time the customer wants to use it.
7. Performance
The product or service needs to perform correctly so the customer can
achieve their goals.
8. Efficiency
The product or service needs to be efficient for the customer by
streamlining an otherwise time-consuming process.
9. Compatibility
The product or service needs to be compatible with other products your
customer is already using.
4. Service Needs
10. Empathy
When your customers get in touch with customer service,
they want empathy and understanding from the people
assisting them.
11. Fairness
From pricing to terms of service to contract length,
customers expect fairness from a company.
12. Transparency
Customers expect transparency from a company they're
doing business with. Service outages, pricing changes, and
things breaking happen, and customers deserve openness
from the businesses they give money to.
5. 13. Control
Customers need to feel like they're in control of the business interaction from
start to finish and beyond, and customer empowerment shouldn't end with the
sale. Make it easy for them to return products, change subscriptions, adjust
terms, etc.
14. Options
Customers need options when they're getting ready to make a purchase from a
company. Offer a variety of product, subscription, and payment options to provide
that freedom of choice.
15. Information
Customers need information, from the moment they start interacting with your
brand to days and months after making a purchase. Businesses should invest in
educational blog content, instructional knowledge base content, and regular
communication so customers have the information they need to successfully use
a product or service.
16. Accessibility
Customers need to be able to access your service and support teams. This
means providing multiple channels for customer service.
6. How to Identify Customer Needs
•Use Existing Data
•Solicit Customer Feedback
•Customer Journey Mapping
•Input from Service Team
•Study Competitors
•Social Media Listening
•Keyword Research
7. 1. Use Existing Data
Most likely you have some customer data already, especially if you’re
using a CRM. This is the best place to start your search. Are there pain
points or issues you can glean from just looking at this customer data?
Are there any patterns you can identify? Taking note of who your current
customers are and their past interactions with your brand to get a better
idea of where customers are coming from and if you’re meeting their
needs.
2. Solicit Customer Feedback
When trying to identify consumer needs, go straight to the source. This
can be done using surveys that live on your site, or sent via email.
Additionally you could conduct focus groups to gain more in depth insight
to customer needs and their overall experience with your product or
service.
8. 3. Customer Journey Mapping
To better understand and assist customers, you’ll need to first know what
phase of the customer journey they are in and what they’re looking for.
This is where customer journey mapping can help, giving a visual
representation of how customers interact with your brand. This exercise
will help you create a more proactive customer service approach and
improve retention.
4. Input from Service Team
In addition to getting customer feedback, it’s important to consult those
who work with them most — your service team. They’ll often have
insights you may not be privy to and can help you anticipate the needs of
your customers as well as solve existing issues. They’ll also be able to
explain how customers are currently using your product or service and
can identify any hiccups in the process.
9. 5. Study Competitors
It’s common to study competitors when conducting market research, but
you should also consider them when identifying customer needs. There
might be overlap in your target audience, meaning your brand could
benefit from reviewing any issues competitors are experiencing and gain
insight on how they went about fixing it. You might find that some of their
strategies would be worth implementing at your company, or discover
gaps in service that your company can fill.
6. Use Social Media
Chances are, your customers use a variety of social media platforms in
their day to day. Take advantage of that by using it as a way to listen in on
what customers are saying about your products and your competitors. Are
people asking questions under your posts? What sorts of comments are
they making? Are they giving praise, asking for assistance, or do they
want new features? Using a social media monitoring tool
like Hootsuite will help you identify trends, mentions, and hashtags
relevant to your brand to better inform your strategy.
10. 7. Keyword Research
People turn to the internet for most things, so Google is an
excellent resource for figuring out customer needs. How
are customers finding your brand online and what are they
typing into the search box to find it? Doing keyword
research can give you a broad overview of what your
customers need based on search data. Keyword research
will also help you optimize your site for search engines by
aligning the content of your site with what customers are
searching for.
11. How to Solve for Customer Needs
1. Offer consistent company-wide messaging.
Too often customers get caught up in the "he said, she said" game of
being told a product can do one thing from sales and another from
support and product. Ultimately, customers become confused and are left
with the perception that the company is disorganized.
2. Provide instructions for easy adoption.
Customers purchase a product because they believe it will meet their
needs and solve their problem. However, adoption setup stages are not
always clear. If best practices aren't specified at the start and they don't
see value right away, it's an uphill battle to gain back their trust and undo
bad habits.
12. 3. Build feedback loops into every stage of the process.
Lean into customer complaints and suggestions, and it will change the
way you operate your business. Criticism often has negative
connotations. However, if you flip problems to opportunities you can easily
improve your business to fit the customer's needs.
4. Nurture customer relationships.
When a customer buys a product or service, they want to use it right away
and fulfill their immediate need. Whether they are delighted within the first
hour, week, or a month, it's important to constantly think about their future
needs.
5. Solve for the right customer needs.
Excluding customers from your cohort of business can seem
counterintuitive to solve for your customers' needs. However,
understanding whose needs you can fulfill and whose you cannot is a
major step toward solving the right problems. All customers'
needs can't be treated equally and a company must recognize which
problems they can solve and ones that aren't aligned with their vision.
13. 6. Provide great customer service.
If a problem arises, your customers want to get it resolved
and feel heard in the process. This starts with being able to
meet their needs with empathy, but along the way, the
process for obtaining support should be easy and on a
channel that's convenient for them.
14. Types of Customer Service
•Email
•Phone
•Chat
•Social Media
•In Person
•Call Back Service
•Customer Self-Service
•Interactive Virtual Assistant
•Integrated Customer Service
