Understanding customer needs probably is the best way to ensure your business success. eCommerce strategies help you define your business goals and also bring more flair to your product development process. Being customer-focused means 60% more return on investment. You cannot avoid that kind of success.

Being customer-focused means understanding your customer needs better and align products and services to provide value. With businesses going global, they can’t go door to door to understand their consumer needs and attend to their problems.

You have to have a strong strategy just to understand your customer needs and effectively set up tools to meet their demands.

For businesses such as eCommerce stores, these problems are far more complicated. Thus, here we are, sharing with you two of the most important things for your customer-focused journey.

1. How to identify customer needs
2. And how to meet customer needs

So, without further ado, let’s get started.

(I) Identifying customer needs

1. Gathering information

One of the best ways to identify your customer needs is by asking them very specific questions. It is your first step towards research. Asking questions would help you gather enough data to do a detailed study. But it is not a one-time thing. You need to set up channels that ensure regular communication.

1. Customer interviews
2. Make focus groups, focal points in the specific product or topic, and do
   qualitative and quantitative surveys to attain opinion and points of
   improvement.
3. Surveys helping get a clear picture of the market and gaining data to improve.

2. Analysis

Comprehensive analysis can help you understand what your customers are looking for in products and services. It provides valuable insights, especially to the people that are using your product. People using your product would give you more idea about needed improvements in your product. And help with the brand positioning to get more downloads or leads.

Using the data collected before start defining customer personas and identify what customer inputs are needed to create unique features and capture customer inputs and feedbacks.

Conducting customer research helps you understand the factors that influence purchase decisions.

3. Tabulating customer needs

Every customer’s need is different, and you have to tabulate their feedback to make the focus areas. Broadly, customer needs are about delivering a better experience with your product, which is difficult to identify. Customer needs can be divided into:

a. Product needs

1. Price
2. Features
3. Effectiveness of solutions

b. Service needs

1. Empathy
2. Clarity
3. Information

(II) How to meet your customer needs

1. Learn about your audience

Once you have established a clear picture of your audience. Now is time you start working on their needs. Basic demographic information, such as age, gender, and location, can be a beneficial marketing strategy. This helps you make marketing personas, understand your customers to dig deeper, and learn about needs and interests.

The best resource for finding information from your existing customer base is by asking customers what they want from the product and what they love more in your product over your competitors.

2. Reaching right buyers

In many cases, identifying the right buyers is difficult, especially in eCommerce companies where anyone can be buying a product. In those cases, an assumption can be wrong. They don’t have to be accurate, but it is important to recognize them, and it doesn’t have to be accurate.

You can determine your right buyers by analyzing
your existing customer base.

Start by identifying factors that are contributing to repeated sales and segments that can help you make a loyal customer base. These things will help you establish a more accurate picture of focused areas and preparing marketing and retention strategies.

3. Finding new leads

Now that you have identified your valuable audience, you can start your search for new leads to expand your business. Using the same data, you can pawn on the factors that can attract new leads. You can change their perspective about your expectation and find your product useful for their needs.

Using the data and information, you can add new features to your products and should help keep your focus on the business goals. Also, try to add features that your competitors are not offering and get a sharper edge in the market. Adding new features also means begin open for improvements and viewing unnecessary criticism.

Useful Reading: 17+ Proven Lead Generation Strategies For ECommerce Store In 2020

4. Support team

A strong customer support team plays an important role in a business’s success. You must offer 24*7 support to your global users that can help you answer customer queries and also ensure successful relationships with your customers.

Having an excellent team of customer executives can ensure the level of service your customers deserve. You have to set a standard for customer service, like faster resolution, 24*7 support, monitoring customer service, response time, average resolution time, and more.

Create guidelines for responding to specific inquiries. List common issues and questions you hear and customers and establish proper responses for each of them. This way, you can provide a high-end customer experience without any hassles each time.

5. Customer-centric culture

Customer happiness should be your biggest responsibility. Each employee must contribute to it and must put their efforts to fulfill your business goals. Further, products and services must be influenced by a customer-centric culture.

Encourage your employees to keep your customers at the center of each decision and then add any new features. And the same goes for marketing decisions. Everything you do must be done by keeping your end-users in your mind.

6. Getting regular feedback

Gauge if your customers are liking your efforts and are meeting your customer expectations. Send customer satisfaction surveys and ask questions about their entire customer experience. Also, see if your customers are getting all the information required to make decisions, how is their buying process, do they find the application or product user-friendly, you are living up to their expectations.

This will help you get a sense of user experience and what value your brand is providing. This will also help you see the negative reviews and provide you further information to improve your product further.

7. Scope of expansion

If your customers have been engaged with your competitors, they are largely driven by their past experience when they come to your brand for solutions. The only way to know whether you are living up to their expectation is by learning about your competitors. Check what makes them better than you and where they are falling out. What is the most loved feature of their product, and also what has made customers come to you?

If there is anything, you can learn from your competitors and add to your product, align a proper strategy for it, and improve that part of your product experience. This will give you a more superior grip on your market. Also, it will help people get more engaged with your brand.

Wrapping up

Now that you have understood well the importance of the feedback system and its effects on your product, you can choose Magento 2 Customer Feedback extension by Solwin Infotech. This will help you get suggestions from your customers, learn about bugs in your product, and compliments about your products and services.

The plugin helps you add a floating “Feedback” button and get a fully-functional feedback form on every page of your website. Upon submission of the feedback form, it sends you the customer details to the store owners and allows you to serve them with the right solution. You can even have a custom feedback system with the plugin. This useful tool is compatible with CE 2.1x – 2.2.x – 2.3.x – 2.4.x | EE 2.1.x – 2.2.x – 2.3.x

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