Companies want to stay relevant and innovative and oftentimes look at other successful companies, hot industry trends, or new shiny products for inspiration.

However, a vital component to growth is at every concern'due south fingertips — their customers.

Yes, customers are the ones with the ability to determine the longevity and progress of your business. Happy customers result in college retentivity rates, lifetime value, and brand reach as they spread the word in their social circles.

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The first step toward creating the types of customer experiences that effect in happy customers is past understanding and coming together customer needs.

In this article, y'all'll learn:

  • The Definition of Client Needs
  • The Types of Customer Needs
  • How to Place Customer Needs
  • What a Client Needs Analysis Is
  • How to Solve for Your Customers' Needs
  • Types of Customer Service

An example of customer demand takes place every solar day around 12:00 p.m. This is when people begin to experience hunger (need) and decide to buy lunch. The type of food, the location of the restaurant, and the amount of time the service will take are all factors to how individuals decide to satisfy the need.

Customer-centric companies know that solving for customer needs and exceeding expectations along the way is how to drive healthy business growth and foster practiced relationships with the people your visitor serves.

Although customer centricity is not a new concept, the right steps to achieve a customer service focus are still hazy.

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Creating a customer-centric company that truly listens to client needs can be daunting, and there's a steep learning curve if you haven't paid close attention to customers earlier.

So to steer you in the right direction, here'due south a beginner's guide that defines the types of customer needs to await for, unpacks common barriers that preclude companies from fulfilling their customers' needs, and discloses solutions to start improving customer service.

Below are the near common types of customer needs — most of which work in tandem with one some other to drive a purchasing decision.

xvi Nigh Common Types of Customer Needs

Product Needs

one. Functionality

Customers demand your product or service to office the way they need in order to solve their problem or want.

2. Price

Customers have unique budgets with which they can buy a product or service.

3. Convenience

Your product or service needs to be a user-friendly solution to the function your customers are trying to meet.

4. Experience

The experience using your product or service needs to exist easy — or at to the lowest degree articulate — and then as not to create more work for your customers.

5. Blueprint

Along the lines of feel, the product or service needs a slick blueprint to brand it relatively easy and intuitive to apply.

6. Reliability

The product or service needs to reliably function every bit advertised every fourth dimension the customer wants to use it.

vii. Performance

The product or service needs to perform correctly so the customer tin can achieve their goals.

8. Efficiency

The production or service needs to be efficient for the customer by streamlining an otherwise time-consuming process.

ix. Compatibility

The production or service needs to exist compatible with other products your client is already using.

Service Needs

10. Empathy

When your customers get in touch with client 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 visitor.

12. Transparency

Customers expect transparency from a company they're doing business with. Service outages, pricing changes, and things breaking happen, and customers deserve openness from the businesses they give money to.

13. Command

Customers need to feel like they're in control of the business interaction from start to finish and beyond, and client empowerment shouldn't end with the auction. Make it piece of cake for them to return products, change subscriptions, accommodate terms, etc.

xiv. Options

Customers need options when they're getting fix to make a purchase from a company. Offering a variety of production, subscription, and payment options to provide that freedom of selection.

15. Information

Customers need information, from the moment they start interacting with your brand to days and months after making a purchase. Businesses should invest in educational blog content, instructional knowledge base content, and regular communication so customers take the data they need to successfully use a production or service.

16. Accessibility

Customers need to exist able to access your service and support teams. This means providing multiple channels for client service. We'll talk a footling more about these options later.

If companies can begin to make changes before their customers' needs aren't fulfilled, this can ultimately atomic number 82 to growth, innovation, and retention. However, with many types of customer needs, how practice you understand which ones utilise to your customers specifically?

"You've got to start with the customer feel and work backwards to the technology," Steve Jobs notably stated. "You cannot start with the engineering science and try to figure out where you lot are going to sell it."

Whether you sell engineering or some other product or service, the underlying message he's proverb here rings truthful.

This means understanding where they're coming from when they've called to make a purchase, what expectations they're bringing to the tabular array, and what bumps they'll see along the way. Yous tin can gain more noesis about what your customers desire using a few different strategies.

