Companies desire to stay relevant and innovative and oft look at other successful companies, hot manufacture trends, or new shiny products for inspiration.

Yet, a vital component to growth is at every business's fingertips — their customers.

Yeah, customers are the ones with the ability to determine the longevity and progress of your business organization. Happy customers result in higher retention rates, lifetime value, and make reach as they spread the discussion in their social circles.

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The first step toward creating the types of customer experiences that result in happy customers is by understanding and meeting customer needs.

In this article, you lot'll learn:

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

An case of client need takes place every twenty-four hours around 12:00 p.m. This is when people begin to feel hunger (need) and make up one's mind to purchase tiffin. The blazon of food, the location of the eating place, and the corporeality 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 forth the way is how to drive healthy business organisation growth and foster good relationships with the people your company serves.

Although client centricity is not a new concept, the correct steps to attain a customer service focus are even so hazy.

HubSpot Culture Code Presentation Customer Code: Creating a Visitor Customers Love from HubSpot

Creating a customer-centric company that truly listens to customer needs can exist daunting, and in that location's a steep learning curve if you haven't paid shut attention to customers before.

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

Below are the virtually common types of customer needs — about of which work in tandem with one some other to drive a purchasing determination.

16 Most Common Types of Client Needs

Production Needs

1. Functionality

Customers need your product or service to part the fashion they need in order to solve their problem or desire.

2. Price

Customers take unique budgets with which they tin buy a production or service.

3. Convenience

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

four. Experience

The experience using your production or service needs to be easy — or at least articulate — so every bit not to create more piece of work for your customers.

v. Design

Along the lines of experience, the product or service needs a slick design to brand information technology relatively like shooting fish in a barrel and intuitive to use.

6. Reliability

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

seven. Performance

The product or service needs to perform correctly so the client can attain their goals.

viii. Efficiency

The product or service needs to be efficient for the customer by streamlining an otherwise fourth dimension-consuming procedure.

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

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. Control

Customers need to feel like they're in command of the business interaction from starting time to finish and beyond, and customer empowerment shouldn't end with the sale. Make it easy for them to return products, change subscriptions, accommodate terms, etc.

14. Options

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

15. Information

Customers need data, from the moment they kickoff 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 have the information they need to successfully employ a product or service.

16. Accessibility

Customers demand to be able to admission your service and back up teams. This ways providing multiple channels for customer service. We'll talk a little more about these options later.

If companies can begin to make changes before their customers' needs aren't fulfilled, this can ultimately pb to growth, innovation, and retention. Withal, with many types of customer needs, how practise you lot understand which ones apply to your customers specifically?

"Yous've got to start with the customer experience and piece of work backwards to the technology," Steve Jobs notably stated. "Yous cannot showtime with the technology and endeavour to figure out where you are going to sell it."

Whether y'all sell technology or another product or service, the underlying message he's saying here rings true.

This means understanding where they're coming from when they've called to make a buy, what expectations they're bringing to the tabular array, and what bumps they'll encounter along the way. Y'all can gain more than cognition nigh what your customers want using a few different strategies.

one. Use Existing Data

Most likely you take some customer data already, especially if you're using a CRM. This is the best place to start your search. Are there pain points or issues yous can glean from simply looking at this customer data? Are in that location any patterns you tin can place? Taking note of who your current customers are and their past interactions with your brand to get a amend idea of where customers are coming from and if you're coming together their needs.

two. Solicit Customer Feedback

When trying to identify consumer needs, go straight to the source. This can be done using surveys that live on your site, or sent via e-mail. Additionally y'all could conduct focus groups to proceeds more than in depth insight to client needs and their overall feel with your product or service.

three. Customer Journeying Mapping

To better understand and assist customers, you lot'll demand to get-go know what stage of the customer journeying they are in and what they're looking for. This is where customer journey mapping tin can assistance, giving a visual representation of how customers collaborate with your brand. This exercise volition help y'all create a more than proactive customer service arroyo and improve retentivity.

