Every business needs to be able to understand their customers. Whether it is a multi-million dollar enterprise, or the local corner store, a business can only succeed once it has a grasp on who their customers are and why they chose to bring their money to you. The way you do business must be guided by your customers, their wants, and their needs. But before your business uses what it knows about your customers to grow, it needs to gather the right information.
The four points below will give you the proper tools that you need to succeed in this all important task.
Start from Empathy
The first step to understanding your customer base is to use empathy. You need to be able to put yourself into their shoes before you can start to properly understand them and how they interact with your business. Think to yourself “Why would I like to use this business?” or “What needs of mine does this business fulfil?” Key questions like this will help you to understand who the people are that make up your customer base.
You also need to avoid the common mistake of answering these questions with information that you only know because you work at your business. For example, your customers probably don’t choose to bring their customers to you because of a relaxed work culture that they don’t see. The answer might be a relaxed front of house atmosphere that is due to the larger business culture, but your customers would have no way of knowing that.
Survey Your Customers
You cannot rely on how you think your customers feel about your business, you have to know. You might believe that you already know why customers chose you and what issues they have with your business but until you hear it directly from them you don’t. The easiest way to get direct information from your customer base is to use a survey.
This survey must first be asking the right questions. You can ask the questions that you have been asking yourself, but you need to be careful that you don’t focus the survey solely on this. Perhaps you are concerned about how your customers are currently navigating your website so most of your questions focus on issues related to this.
This should give you important information, but it is a good idea to include at least one open ended question that allows your customers to bring up any unrelated issues that they have with your business. This lets you see what your customers think the biggest issues are with your business. You might find a pattern in the answers you get, where you were worried about your website's layout but your customers were more worried about the wait times on your phone lines.
Take what your Customers tells you Seriously
It can be tempting to hand wave any negative feedback you get, don’t. This feedback can be the key to your business’s success in the future. Your customer has taken the time out of their day to let you know why they are unhappy with your service or product, and you need to be able to handle this feedback properly. Negative feedback provides the perfect learning opportunity for you and your business. It lets you know where you went wrong so you can make sure that you don’t make the same mistake again.
For example, you might run a restaurant that also delivers food. You are finding that people are only ordering from you once and never again. Your reviews on the food delivery site that you use often mention that your chips are getting to your customers soggy. Working in your restaurant, you would have no way of knowing this but thanks to the feedback you can now take steps to make sure that your food is getting where it needs to go while still keeping the high standard you reach in your restaurant. With this achieved, the number of returning customers started to rise.
As this example shows you can only fix an issue once you know it exists. When customers start leaving your business or your growth has started to decline you need to use customer feedback to identify what needs to be fixed. If the example restaurant had not taken these reviews seriously, they would not have been able to improve the business.
Talk to Front Line Employees
The more complex a business grows the harder it is for an owner or operator to know how their customers are feeling. The further away you work from actual customer interactions the less chances you have to hear directly from them. But there are always employees at your business that can provide you with the information you need.
Your front-line employees are the people that work with your clients every day. They hear directly from your customers and out of all your employees will know the most about how your clients interact with your business. You should be talking to them regularly so that you can be kept up to date.
This is especially true when trying new strategies, or launching new products. Your front-line employees will be able to tell you how the change is being felt by your customers, any issues they might have or even some suggestions to improve the customer/staff interaction.
These tips will help you get the most out of understanding your customers. All businesses need to know how their customers view them. Only with this key insight can they grow and change for the better.
Just as you need to have a well-rounded view of your business from your customers perspective you need a comprehensive view of your business value. Our Canberra Business valuers are able to perform valuations of any business types and give you a deeper view of your finances and value for the future success of your business.