It is common for companies to look for inspiration from other successful companies, hot industry trends, or new shiny products to stay relevant and innovative.
However, a vital component to growth is at every business's fingertips — it's customers. You can improve the longevity and progress of your business by focusing on customer needs. Keeping customers happy results in higher retention rates, lifetime value, and brand reach as they spread the word.
Customer needs must be understood and met in order to create the types of customer experiences that result in happy customers.
What are customer needs?
Buying a product or service is motivated by a customer's need. Ultimately, the need is the driver of the customer's purchase decision. Companies often look at the customer need as an opportunity to resolve or contribute surplus value back to the original motive.
An example of customer need takes place every day around 12:00 p.m. It is around this time that people begin to experience hunger (need) and decide to purchase lunch. Individuals decide how to satisfy the need based on the type of food, the location, and the length of time it will take.
Businesses that are customer-centric know that solving for customer needs and exceeding expectations along the way is the key to fostering good relationships with clients.
Why are customer needs important?
By anticipating customer needs, you will be able to provide them with what they need before they ask for it. If companies can begin to make changes before their customers' needs aren't fulfilled, this can ultimately lead to growth, innovation, and retention.
When you haven't paid close attention to your customers before, it's tricky to create a customer-centric company that truly listens to their needs.
Below are the most common types of customer needs — most of which work in tandem with one another to drive a purchasing decision.
16 Most Common Types of Customer Needs
The types of product needs can be split into two categories: product and service.
Product Needs
1. Functionality
Customers need your product or service to function the way they need in order to solve their problem or desire.
2. Price
Customers have unique budgets with which they can purchase a product or service.
3. Convenience
Your product or service needs to be a convenient solution to the function your customers are trying to meet.
4. Experience
The experience using your product or service needs to be easy — or at least clear — so as not to create more work for your customers.
5. Design
Along the lines of experience, the product or service needs a slick design to make it relatively easy and intuitive to use.
6. Reliability
The product or service needs to reliably function as advertised every time the customer wants to use it.
7. Performance
The product or service needs to perform correctly so the customer can achieve their goals.
8. Efficiency
The product or service needs to be efficient for the customer by streamlining an otherwise time-consuming process.
9. Compatibility
The product or service needs to be compatible with other products your customer is already using.
Service Needs
10. Empathy
When your customers get in touch with customer service, they want empathy and understanding from the people assisting them.
11. Fairness
From pricing to terms of service to contract length, customers expect fairness from a company.
12. Transparency
When doing business with a company, customers expect transparency. Service outages, pricing changes, and things breaking happen, and customers deserve openness from the businesses they give money to.
13. Control
The customer should feel empowered from start to finish, and it shouldn't end after the sale. Make it easy for them to return products, change subscriptions, adjust terms, etc.
14. Options
In order to make a purchase from a company, customers need options. Offer a variety of product, subscription, and payment options to provide that freedom of choice.
15. Information
Your customers need information from the moment they interact with your brand to days and months afterward. To ensure that customers are able to successfully use a product or service, businesses should invest in educational blog content, instructional knowledge base content, and regular communication.
16. Accessibility
Your service and support teams must be accessible to customers. Providing multiple channels for customer service is one way to accomplish this. We'll discuss these options in more detail later.
With so many types of customer needs, how do you understand which ones apply to your customers specifically? Next, we'll dig into how to identify them.
How to Identify Customer Needs
Steve Jobs famously stated, "You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards from there.". "You cannot start with the technology and try to figure out where you are going to sell it."
Whether you sell technology or some other product or service, he's making a valuable point here.
This means understanding where they're coming from when they've chosen to make a purchase, what expectations they're bringing to the table, and what bumps they'll encounter along the way.
Identifying Customer Needs
You can gain more knowledge about what your customers want using a few different strategies.
1. Use Existing Data
It's likely you have some customer data already, especially if you're using a CRM. You should start your search here. Is there anything you can glean from this customer data about pain points or issues? Are there any patterns you can identify? Taking note of who your current customers are and their past interactions with your brand to get a better idea of where customers are coming from and if you’re meeting their needs.
2. Solicit Customer Feedback
You should go straight to the source when trying to identify consumer needs. Surveys can be placed on your website or sent via email. Additionally you could conduct focus groups to gain more in depth insight to customer needs and their overall experience with your product or service.