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iv. Input from Service Team

In addition to getting client feedback, it'southward important to consult those who work with them most — your service team. They'll often take insights yous may not be privy to and tin help you anticipate the needs of your customers equally well as solve existing issues. They'll also be able to explicate how customers are currently using your product or service and can identify whatsoever hiccups in the process.

5. Study Competitors

It's common to study competitors when conducting market research, just y'all should too consider them when identifying customer needs. There might be overlap in your target audience, meaning your brand could do good from reviewing any issues competitors are experiencing and proceeds insight on how they went about fixing it. Yous might observe 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 employ a variety of social media platforms in their solar day to day. Take advantage of that by using it as a fashion to heed in on what customers are proverb nearly 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 help, or do they desire new features? Using a social media monitoring tool like Hootsuite will help you place trends, mentions, and hashtags relevant to your brand to better inform your strategy.

7. Keyword Research

People turn to the internet for about things, so Google is an excellent resource for figuring out customer needs. How are customers finding your make online and what are they typing into the search box to detect information technology? Doing keyword research tin requite you a broad overview of what your customers demand based on search information. Keyword research will also assist you optimize your site for search engines past aligning the content of your site with what customers are searching for.

If y'all design your process with these things in mind, you'll be able to uncover consumer needs at any stage of their lifecycle. You can accept a deeper dive into their needs by conducting a customer needs analysis.

To conduct a customer needs analysis successfully, you demand to do the following:

i. Customer Needs Analysis Survey

The client needs analysis is typically conducted by running surveys that help companies effigy out their position in their corresponding competitive markets and how they stack up in terms of meeting their target customers' needs.

The survey should primarily ask questions near your brand and competitors, every bit well as customers' product sensation and brand attitudes in full general.

Questions can include:

  • Questions about positive and negative word associations with your brand
  • Questions asking customers to group your make in with similar and/or competing brands
  • Questions comparing and sorting brands co-ordinate to their preferences for usage

Yous can acquire more about which questions to enquire in this survey in our guide and this guide from dummies.

two. Means-End Analysis

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

A means-end analysis analyzes those answers to determine the principal reasons why a customer would purchase your production. Those buyer reasons can be divided into iii main groups:

1. Features: A customer buys a product or service because of the features included in the purchase. If the client were buying a computer, for example, they might buy it considering it'southward smaller and more lightweight than other options.

2. Benefits: A client buys a product or service because of a do good, real or perceived, they believe information technology will offer them. The customer might also buy the reckoner 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 assist them fulfill. The customer might recollect the computer will assistance them to be more creative or artistic and unlock other personal or professional creative opportunities.

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

3. Customer Feedback

If yous want to know what your customers think about the experience of working with your company, 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 gather data from your customer needs assay, it'southward important to identify the points of friction that your customers experience and the moments in their journey that provide unexpected please.

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

Request these questions can lead yous to valuable insights as you work to solve for your customers.

How to Solve for Client Needs

The starting time stride to solving for your customers is to put yourself in their shoes: If you were the client when we purchase your goods, use your applied science, or sign up for your services, what would prevent you from achieving ultimate value?

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

1. Offer consequent company-wide messaging.

As well ofttimes customers get caught up in the "he said, she said" game of being told a product tin do one matter from sales and another from support and product. Ultimately, customers get confused and are left with the perception that the company is disorganized.

Consistent internal communications beyond all departments is 1 of the best steps towards a client-focused mindset. If the entire visitor understands its goals, values, product, and service capabilities, then the messages volition hands translate to meet the customers' needs.

To become anybody on the same page, organize sales and customer service meetings, ship 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 like shooting fish in a barrel adoption.

Customers purchase a product considering they believe it will meet their needs and solve their problem. However, adoption setup stages are non ever clear. If all-time practices aren't specified at the start and they don't see value right abroad, it'due south an uphill battle to proceeds back their trust and disengage bad habits.

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

One way companies proceeds their customers' attention is providing in-product and e-mail walkthroughs and instructions every bit soon every bit the client receives a payment confirmation. This limits the confusion, technical questions, and distractions from the immediate post-purchase euphoria.

