Customers are the lifeblood of any business, more customers means success and growth for your business. Once you have established your business, it’s important not to get complacent with your success. So for any business to thrive, understanding consumer purchasing patterns is really essential if you want to make some boost to your sales.
Although, extensive research has been done in this field, Bob O’Regan, Director, Content Marketing Strategy at IDG Enterprise indicates that there are four questions to ask your customer about their experiences that are universally helpful across industries.
- Can you rely on us to do what we say we will do?
- Are we convenient to deal with?
- Are our products, services, and marketing offers relevant to you?
- Do we respond to your needs and questions in a timely and helpful way?
The problem arises when the answer to these questions do not give you a clear indication of how to perceive the best manner in fulfilling the customer’s needs. We take these questions forward by revealing five tips to understand the customer’s purchasing patterns.
You must have heard that word-of-mouth is possibly the best way to get your product up and running, this comes as no surprise as it is also a great way to understand your customer’s purchasing patterns. Lets look at these tips more closely to understand why customers make the choices they do.
1. Get into the Customer’s Shoes
Here, getting into the customer’s shoes explains that you need to understand the customer’s requirements. In simple words, you have to “think like customers” in order to understand their buying behavior. You need to understand the attitude of a customer towards a particular product or service and what purchasing pattern they follows when any product introduces to the market.
With the sale’s figure, the success of product is revealed and through some research, you can get the right information on the customer’s buying pattern. You must have noticed that not many products get customer’s attention. It is because, whether the brand is not trustworthy or the customer service is not appreciable.
Therefore, it is important to evaluate how successful you are meeting your customer’s expectations and how often you listen to your customer’s demands. To make it possible, you need to ensure providing great customer service to your customers. From front desk to the delivery staff, everyone should focus not only meeting but exceeding customer’s expectations.
2. Use Data to understand Customer’s Buying Behavior
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is an effective source that holds important information about your potential customers and their requirements. Putting up your customer’s information into data can help you later in your investigation for understanding the customer’s buying pattern. Carefully go through the data and figure out the pattern that reveals the number of customers making orders at a particular time. You can also use this informative data to analyze your performance by checking out the deliveries being made on time or not.
This CRM system is comparatively more sophisticated than simple mailing lists. This is because, it provides a comprehensive picture of customers and improves customer satisfaction. With this, it also increases the value of customers by offering an opportunity to upsell and cross sell.
3. Ask your Customer About their Requirements
Conduct a survey that will be based on customer’s requirements and during your survey make your customer feel valued while asking about their needs and changes they want to see in the service. Just in case, if you are not ready for any changes, make sure that you don’t ask for any feedback. And once you make some improvements to your services, simply tell your customers that these improvements are the results of their feedbacks.
This survey can be beneficial as it may unveil those complaints that never discovered, such as staff behavior. When dissatisfied with services, it is not necessary that every customer complain about it. Unless you discuss with your customer, you could never come to know about your flaws and won’t be giving promising results to your customers.
While asking for customer feedback, ensure to set up a customer contact program in order to keep in touch with your customers. This two-way communication allows you to listen to your customer’s needs and also tell them about what you offer.
4. Make a Bond with your Potential Customers
Making a good rapport with your customers simply means that you need to think about everything from the way you greet your customer, to meeting with their expectations. Having good terms with your customer will always lead to building a strong customer relationship and to do so, you have to make your customer feel special. You have to make them realize that you care for them and understand that their time is precious as well. This will automatically connects you with your potential customer and you can engage your customers for longer time.
There are few ways to make a good bond with your customers are mentioned below:
- Advance planning.
- Care for your customers.
- Introduce special offers.
- Keep in touch with them.
- One on one interaction.
5. Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is something that is essential to your business growth. So, it becomes really important to take care of customer satisfaction. It is because, if your customer is not satisfied with your services, there is no point serving your services to the customers. For any kind of business, customer satisfaction is something that requires as it also indicates that marketers and business owners can certainly manage and improve business status with time. Here are some good reasons to explain the importance of customer satisfaction:
- Customer loyalty and intention to buy the product.
- Boost customer lifetime value.
- Reduce negative word-of-mouth
Sharing Words of Wisdom
At the end, all you have to take care of your customers, if you want to sustain in the market place. And to do so, you need to understand the customer behavior as it will direct you in the right direction.
With a degree in IT, Kathleen Collins has worked with the top hosting companies for over a decade. Currently she works with Hosting Reviewed, providing an in-depth evaluation of the various hosting companies listed