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Get Into the Mind of Your Customers

By bpjames | September 15, 2009

 Why would you want to get into the mind of your customers? Quite simply, the better you understand their needs and wants the better you can serve them. When you serve your customers well according to their needs and wants, they are keen to do business with you. Why wouldn’t you want to do business with an organisation that looks after you well?

This helps to develop enduring loyalty and produce raving fans happy and willing to do business with you. This enables you to improve the quality of information you have on your customers offering opportunities to present the right message at the right time and achieve maximum results. As long as you ensure your margins are maintained this leads to greater success and sustainable growth.

Delivering more of what your customers want gives you:

What information do you want?

You want to fully understand your customers buying criteria and expectations so you can serve them better. This can be broken down into several categories of understanding which differentiates your proposition from other businesses. These include:

Price

Quality of your products and services

Service quality

Turnaround times

Convenience

Tailoring

Guarantees

Added value

The combination of how you deliver on these items determines your uniqueness. It’s not feasible to deliver the ultimate with all of them at the same time as there is a trade-off between them. For example, your customers can’t have the best possible quality and the lowest price. The most important element is to deliver with consistency and reliability enabling you to build brand personality and recognition.

Make sure customers understand how your prices are structured. A flexible approach to pricing is helpful. For example, you could alter your prices according to variations in demand and how you package and position them. Your prices could increase for those requiring greater convenience or faster turnaround times and reduce for those who are happy to fit in with your delivery schedule and availability. You could also alter your prices according to variations in product quality with higher prices for higher quality items and lower prices where quality is less important.

Exact tailoring of your product and service gives you the opportunity to customise a unique solution for each customer and in turn charge premium prices. Offering guarantees removes the risk to the customer providing peace of mind for them and more sales for you. Added value such as volume discounts and time saving features can increase your average order values and profitability.

How to get into their minds

There are two main opportunities for gathering important customer insights. Firstly, as part of a dedicated survey or alternatively as part of your regular contact with them when they buy or request information from you.

Dedicated surveys can be quickly produced and put to use. These can be sent in the post, carried out over the phone or online. One of the best online tools is available at http://www.surveymonkey.com/

This is free for up to 10 questions in a survey completed by up to 100 customers.

Routine information can be obtained by asking specific questions when you are in regular contact with your customers and interacting with them. This could be over the phone or face to face.

Here is some of the information you could establish:

  • Improved consistency in how your product or service is delivered
  • Improvements to customer service levels and reliability
  • Preferred method of customer contact
  • Relevant competitor activity
  • Ideas for repositioning your proposition and adding brand value
  • Insights into customer buying cycles and ideal timing
  • New and innovative product or service ideas

By getting into your customers’ mind you establish their motives and buying behaviours. This helps you to define your uniqueness, obliterate any competition and maximise your business opportunities.

Brian.

Topics: Customer development |

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