The Importance Of Knowing Your Customer

Know your customers better because only they can help you get more lead and more business. Understanding customers is the key to giving them good service which in turn results into strong customer relationships and new sales through positive word-of-mouth recommendation. However, understanding the customers’ psyche is not easy and most often requires a thoughtful analysis to identify their preferences or purchase patterns so that you can anticipate their needs and exceed their expectations.

In what holds further is a list of six easy ways to understand your customers better. Read, comprehend and imbibe them in your working approach to engage with the customers better and ultimately sell them more.

1. Track Customers’ Real-Time Behavior

Today’s customers demand nothing less than a seamless experience across both traditional and digital touch points. To do this, a business needs to be prompt and proactive in its approach. It needs to anticipate the customers needs to serve them on all platforms even before the requirement is actually placed.

And all this can only happen when you have a tool that gives you a peep into the real-time behavior of the customers. Experts suggest investing in a customer relationship management tool (CRM) that provides an in-depth analytics of the customers’ activities. One of the best instances to corroborate this is CRM’s email marketing functionality.

Most of the renowned CRMs offer robust email marketing functionality with real-time tracking.

Using the software, you can

Track the performance of your email marketing campaigns
Track each campaign result through fields such as Total Sent / Attempted; Opened / Viewed; Link clicked; Un-subscribed; Bounce / Invalid
Understand your target audience better by jotting down a list of their likes and dislikes
Presenting their preferences with highly visual, context-rich Bar, Pie, and Line charts for quick analytics.

Jane Miller comments – Majority of the Big Players in the market do ‘needs anticipation’. All thanks to the easy to use CRM technology that has given them the power to extract, blend and analyze real-time customer data to identify customer preferences and purchase patterns and predict customer needs before even customers say so.

2. Identify the different categories of your Customers

Tagging them together in the same group only leads to generic cross-selling campaigns that do not generate any fruitful results. It’s important to understand the different parameters on which you can segregate your customers. Let’s say – the type of products/services they buy, frequency of purchase, geographic location of the customers and so on.

Once the categories are formed and customers are segregated, it becomes easier to frame precise marketing and cross-selling campaigns with targeted messaging. Needless to say, these campaigns drive more value for both your business and your customers.

3. Invest on Social Media Customer Engagement

Reason being that reports like IBM CEO Insights has stated that consumers are active on social media channels for no less than 6 hours a day. This clearly explains the indispensable role that social media plays in shaping and influencing the opinions of the consumers.

In such a scenario, it becomes essential for every business to invest exhaustively on social media engagement. So frame strategies to engage with your target audience and customers on all social media channels as they are clearly the best place to reach them.

Tip: Do not opt for push advertising in social media. Unlike other traditional platforms where these old-school marketing tactics can work, social media calls for compelling, authentic campaigns that involves real and informative elements. We suggest using Social CRM tools to run social campaigns. It will empower you to run different campaigns on all leading social channels and aggregate user data across all streams.
Not just this, integrating your customers’ social profiles into the Enterprise CRM will provide you a live feed of all the updates done by your customers. This will act as an added resource from where you can get a better idea of your customers like the type of discussions your customers mostly participate into.

4. Leverage Customer Service Interactions

This is one of the best times to get a peep into the customers psyche. So frame a questionnaire and hand it over to your customer service representatives.

On every occasion when your customers contact your service representatives, they can ask queries about the customers likes/dislikes in relation to the product or service usage. Example:

How they are using the product or service?
Are they satisfied using the product/service?
What are the changes they would like to see in the product/service?

Practicing this experience regularly, will help you accumulate a database of valuable customer insights that can be used to frame targeted messaging.

5. Focus on Customers’ Personal Tastes and Preferences

Nurturing your customers with informative contents about your product/service is good but do not limit yourself to only that. Sometimes facilitating to the generic interests of the customers serves a great purpose too. It gives the impression of how attentive you are towards your customers and brings your buyers inches closer to you.

Many startup ventures follow this policy where they use the consumer data in CRM database to frame materials/resources that resonate with the other interests of the customers. For instance sharing of articles around the newest trends that is happening in some other industries not necessarily related to the company’s own product/service.
The idea is that instead of continuously sending contents in relation to the product/service (which often gets monotonous), sparking conversations around other universal topics generates multiple opportunities to create a conversation thread with the customers.

6. Build Comprehensive Contact Information

Make sure you have one centralized database that holds an accurate and detailed contact list. Although there are different methods to it, notion comes close to a robust easy to use CRM application. This is the reason why millions of businesses per annum implement a cloud based CRM solution to neatly store every piece of customer data. Needless to say this helps to build a rich customer profile and ably handle the ongoing interactions between customer and the company.