.jpg?width=477&height=318&name=happy-call-center-agent-using-computer-while-communicating-with-clients-working-office%20(1).jpg)
3. Customer Journey Mapping
Identifying the phase of the customer journey and what they're looking for will help you better understand and assist them. Customer journey mapping provides a visual representation of how customers interact with your brand. This exercise will help you create a more proactive customer service approach and improve retention.
4. Input from Service Team
In addition to getting customer feedback, it’s important to consult those who work with them most — your service team. Often, they'll have insights you don't have and can help you anticipate the needs of your customers as well as solve problems. They’ll also be able to explain how customers are currently using your product or service and can identify any hiccups in the process.
5. Study Competitors
When conducting market research, it's common to study competitors, but when identifying customer needs, you should also consider them. Your target audience might overlap, which means your brand could benefit from reviewing any issues your competitors are experiencing and how they resolved them. You might find that some of their strategies would be worth implementing at your company, or discover gaps in service that your company can fill.
6. Use Social Media
Chances are, your customers use a variety of social media platforms in their day to day. Take advantage of that by listening in on what customers are saying about your products and your competitors. Are people asking questions under your posts? What sorts of comments are they making? Are they giving praise, asking for assistance, or do they want new features? Using a social media monitoring tool like Hootsuite will help you identify trends, mentions, and hashtags relevant to your brand to better inform your strategy.
7. Keyword Research
For most things, people turn to the internet, so Google is a great resource for determining customer needs. When customers search for your brand online, what do they type into the search box? Doing keyword research can give you a broad overview of what your customers need based on search data. Keyword research will also help you optimize your site for search engines by aligning the content of your site with what customers are searching for.
With these things in mind, you can uncover consumer needs at any stage of their lifecycle. You can take a deeper dive into their needs by conducting a customer needs analysis.
What is a customer needs analysis?
During product development and branding, a customer needs analysis helps ensure that the product or message offers the benefits, attributes, and features that the customer needs.
To conduct a customer needs analysis successfully, you need to do the following:
1. Customer Needs Analysis Survey
Surveys are typically used to analyze customer needs, allowing companies to determine their position in their respective competitive markets and how well they meet their target customers' needs.
Your survey should focus primarily on your brand and competitors, as well as customers' overall product awareness and brand attitudes.
Questions can include:
- - Questions about positive and negative word associations with your brand
- - Questions asking customers to group your brand in with similar and/or competing brands
- - Questions comparing and sorting brands according to their preferences for usage
2. Means-End Analysis
Using the answers to the customer needs analysis survey, you can gain a better understanding of why your customers buy from you, and what makes your product or service unique.
Using a means-end analysis, you can determine the primary reasons why a customer would buy your product. Those buyer reasons can be divided into three main groups:
1. Features: A customer buys a product or service because of the features included in the purchase. If the customer were buying a computer, for example, they might buy it because it's smaller and more lightweight than other options.
2. Benefits: A customer buys a product or service because of a benefit, real or perceived, they believe it will offer them. The customer might also buy the computer because it syncs easily with their other devices wirelessly.
3. Values: A customer buys a product or service for unique, individual values, real or perceived, they believe it will help them fulfill. The customer might think the computer will help them to be more creative or artistic and unlock other personal or professional artistic opportunities.
Since these reasons for purchasing something can vary from customer to customer, it's important to conduct these customer surveys, collect the answers, and group them accordingly. From there, you can identify which of those motivating factors you're solving for, and which you can improve on to make your product or service even more competitive in the market.
3. Customer Feedback
You can find out what your customers think about the experience of working with your company if you ask them. A customer needs analysis and improvements to your customer lifecycle can be achieved by interviewing your customers and members of your service team.
During your customer needs analysis, you should identify the points of friction and moments of unexpected delight that your customers encounter.
- - What can your company change?
- - What are the elements that you can build from?
- - What parts of the experience needs to be worked on?
As you work to solve for your customers, you can gain valuable insights by asking these questions.
How to Solve for Customer Needs
In order to solve problems for your customers, put yourself in their shoes: If you were the customer, what would prevent you from achieving ultimate value?
