Everyone knows that customer’s opinions are very important and that understanding them is imperative, but why exactly is it so essential? While some business owners may not be willing to take the time to understand their customers, doing so puts their business at risk; listening to customer feedback and tailoring your services to meet their needs can encourage customer loyalty, resulting in increased profits and sales.
Making a Profit
Firstly, your customers are the people keeping you in business. The people buying your products or services should be the most important people to you. If you are able to understand them you will be able to understand what it is about your business that appeals to them and how you can tailor your products or services to best meet their needs and keep them interested. Understanding your customers makes you better able to provide great customer service and give them exactly what they want. This will further increase their loyalty and keep them happy.
Understanding Their Buying Habits
Part of truly understanding your customer is knowing when they buy from you, where they buy, and how often they make purchases. Knowing this will allow you to predict their behavior and then harness this information to make your business more successful. You can learn when the best times to restock are, when shops should be open, or which sales methods are best. For example, if the majority of your customers prefer to shop from your website, distributing more merchandise online may be a better move than putting funds toward another physical location.
Increasing Sales
Understanding why current customers have chosen to turn to your company’s services may help you to work out ways to drum up more business and attract more customers. This can primarily be accomplished through targeted demographic marketing. If you gain a greater understanding of who your customers are (in terms of age, gender, and more) as well as where they live, you can begin to target marketing to people who are likely to be the most receptive of it, which should should help increase sales. This information can be collected via surveys (or online feedback via social media sites, for smaller businesses).
How Can You Find This Information?
All of this information can be found on online opinion polls. It may be useful to set your own up and invite current customers to complete them so you can get feedback. It may also be worth offering an incentive to persuade people to complete the poll to ensure you get a good number of responses.
What Happens if You Don’t Understand Your Customer?
A good way to illustrate just how important understanding your customers can be is to look at the possible consequences if you don’t. Marketing can be expensive, so one negative consequence is that you may waste a lot of money on ineffective advertising that will not bring in any new customers. It will also mean you may not continue to do the things that first attracted your current customers and you won’t implement any new policies that will appeal to them, meaning you could potentially lose these sales and their loyalty.
