David Thacker
When you being an organization, know how you can understand your customers, you have more chances of being successful. Similarly, when you lack in customer understanding, it becomes a barrier for your success as it won’t let you provide your customers with the best experiences.
There are two lenses which are necessary for a firm to look through for a better understanding of their customers.
- Value
Value is the worth of your potential customers to your organization
- Needs
Needs are the expectations that your customers have from your organization.
When companies make segmentations in their target customers, they mostly segment them based on the value they possess for that company. They make segments of the customers, and those segments usually based on the sales levels of the company.
The ultimate goal of companies is getting profits and strives to understand which group of customers will give them the most revenues.
From the company’s perspectives, value segmentation of the customers is most important because it helps a company know regarding the areas it has to put its most focus in. It also lets the company understand how it has to serve a specific segment of customers.
Value segmentation of the customers is essential, but it is not the only thing a company is supposed to do when it is about understanding its customers. Value segmentation can help a company to understand what a group of people need but to understand the individual needs of a customer, value segmentation alone can’t improve.
Why adequate understanding the customers is essential?
When it is about understanding your customers, it is about knowing every important thing about them. The different value group of customer’s possess can change over then changing time.
Typically companies to understand their customers don’t look them with the lens of needs and want. Even if they do, they don’t let the internal groups or the other direction, or indirectly related groups know about it.
When you being a business don’t know regarding how you can understand your customers in a better way, you will ultimately provide them with poor customer experiences. You need to know first about what is customer experience and then start formulating strategies for that.
What if you don’t understand your customers?
One of the significant disadvantages that companies face for not knowing their customers is that they lose them soon. Not knowing the best strategies to know and understand the customers may make it difficult for the company to retain its customers. Customers have high expectations from you, and when you don’t fulfill those expectations, they will start looking for substitutes.
On the other hand, consumer behavior keeps on changing with changing market trends. For you to meet the changing expectations of your customers, it’s essential to understand them at the individual level. Ignoring the importance of understanding your customers can waste all your customer service costs.
How can you understand your customers?
- Analyze the touchpoints and gather more information about your customers
- Use and expand the voice of the customer program
- Practice segmentation to categorize the customers based on their needs and value.
- Reformulate the strategies by being customer-oriented.
Benefits of knowing your customers
- It helps a business have increased sales and effective marketing
- Empowers employees for decision making
- Provides a better customer experience and improves relationships
- Helps in retaining customers for the long run.