You can identify common pain points in your customer's mind by conducting a customer needs analysis. From there, you can build a proactive plan to implement your customer-first values throughout the customer lifecycle. Here are some tips for doing so:
1. Offer consistent company-wide messaging
In the "he said, she said" game, customers are often told one thing by sales and another by support and product. Ultimately, customers become confused and are left with the perception that the company is disorganized.
A customer-focused mindset starts with consistent internal communication across all departments. If the entire company understands its goals, values, product, and service capabilities, then the messages will easily translate to meet the customers’ needs.
To get everyone on the same page, organize sales and customer service meetings, send out new product emails, provide robust new employee onboarding, and require quarterly training and seminars or staff-hosted webinars to share important projects.
2. Provide instructions for easy adoption
Customers purchase products because they believe they will meet their needs and solve their problems. However, adoption setup stages are not always clear. Gaining back their trust and undoing bad habits is an uphill battle if best practices aren't specified right from the start and they don't see value right away.
A well-thought-out post-purchase strategy will enable your products or services to be usable and useful.
Companies can gain the attention of their customers by providing in-product and email walkthroughs and instructions once a payment confirmation is received. In this way, confusion, technical questions, and distractions from the euphoria of post-purchase are minimized.
A customer education guide or knowledge base is essential to deliver proper customer adoption and avoid the ‘floundering effect' when customers are stuck. Other companies provide new customer onboarding services, host live demos and webinars and include events and promotions in their email signatures.
3. Build feedback loops into every stage of the process
You will be able to change the way you operate your business by leaning into customer complaints and suggestions. Criticism often has negative connotations. By flipping problems into opportunities, you can easily improve your business to meet customer needs.
Just as you solicited customer feedback in your needs analysis, you can keep a pulse on how your customers feel at scale with customer satisfaction scores, customer surveys, exploration customer interviews, social media polls, or personal customer feedback emails.
Your organization will always be aware of the state of the customer experience if you incorporate this into a repeatable process. Take customer suggestions seriously and act on them to improve design, product, and system glitches. Most customer support success metrics are paramount to the customer experience and this mentality should trickle down to every aspect of the organization.
4. Nurture customer relationships
When a customer purchases a product or service, they want to use it right away and fulfill their immediate needs. It is important to constantly consider their future needs, whether they are delighted within an hour, a week, or a month.
To prevent customers from losing their post-purchase excitement and churning, you need to build proactive relationships. If customers stop hearing from you and you don't hear from them this can be a bad sign that they are about to churn.
Companies solve for customer relationships with a combination of customer service structure and communication strategies. Solve for the long-term customer need and create a customer service team dedicated to check-ins and customer retention, show appreciation with rewards and gifts to loyal customers, host local events, highlight employees that go above and beyond and communicate product updates and new features.
5. Solve for the right customer needs
The idea of excluding customers from your cohort of business may seem counterintuitive. However, understanding whose needs you can fulfill and whose you cannot is a major step toward solving the right problems. All customers' needs can't be treated equally and a company must recognize which problems they can solve and ones that aren't aligned with their vision.
To find the right customer priorities, build buyer personas and uncover consumer trends, analyze long-term customer retention patterns, create a clear company vision, provide premier customer service to valued customers, and communicate with your ideal customer in their preferred social media space to capture questions, comments, and suggestions.
In order to stay competitive and establish industry trends, successful startups, brick-and-mortar stores, and Fortune 500 companies prioritize customer needs.
6. Provide great customer service
Your customers want their problems resolved and to feel heard in the process. This starts with being able to meet their needs with empathy, but along the way, the process for obtaining support should be easy and on a channel that's convenient for them.
Time-sensitive customer needs require immediate interaction via phone or chat. Others are less critical and can be resolved at a more casual pace. Let's break down the types of customer service and how each optimizes your team's ability to fulfill customer needs.
Types of Customer Service
1. Email
Customer service can be provided via email, which is one of the most fundamental forms. Customers can fully describe their problems and the conversation is automatically recorded into a resourceful thread. Customers only have to explain their issue once, while reps can reference important case details without having to request additional information.
Email is best used with customer needs that don't need to be resolved right away. Customers can ask their question, go back to work, and return to the case once the service rep has found a solution. Unlike phones or chat, they don't have to wait idly while a rep finds them an answer.