1. Use Existing Data

Most likely you accept some client information already, specially if you're using a CRM. This is the best identify to first your search. Are there pain points or issues you can glean from just looking at this customer data? Are in that location whatsoever patterns you lot can identify? Taking note of who your electric current customers are and their past interactions with your brand to get a better idea of where customers are coming from and if yous're meeting their needs.

ii. Solicit Client Feedback

When trying to identify consumer needs, get direct to the source. This can exist washed using surveys that alive on your site, or sent via e-mail. Additionally you could conduct focus groups to gain more in depth insight to customer needs and their overall experience with your product or service.

3. Client Journeying Mapping

To better understand and assist customers, yous'll need to commencement know what stage of the customer journey they are in and what they're looking for. This is where customer journey mapping can help, giving a visual representation of how customers interact with your brand. This exercise volition help you create a more proactive customer service approach and improve retention.

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4. Input from Service Team

In improver to getting customer feedback, it's important to consult those who work with them nearly — your service team. They'll ofttimes have insights you may non be privy to and can help you lot anticipate the needs of your customers as well as solve existing issues. They'll too exist able to explain how customers are currently using your product or service and can identify any hiccups in the process.

five. Report Competitors

It's common to report competitors when conducting marketplace research, but yous should besides consider them when identifying client needs. There might be overlap in your target audience, meaning your brand could benefit from reviewing any problems competitors are experiencing and gain insight on how they went near fixing it. You might notice that some of their strategies would be worth implementing at your visitor, or discover gaps in service that your company tin fill.

half-dozen. Use Social Media

Chances are, your customers use a variety of social media platforms in their day to solar day. Take advantage of that by using it as a fashion to heed in on what customers are saying most your products and your competitors. Are people request questions under your posts? What sorts of comments are they making? Are they giving praise, asking for assist, or exercise they desire 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

People plow to the internet for most things, so Google is an excellent resource for figuring out customer needs. How are customers finding your brand online and what are they typing into the search box to discover information technology? Doing keyword inquiry can give yous a wide overview of what your customers demand based on search data. Keyword inquiry volition besides help you optimize your site for search engines by aligning the content of your site with what customers are searching for.

If you blueprint your process with these things in mind, you'll be able to uncover consumer needs at whatsoever stage of their lifecycle. You tin can take a deeper swoop into their needs by conducting a client needs analysis.

To conduct a customer needs analysis successfully, you lot demand to practice the post-obit:

ane. Customer Needs Assay Survey

The customer needs assay is typically conducted by running surveys that assistance companies effigy out their position in their respective competitive markets and how they stack up in terms of coming together their target customers' needs.

The survey should primarily ask questions about your brand and competitors, equally well as customers' production awareness and brand attitudes in general.

Questions tin can include:

  • Questions most 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

You can larn more almost which questions to ask in this survey in our guide and this guide from dummies.

2. Means-Terminate Analysis

Once you've conducted the customer needs analysis survey, y'all can use the answers to get a fuller picture of the reasons why your customers purchase from y'all, and what makes your product or service stand apart from your competitors'.

A means-end assay analyzes those answers to make up one's mind the primary reasons why a customer would buy your product. Those heir-apparent reasons can be divided into three main groups:

one. Features: A customer buys a product or service because of the features included in the purchase. If the customer were buying a estimator, for instance, they might buy information technology considering 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 volition offer them. The client might as well buy the estimator because it syncs easily with their other devices wirelessly.

3. Values: A customer buys a product or service for unique, private values, real or perceived, they believe it volition help them fulfill. The client might think the estimator will help them to exist more creative or creative and unlock other personal or professional artistic opportunities.

As y'all might imagine, these reasons for purchasing something can vary from customer to customer, so it'south important to conduct these customer surveys, collect the answers, and group them into these three categories. From there, you lot can identify which of those motivating factors you're solving for, and which you tin better on to make your product or service fifty-fifty more competitive in the market.

3. Customer Feedback

If you want to know what your customers think well-nigh the experience of working with your visitor, ask them. Interviewing your customers and members of your service team tin contribute to a customer needs analysis and improvements to your customer lifecycle.

As you get together data from your customer needs analysis, information technology'due south important to identify the points of friction that your customers experience and the moments in their journey that provide unexpected delight.

  • What can your company alter?
  • What are the elements that you can build from?
  • What parts of the feel needs to be worked on?

Request these questions can lead you to valuable insights as y'all piece of work to solve for your customers.