A customer education guide or knowledge base is essential to evangelize proper customer adoption and avoid the 'floundering effect' when customers are stuck. Other companies provide new client onboarding services, host live demos and webinars and include events and promotions in their e-mail signatures.

three. Build feedback loops into every stage of the process.

Lean into customer complaints and suggestions, and information technology will change the mode you operate your concern. Criticism oft has negative connotations. However, if you lot flip problems to opportunities you lot can easily ameliorate your business to fit the customer's needs.

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

If you're able to incorporate this into a repeatable process, yous'll never be in the dark about the country of the customer feel in your system, and yous'll exist enabled to go on improving it.

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

4. Nurture customer relationships.

When a customer buys a product or service, they desire to utilize it right abroad and fulfill their immediate need. Whether they are delighted within the first hour, week, or a month, it's of import to constantly call back about their future needs.

Proactive relationship-edifice is essential to prevent customers from losing their post-purchase excitement and ultimately churning. If customers finish hearing from you and you don't hear from them this tin be a bad sign that they are about 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 client service squad dedicated to bank check-ins and customer retentivity, show appreciation with rewards and gifts to loyal customers, host local events, highlight employees that go higher up and beyond and communicate product updates and new features.

five. Solve for the right customer needs.

Excluding customers from your accomplice of business can seem counterintuitive to solve for your customers' needs. Nonetheless, understanding whose needs you can fulfill and whose y'all cannot is a major footstep toward solving the right problems. All customers' needs tin't be treated every bit 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, wait at customer's long-term retention patterns, establish a clear visitor vision, provide premier customer service to valuable customers and communicate with your ideal customer 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 constitute manufacture trends.

half dozen. Provide great customer service.

If a problem arises, your customers want to get information technology resolved and feel heard in the procedure. 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.

Some customer needs are time-sensitive and require immediate interaction via phone or chat. Others are less disquisitional and can exist resolved at a more coincidental pace. Let's break down the types of customer service and how each optimizes your squad's power to fulfill customer needs.

ane. Email

Email is one of the near fundamental forms of customer service. It allows customers to fully describe their issues, and it automatically records the conversation into a resourceful thread. Customers merely take to explicate their upshot once, while reps tin can reference of import case details without having to request boosted information.

Email is best used with customer needs that don't need to be resolved right abroad. Customers can ask their question, go back to piece of work, and render 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.

I limitation of email is the potential lack of clarity. Some customers have problem describing their trouble, and some service reps struggle to explain solutions. This creates fourth dimension-consuming roadblocks when the issue is overly complex. To exist rubber, use e-mail for elementary problems that crave a cursory explanation or solution.

two. Phone

When customers have problems that demand to be answered immediately, phones are the best medium to use. 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 element is a major factor in creating delightful customer experiences.

Phones come in handy almost when in that location's a frustrated or angry customer. These customers are virtually likely to churn and require your team to provide a personalized solution. Your team can apply soft communication skills to appease the client and forbid costly escalations. These responses appear more genuine on the phone because reps have less time to codify an answer.

The near common flaw with telephone support is the await time. Customers detest being put on hold, and it's a determining factor for customer churn.

iii. Chat

Chat is one of the most flexible customer service channels. It can solve a high volume of simple issues or provide detailed support for circuitous ones. Businesses continue to adopt chat because of its versatility also equally the improvement in efficiency information technology provides for customer service reps.

When it comes to solving customer needs, chat can exist used to solve almost whatever problem. Unproblematic and mutual 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 help them diagnose and resolve issues.

The limitations of chat are similar to those of email. Still, since the interaction is alive, any lack of clarity betwixt the 2 parties tin can drastically impact troubleshooting. As a onetime chat rep, there were enough of times where I struggled to get on the same page every bit 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 customer service channel. While it's been around for over a decade, businesses are at present showtime to adopt it every bit a viable service choice. That'southward because social media lets customers immediately report an issue. And since that report is public, client service teams are more than motivated to resolve the customer's problem.