The potential lack of clarity in email is one of its limitations. Some customers have difficulty describing their problems, and some service representatives have trouble explaining solutions. When the issue is overly complex, this creates time-consuming roadblocks. For simple problems that require a brief explanation or solution, use email.
2. Phone
Phones are the best medium to use when customers have urgent problems. Phones connect customers directly to reps and create a human interaction between the customer and the business. Both parties hear each other's tone and can gauge the severity of the situation. This human element is a major factor in creating delightful customer experiences.
Phones come in handy most when there's a frustrated or angry customer. These customers are most likely to churn and require your team to provide a personalized solution. Your team can use soft communication skills to appease the customer and prevent costly escalations. These responses appear more genuine on the phone because reps have less time to formulate an answer.
The most common flaw with phone support is the wait time. Strive for shorter wait times as 33% of customers are frustrated by being waiting on hold. Customers hate being put on hold, and it's a determining factor for customer churn.
3. Chat
Chat is one of the most flexible channels for customer service. A high volume of simple problems can be solved with it, as well as detailed support for complex problems. As a result of its versatility and the efficiency improvements it provides for customer service representatives, businesses continue to adopt chat.
When it comes to solving customer needs, chat can be used to solve almost any problem. Simple and common questions can be answered with chatbots that automate the customer service process. For more advanced roadblocks, reps can integrate customer service tools into their chat software to help them diagnose and resolve issues.
The limitations of chat are similar to those of email. Since the interaction is live, any lack of clarity between the two parties can significantly impact troubleshooting. As a former chat rep, there were plenty of times where I struggled to get on the same page as my customer. Even though we resolved the issue, that miscommunication negatively impacted the customer's experience.
4. Social Media
Social media is a relatively new channel for customer service. While it has been around for over a decade, businesses are now adopting it as a viable service option. That's because social media lets customers immediately report an issue. And since that report is public, customer service teams are more motivated to resolve the customer's problem.
Social media is an excellent channel for mass communication, which is particularly useful during a business crisis. When a crisis occurs, your customers' product and service needs become the primary concern of your organization. Social media is an effective tool for communicating with your customers in bulk. With a social media crisis management plan, your team can continue to fulfill customer needs during critical situations.
Social media is different from other types of customer service because it empowers the customer the most. Customers tend to have more urgent needs and expect instant responses from your accounts. While this type of service presents an enormous opportunity, it also places tremendous pressure on your reps to fulfill customer demand. Be sure your team is equipped with proper social media management tools before you offer routine support.
5. In Person
In person customer service is the oldest form of customer service. Brands who have brick-and-mortar stores must offer this service for customers living near their locations. This fulfills a convenience need as customers can purchase and return a product without having to ship it back to the company through an online service.
In-person customer service is great for businesses with strong service personnel. Without dedicated employees, your customer service team won't be able to fulfill your customers' product or service needs. Successful teams have reps who are determined to provide above-and-beyond customer service.
5. Call Back Service
It's not always about how fast you can provide a solution, but rather how efficient you can make your customer service experience. For example, say a customer has a simple question about pricing that should only take a few minutes to answer, but their expected wait time for phone service is over 15 minutes. Rather than making this customer spend more time on hold than actually speaking with a representative, you can offer a call back service where your team reaches out to the customer as soon as the next rep is available.
Text-based mediums like email and live chat can also benefit from this type of service. In some cases, these channels aren't ideal for troubleshooting and can lead to friction if the case isn't transferred to another platform. Having a call back service available allows customers to schedule time to speak directly with reps, particularly when they feel like they aren't gaining progress on their case. Instead of having to create a completely new support ticket, call backs seamlessly transition the conversation to a more effective channel.
6. Customer Self-Service
Self-service teaches your customers how to solve problems independently from your support team. Rather than calling or emailing your business whenever they need assistance, customers can navigate to your knowledge base and access resources that help them troubleshoot issues on their own. Not only does this get customers faster solutions, but it also saves them from having to open a ticket with your team. This makes the experience feel much less like a formal support case and more like a quick roadblock that your customers can handle on their own.
You can also increase your team's productivity by implementing self-service. Your team will receive fewer calls or emails for help if more customers use your knowledge base. In this way, your reps will have more time to work on complex service cases.
7. Interactive Virtual Assistant
It's no longer a novelty for customer service teams to demonstrate their technological prowess with chatbots. As they act more like interactive virtual assistants than simple, question-and-answer bots, they are now integral components of support strategies. Using AI technology, chatbots today interpret customers' needs and walk them through step-by-step solutions.