How to Solve for Customer Needs

The first footstep to solving for your customers is to put yourself in their shoes: If you were the customer when we purchase your goods, employ your technology, or sign upwards for your services, what would forestall you lot from achieving ultimate value?

Your customer needs assay is a good starting signal for getting in the listen of your customer, especially when it comes to identifying common pain points. From there, y'all tin build a proactive plan to implement your customer-outset values throughout the customer lifecycle. Here are some tips for doing and so:

1. Offer consistent company-wide messaging.

Too ofttimes customers get defenseless up in the "he said, she said" game of beingness told a product can do 1 affair from sales and another from support and product. Ultimately, customers become dislocated and are left with the perception that the company is disorganized.

Consistent internal communications beyond all departments is one of the best steps towards a customer-focused mindset. If the entire visitor understands its goals, values, product, and service capabilities, then the letters will hands translate to run into the customers' needs.

To get everyone on the aforementioned page, organize sales and client service meetings, transport out new production emails, provide robust new employee onboarding, and crave quarterly training and seminars or staff hosted webinars to share important projects.

2. Provide instructions for piece of cake adoption.

Customers buy a production because they believe information technology volition run across their needs and solve their problem. However, adoption setup stages are not always articulate. If best practices aren't specified at the start and they don't run across value right away, it'southward an uphill battle to proceeds back their trust and disengage bad habits.

A well-thought-out post-buy strategy will enable your products or services to be usable and useful.

One manner companies gain their customers' attention is providing in-production and email walkthroughs and instructions equally soon equally the customer receives a payment confirmation. This limits the defoliation, technical questions, and distractions from the immediate mail-purchase euphoria.

A customer didactics guide or cognition base of operations is essential to deliver proper customer adoption and avert 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 electronic mail signatures.

3. Build feedback loops into every stage of the procedure.

Lean into customer complaints and suggestions, and it will change the way y'all operate your business concern. Criticism often has negative connotations. Nevertheless, if you flip bug to opportunities y'all can easily improve your business to fit the customer's needs.

Just every bit you solicited client feedback in your needs analysis, yous can keep a pulse on how your customers feel at scale with customer satisfaction scores, client surveys, exploration customer interviews, social media polls, or personal customer feedback emails.

If you're able to incorporate this into a repeatable process, you'll never be in the dark about the state of the client experience in your organization, and you'll be enabled to continue improving it.

Take client suggestions seriously and act on those recommendations to improve design, product, and organization glitches. Most customer support success metrics are paramount to the customer experience and this mentality should trickle downward to every aspect of the system.

four. Nurture client relationships.

When a client buys a product or service, they want to use it correct away and fulfill their immediate demand. Whether they are delighted within the first hour, week, or a calendar month, it'southward important to constantly think about their future needs.

Proactive human relationship-building is essential to prevent customers from losing their mail-purchase excitement and ultimately churning. If customers cease hearing from you and you don't hear from them this tin can be a bad sign that they are well-nigh to churn.

Companies solve for customer relationships with a combination of customer service construction and communication strategies. Solve for the long-term customer need and create a customer service team dedicated to check-ins and customer memory, 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.

Excluding customers from your cohort of concern can seem counterintuitive to solve for your customers' needs. Still, understanding whose needs you can fulfill and whose you lot cannot is a major step toward solving the right bug. All customers' needs tin't be treated equally and a visitor must recognize which issues they can solve and ones that aren't aligned with their vision.

To find the right customer priorities, create buyer personas and uncover consumer trends, look at customer's long-term retention patterns, establish a articulate company vision, provide premier customer service to valuable customers and communicate with your platonic client in their preferred social media space to capture questions, comments and suggestions.

Successful startups, brick and mortar shops, and Fortune 500 companies alike all solve and prioritize customer needs to stay ahead and establish industry trends.

half-dozen. Provide corking customer service.

If a problem arises, your customers want to get it resolved and feel heard in the procedure. This starts with beingness able to meet their needs with empathy, but along the style, the process for obtaining support should be easy and on a channel that's convenient for them.

Some customer needs are time-sensitive and crave immediate interaction via phone or conversation. Others are less critical and can be resolved at a more coincidental pace. Let'due south interruption downwards the types of customer service and how each optimizes your team's power to fulfill client needs.

