9 Ways to Tailor Your Small Business to Customer Needs
Ezra Cabrera | February 29, 2024
Whether you run a small medical practice or a long-distance moving company, your business’s effectiveness — and its long-term success — is going to depend largely on how well you can meet your customers’ needs.
When we talk about customer needs, we’re talking about more than just your product. The term encompasses everything from your customers’ need for prompt, friendly service, to their need to feel appreciated and seen. Successful brands take a holistic approach to customer satisfaction and meet all those needs on multiple channels and platforms.
Let’s look at some of the best ways to tailor your small business to customer needs.
1. Know your Customers
Your business has financial goals just like the average person, and you won’t be able to meet those goals without a robust, meaningful attempt to understand exactly who your customers are.
Use in-app and online purchases to gather as much data as possible on your customers. Social media clickthroughs can also yield useful information, as can loyalty or rewards programs. By offering discounts or account bonuses through your rewards programs, customers will often give you valuable information on their buying patterns and demographics. Ultimately, you want to use this data to create detailed customer profiles that can help you predict the best advertising and product strategies.
2. Understand Customer Needs
Keeping customers is a lot like retaining prized employees. In both cases, if you aren’t sensitive to their needs, they’ll start quietly plotting their next move. But you won’t be able to directly address your customers’ needs until you know exactly what those needs are. And in order to understand their needs, you’re going to have to go out of your way to figure out what they are.
Market research is a highly effective way to learn about your customers, what they want, and how they buy. This can include in-person focus groups, one-on-one interviews, or surveys, and if done correctly, will yield some very specific and actionable intelligence.
Another great way to find out what your customers want is to simply listen to them. Customer feedback is a valuable source of intel because it tells you exactly what your customers do and don't want. When you find a recurring source of praise, make it a company-wide best practice.
3. Stay Ahead of the Curve
Culture evolves faster than ever today, so make an effort to keep up with changing tastes and trends. You never want your customers to feel like they’re waiting for you to catch up, and winning back a lost customer is much harder than keeping one you already have. Staying on top of trends will help you identify precious growth opportunities, as well as build up valuable credibility.
4. Meet Them Where They Are
Figure out where your customers are engaging with your product, and meet them there. That could mean various social media platforms, their email inbox, or even in physical stores. Figuring out the most natural place to interact with your customers will make it much easier to make contact with them and to cultivate an ongoing, mutually beneficial relationship.
5. Vertically Integrate Your Customer Strategy
You can’t always know where a customer will make contact with your business. It could be at the support level, the brick-and-mortar sales level, the online level, or even the management level.
To make sure you have consistent, accurate messaging at all levels of your business, send out frequent company-wide product updates, organize trainings, hold meetings on important business initiatives, and put a substantial employee onboarding process in place. The objective here is that, no matter where your customer makes contact with your business, they’ll find a friendly, knowledgeable face.
6. Solicit Feedback
We touched on the importance of using customer feedback to improve your performance, but it’s even more important to actively gather that feedback. To get perspectives from your customers on what you can do better, you can use Google Forms for surveys, and you can send out feedback emails and post polls on social media. If done right, you'll be able to tackle problems while they’re still small, instead of reacting to big problems that have already mushroomed.
7. Maintain Connections
Your customer relationships should extend well beyond their purchase. Maintaining your connection with a customer is the key to retaining them and cultivating customer loyalty. If you’re a bank, offer long-time customers special bank account bonuses. If you’re a gym, think about offering free personal training or workout plans. Make your customers feel appreciated and wanted with rewards and loyalty programs, frequent check-ins, and highly responsive customer service.
8. Provide Excellent Customer Service
Customer service is a great predictor of brand loyalty. Companies that offer stellar customer service have a lot of repeat customers, retain those customers, and generally get good reviews.
What is good customer service? It’s actually pretty simple — customers want you to listen to them, and to be pleasant, responsive, and sympathetic.
You’ll also want to implement your customer service strategy across a number of channels, including email, social media, phone, in-person, and online chat. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to reach you.
9. Make Communication Personal
When possible, address your customers by name. An email or text message addressed personally will be much more successful than one addressed to "Dear Customer."
If you’re trying to open a line of business credit at your bank, you’ll be much more responsive if the bank officer addresses you by name and offers some degree of familiarity. On the other hand, if their communications are totally anonymized, and they treat you like an interchangeable, faceless customer, you might start thinking about taking your business to a more appreciative institution.
Achieving Success With Your Customers
In the end, your relationship with your customers is a lot like any relationship. If you listen to them, give them what they want, respond to constructive criticism, and keep communication lines open, both parties are going to be pretty happy when all is said and done.
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