A perfect example of how useful virtual assistants can be can be seen in the image above. A customer is learning how to use their new car - a product that usually offers a lot of unique features and an extensive manual. To help new users navigate the car's basic features, this brand offers an augmented reality tour hosted by a virtual assistant. The user simply has to scroll their camera over different parts of the car and the chatbot will tell them everything they need to know.
The inclusion of interactive features like this shows that you are investing in more than just product development. You're considering how you'll support customers and what services you can adopt to make their lives easier. Customers pay attention to this type of customer service and it can often be a reason why many will return to your business.
8. Integrated Customer Service
Integrated service can be described as all of the little things your brand does to remove pain points from the customer experience. Some of this is proactive, like sending customers an automated newsletter that informs them about major updates or announcements, and some of it is reactive, like pinging a customer success manager whenever someone submits negative feedback to your team.
Even though these pain points may seem small, they add up over time if left unchecked. The best way to remove most of these points of friction is to adopt automation as you grow your customer base. Automated customer service tools like ticketing systems, help desks, and workflows help your team keep pace with increasing customer demand. This technology lets you maintain that same level of personalized customer service even as more people reach out to your business for support.
There's no "best" type of customer service. Each medium complements the other and optimizes your overall performance when used together. This creates an omni-channel experience for your customers which will keep them coming back for more.
What do customers want from a typical customer service situation?
The customer service department is reactive in nature. That said, there are a few things to keep in mind to ensure you’re providing excellent customer service.
- - Listen: While it’s normal to want to quickly get customers in and out of your service queue, it’s important to actually listen to what their issue is before giving them a solution. They may have a more nuanced issue that a boilerplate response can’t provide. There’s nothing more frustrating than providing customers with a canned response that doesn’t actually solve their issue. Automation is great, but just ensure that it is helping customers.
- - Don’t Make Customers Repeat Information: No one wants to answer or submit the same questions repeatedly. Not only is it inconvenient, it shows the customer that no one is listening or paying attention. If you have a ticketing system, review the customer’s history or profile to get familiar with their situation before responding.
- - Be Pleasant: Tone is much harder to convey over written communication and can unintentionally come across as cold. To convey some warmth you could introduce phrases like “I’d be happy to help with that,” or “Hope your day/week is going well.”
- - Be Responsive: Not only do customers want their problem solved, but they prefer it’s resolved quickly. If you can’t solve their issue easily when they first contact you, set expectations around when it will be resolved (24hrs, 2 business days?) and keep them in the loop. Don’t ghost them.
What Customers Want
1. Simple Solutions
Even if your product or service uses complex algorithms and procedures, customers don't need to know about them. They simply want a solution that resolves their issue with as little fuss as possible. Keep your messaging simple and focus on how your brand will solve the customer’s problem.
2. Personalization
Treat your customers like people and not numbers on a spreadsheet. Zendesk found that 54% of customers expect all experiences to be personalized. Use their name in communications and tailor your messaging to the buyer persona they most closely align with. Adding a personal touch when it comes to marketing lets customers know that their needs are at the forefront of your brand’s mission.
3. Value
Does your product or service outperform the competition or provide a more cost effective solution for consumers? If so, drive that point home in your messaging. Explain how and why they should choose your product or service over others on the market. How will customers benefit when they choose your brand?
4. Transparency
Transparency is one of the easiest ways to build trust with consumers. No one wants to feel duped by disingenuous, bait-and-switch advertising. Be honest about your product or service’s capabilities and pricing whenever possible.
5. Accessibility
Having features like a knowledge base encourages customers to help themselves, but getting extra assistance when they need it should not be difficult. Whether it’s phone, email, or chat support, it’s important to be responsive to consumer needs. At the beginning of this article we identified accessibility as one of the most common types of customer needs. If your team is unresponsive to their needs, customers will trade your brand in for a competitor that fills the gap.
Understanding Customer Needs and Expectations
The best thing you can do is to keep learning based on the types of issues that arise so that you can proactively address consumer needs and continue to improve.
Even though the process requires a lot of work, the results will be crucial to your brand's success. Once you understand customer needs and expectations, you can work towards delighting them with your product.