1. Electronic mail

E-mail is one of the almost fundamental forms of customer service. It allows customers to fully draw their bug, and it automatically records the conversation into a resourceful thread. Customers only accept to explain their issue once, while reps can reference important instance details without having to request boosted information.

Email is all-time used with customer needs that don't demand to be resolved right away. Customers can ask their question, become dorsum to piece of work, and return to the instance 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.

One limitation of email is the potential lack of clarity. Some customers accept problem describing their trouble, and some service reps struggle to explain solutions. This creates time-consuming roadblocks when the consequence is overly complex. To be safety, employ e-mail for simple problems that require a cursory explanation or solution.

2. Phone

When customers take problems that demand to be answered immediately, phones are the all-time medium to utilize. Phones connect customers directly to reps and create a human interaction between the customer and the business concern. Both parties hear each other's tone and can gauge the severity of the situation. This human chemical element is a major factor in creating delightful customer experiences.

Phones come in handy near when there's a frustrated or angry customer. These customers are almost likely to churn and require your team to provide a personalized solution. Your squad 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 back up is the wait time. Customers hate being put on hold, and information technology's a determining factor for customer churn.

three. Conversation

Chat is one of the about flexible customer service channels. It can solve a high volume of simple issues or provide detailed support for complex ones. Businesses continue to prefer chat because of its versatility as well as the improvement in efficiency information technology provides for customer service reps.

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 than advanced roadblocks, reps can integrate customer service tools into their chat software to assistance them diagnose and resolve issues.

The limitations of chat are similar to those of electronic mail. Still, since the interaction is live, whatsoever lack of clarity betwixt the ii parties can drastically affect troubleshooting. As a quondam conversation rep, there were plenty of times where I struggled to go on the same page as my customer. Even though nosotros resolved the consequence, that miscommunication negatively impacted the customer'due south experience.

4. Social Media

Social media is a relatively new customer service channel. While it'south been effectually for over a decade, businesses are now beginning to adopt it as a feasible service option. That's because social media lets customers immediately report an result. And since that study is public, client service teams are more motivated to resolve the client'due south trouble.

Social media is an excellent aqueduct 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 organisation. Social media is an effective tool for communicating with your customers in bulk. With a social media crunch management plan, your team can proceed to fulfill client needs during critical situations.

Social media is unlike from other types of client service because it empowers the client the nearly. Customers tend to take more urgent needs and expect instant responses from your accounts. While this blazon of service presents an enormous opportunity, it also places tremendous force per unit area on your reps to fulfill customer demand. Exist sure your squad is equipped with proper social media direction tools before you offer routine support.

v. In Person

Every bit the oldest course of customer service, you're probably familiar with working in person with customers. Brands who accept brick-and-mortar stores must offer this service for customers living near their locations. This fulfills a convenience need as customers can buy and render a product without having to ship information technology back to the visitor through an online service.

In-person customer service is great for businesses with strong service personnel. Without defended employees, your customer service team won't be able to fulfill your customers' production or service needs. Successful teams have reps who are determined to provide above-and-beyond customer service.

five. Call Back Service

Sometimes it's not nearly how quickly your business organization can provide a solution, but rather how efficient you can make the service feel. For example, say a customer has a simple question about pricing that should simply accept a few minutes to answer, but their expected await fourth dimension for telephone 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 phone call back service where your team reaches out to the customer as soon as the next rep is available.

Another situation where this blazon of service comes in handy is with text-based mediums like electronic mail and live conversation. In some cases, these channels aren't ideal for troubleshooting and can pb to friction if the case isn't transferred to some other platform. Having a telephone call back service bachelor allows customers to schedule time to speak directly with reps, peculiarly 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 than effective aqueduct.

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 noesis base and access resources that aid them troubleshoot bug on their own. Not only does this go customers faster solutions, but it too saves them from having to open up 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.

Cocky-service is advantageous for your team's productivity as well. If more customers apply your noesis base of operations, less will phone call or email your squad for help. This volition costless your reps up more to focus on complex service cases that require a longer fourth dimension commitment.

