How well do you really know your customers?

What’s better?

Knowing your customer?

or knowing your product?

We’d say your customer, because….

Only the customer knows how they're going to make use of your product.

Your product alone reveals no such insight.

Focusing on customer needs can actually increase your product's success.

Knowing your customers better is knowing your product better

“Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you

care” – Theodore Roosevelt.

Here are some strategies you can use to get to know your customers better.

1) Customer profiling: the basics

The goal of customer profiling is to create a clear portrait of your key customer segments.

This helps in designing better sales and marketing strategies.

Customer profiling is a continuous process that starts from before they meet you, and continues on even when they become your loyal customer.

To profile well, document customer information like:

➢ Best mode of communication➢ Preferred time of contact➢ Spending habits➢ Purchasing behavior➢ Interested aspects

This profiling helps you to know clients better and gauge their needs.

2) Ask, Listen and Engage: know more to grow more

A key elements to running a successful business is engaging your customers

Engaging with customers in a way that solves a real problem is offering them a real value.

Asking customers questions is a standard way to obtain customer insights.

The best insights come from asking why and how.

“Your customers wish you knew about them.”

Customer support statistics

Use all channels like calls, emails, point of sale, social media, communities and groups.

Respond promptly, track their experience and take the feedback regularly.

Conduct surveys to get customers’ exact opinion on specific aspects of your products.

Have genuine enthusiasm and interest in your customers.

Take a deeper look into customer reviews.

3) Stop assuming: Start analyzing

Business assumptions arise from uncertainty.

Don’t assume about clients’ perception.

Customer’s perception is your reality.

Segment customers on the main differentials:

➢ Age➢ Gender➢ Location➢ Spending pattern➢ Referrals➢ Purchase history

Analyze customer experience

Monitor their engagement with your social posts.

Take feedback on every engagement you have with them.

Analyze all available data like calls, comments, surveys, feedback, complaints and appreciations.

“If you don’t know the situation, then you don’t have a right to have an

opinion.”

4) Customer service: Support people, not products

Aren’t you surprised to know “poor customer service” is top listed for “what irritates customers most”?

Not all customers are created equal. So everyone cannot be treated same.

Never treat customers like tickets or cases.

Be specific about any information.

Being friendly, personable, and casual will make communicating problems easy.

Convey important ideas clearly.

Customer service experience

“70% of the buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being

treated.”

5) Customer-centric: Never ending journey

Customer-centricity is a misunderstood concept well used terms in the business sector, but ideally limited to presentations, meetings and websites, but not well implemented.

Customer-centric is not about releasing a product in client’s perspective and expecting record sales.

Customer-centricity should be delivering value for customers that will eventually create value for the company.

Top customer centric approaches

Customer-centricity is a journey throughout the client’s life cycle process of focusing, converting, responding, engaging and inspiring the customers.

Don’t find customers for your products. Find products for your clients.

“Get closer to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well

before they realize it themselves” – Steve Jobs.

It’s time to get into your customer’s shoes.

Think like a customer.

Go for Vtiger helpdesk for support automation, which helps you provide excellent customer support across all channels like cases, SLAs, insights, workflows, tasks, mobile apps, and integrations.