June 7, 2023
In marketing and in business generally, there is always a lot of talk about giving the customer what they want. But it’s one thing knowing that you need to try and do this, and quite another actually being able to. One of the challenges is in working out what it is that your customers really want, and you might find yourself wondering how you can even work this out effectively. Here are some of the best ways to figure out what your customers really want, so you can then deliver it to them.
One of the most effective methods for this is to simply ask your existing customers for feedback. You will generally want to do this at the end of the customer journey, but it’s important that you are seeking out feedback from customers who have had all kinds of experiences with you, not just the positive ones. Only this way can you actually hope to learn from it, after all. Make sure that you are soliciting feedback regularly, and that you actually read through it and act on it. There are few things more effective for building a better business than this.
This is a more useful approach when you are trying to figure out what people think about a new idea - a product or service, or perhaps even a rebrand - so that you can know whether or not it’s actually a good idea. A focus group is simple in practice. You just need to get a good cross-section of people together in a room, record what they say through video recording or transcription services, and then ask them questions about the issue at hand. It’s a really useful way of getting the pulse on something.
The complaints that customers make are especially useful information, and you should make sure that you are listening to them above all as well as you can. Listening to the complaints of your customers means that you are going to have a much better sense of what you need to improve upon and why, and that can be a really useful way to make sure that you are always moving in the right direction. So never ignore complaints, and when you see trends in them, that’s something to really pay attention to as much as you can.
Finally, you can also go by the numbers to figure out what people want. If you are selling a few versions of something and one of them sells particularly well, then you know that you have one that you should focus on. These numbers are telling you something about what people want to, so you may as well pay attention to that as best as you can. Look at your sales and you should find that you can figure out a lot that you might not otherwise have known.