7. Interactive Virtual Banana

Chatbots are no longer novelties that customer service teams utilise to show off their technological prowess. Now, they're integral pieces of support strategies as they human activity more than like interactive virtual administration than uncomplicated, question-and-answer bots. Today's chatbots are powered by innovative AI applied science that interprets client needs and can walk people through footstep-past-step solutions.

interactive virtual assistant for customer service in a car

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The image to a higher place shows a perfect example of how useful today's virtual administration can be. In this state of affairs, the customer is learning how to employ their new machine — a product that typically offers a lot of unique features and an extensive operator'due south transmission. To help new users navigate the motorcar'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 volition tell them everything they need to know.

Interactive features similar this show that you're investing in more than just product development. You're thinking well-nigh how y'all'll support customers and what services you tin can adopt that will make their lives easier. Customers pay attention to this type of customer service and it tin can frequently be a reason why many will render to your business.

8. Integrated Client Service

Integrated service tin be described as all of the little things your make does to remove pain points from the customer experience. Some of this is proactive, like sending customers an automated newsletter that informs them almost major updates or announcements, and some of it is reactive, like pinging a customer success director whenever someone submits negative feedback to your team.

Even though these pain points may seem small, they add together up over time if left unchecked. The best way to remove well-nigh of these points of friction is to adopt automation every bit y'all grow your customer base. Automated customer service tools like ticketing systems, help desks, and workflows assistance your team go on pace with increasing customer need. This engineering lets y'all maintain that same level of personalized client service even every bit more people reach out to your business organisation for support.

There's no "all-time" blazon of customer service. When used together, each medium compliments the other and optimizes your overall performance. This creates an omni-channel experience for your customers which will keep them coming dorsum for more than.

What practice customers want from a typical customer service situation?

It's important to note that customer service is reactive. That said, there are a few things to keep in listen to ensure yous're providing splendid customer service.

  • Listen: While information technology's normal to want to chop-chop become customers in and out of your service queue, it's important to actually listen to what their effect is before giving them a solution. They may have a more nuanced event that a boilerplate response can't provide. In that location'due south null more frustrating than providing customers with a canned response that doesn't really 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, information technology shows the client that no one is listening or paying attention. If you lot have a ticketing system, review the customer's history or profile to get familiar with their state of affairs before responding.
  • Be Pleasant: Tone is much harder to convey over written communication and can unintentionally come up across equally common cold. To convey some warmth yous could innovate phrases like "I'd be happy to help with that," or "Hope your solar day/week is going well."
  • Be Responsive: Not only exercise customers desire their problem solved, but they adopt it'due south resolved quickly. If you tin't solve their issue hands when they get-go contact you lot, set expectations around when information technology will be resolved (24hrs, 2 business days?) and keep them in the loop. Don't ghost them.

Each customer has their own unique needs, but at that place are a few that are universal.

i. Uncomplicated Solutions

While your product or service may run using a circuitous set up of algorithms and procedures, customers don't demand to know that. They simply desire a solution that resolves their issue with equally little fuss as possible. Proceed your messaging simple and focus on how your make will solve the client'southward problem.

2. Personalization

Treat your customers like people and not numbers on a spreadsheet. Use their name in communications and tailor your messaging to the buyer persona they well-nigh closely align with. Adding a personal touch when information technology comes to marketing lets customers know that their needs are at the forefront of your make's mission.

three. Value

Does your product or service outperform the competition or provide a more cost effective solution for consumers? If so, drive that signal 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

One of the easiest ways to build trust with consumers is to exist transparent. No i wants to experience duped by disingenuous, allurement-and-switch advertising. Be honest nigh your product or service's capabilities and pricing whenever possible.

five. Accessibility

While it is always encouraged to empower customers to help themselves with features like a knowledge base of operations, getting extra help when they demand it shouldn't be difficult. Whether it'southward phone, email, or chat back up, it's of import to be responsive to consumer needs. At the start of this article nosotros identified accessibility as one of the most common types of customer needs. If your squad is unresponsive to their needs, customers will trade your make in for a competitor that fills the gap.

Agreement Customer Needs and Expectations

1 of the best things you can exercise is go on learning based on the types of issues that come up and then that you can proactively address consumer needs and go along improving on the feel.

While the procedure requires quite a bit of legwork, the results will be instrumental in the success of your brand. Once yous understand customer needs and expectations, you can work towards delighting them with your product.

Editor's notation: This post was originally published in September 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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customer profile

Originally published Jan 12, 2022 seven:00:00 AM, updated February 28 2022