Social media is an fantabulous aqueduct for mass communication, which is particularly useful during a business crunch. When a crisis occurs, your customers' product and service needs become the primary concern of your organization. Social media is an constructive tool for communicating with your customers in bulk. With a social media crisis management program, your team can proceed 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 blazon of service presents an enormous opportunity, it also places tremendous pressure level on your reps to fulfill customer need. Be sure your team is equipped with proper social media management tools before yous offer routine support.

5. In Person

As the oldest grade of customer service, you lot're probably familiar with working in person with customers. Brands who have brick-and-mortar stores must offer this service for customers living nearly their locations. This fulfills a convenience demand equally customers can purchase and return a product without having to ship it back to the visitor 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 in a higher place-and-across customer service.

5. Phone call Dorsum Service

Sometimes it's not well-nigh how quickly your business can provide a solution, but rather how efficient you tin make the service experience. For example, say a customer has a simple question near pricing that should only have a few minutes to respond, but their expected wait time for phone service is over xv minutes. Rather than making this customer spend more fourth dimension on hold than actually speaking with a representative, you can offer a retrieve service where your team reaches out to the customer as soon as the side by side rep is available.

Another state of affairs where this type of service comes in handy is with text-based mediums like e-mail and live conversation. In some cases, these channels aren't ideal for troubleshooting and can lead to friction if the instance isn't transferred to another platform. Having a call up service available allows customers to schedule fourth dimension to speak directly with reps, peculiarly when they experience like they aren't gaining progress on their case. Instead of having to create a completely new back up ticket, call backs seamlessly transition the conversation to a more than effective channel.

half-dozen. Client 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 assist them troubleshoot problems 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 similar a formal support case and more like a quick roadblock that your customers can handle on their ain.

Self-service is advantageous for your team's productivity every bit well. If more customers use your knowledge base, less will call or e-mail your squad for aid. This will free your reps up more than to focus on circuitous service cases that require a longer time commitment.

7. Interactive Virtual Assistant

Chatbots are no longer novelties that customer service teams use to testify off their technological prowess. At present, they're integral pieces of back up strategies every bit they human activity more like interactive virtual assistants than simple, question-and-answer bots. Today'south chatbots are powered past innovative AI technology that interprets client needs and can walk people through step-by-step solutions.

interactive virtual assistant for customer service in a car

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The epitome above shows a perfect example of how useful today'due south virtual administration can be. In this situation, the customer is learning how to use their new car — a product that typically offers a lot of unique features and an extensive operator's transmission. To help new users navigate the motorcar's basic features, this brand offers an augmented reality bout 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 like this show that you're investing in more just production development. You're thinking about how you'll support customers and what services yous can adopt that will make their lives easier. Customers pay attention to this blazon of customer service and it tin often be a reason why many will return to your business.

8. Integrated Client Service

Integrated service can exist described equally all of the little things your brand does to remove hurting points from the customer experience. Some of this is proactive, like sending customers an automated newsletter that informs them nearly major updates or announcements, and some of information technology is reactive, similar 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 virtually of these points of friction is to adopt automation as you grow your customer base. Automated client service tools like ticketing systems, assist desks, and workflows aid your team keep pace with increasing client demand. This technology lets you maintain that same level of personalized customer service even as more people reach out to your business organisation for support.

There's no "best" type 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 go along them coming back for more.

What do customers desire from a typical customer service situation?

It'due south important to note that customer service is reactive. That said, there are a few things to keep in mind to ensure you're providing excellent customer service.

  • Mind: 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 effect is before giving them a solution. They may accept a more nuanced issue that a boilerplate response tin't provide. There'due south nil more frustrating than providing customers with a canned response that doesn't actually solve their effect. Automation is bang-up, 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. Non only is it inconvenient, it shows the client that no one is listening or paying attention. If you have a ticketing system, review the client's history or profile to get familiar with their state of affairs earlier responding.
  • Be Pleasant: Tone is much harder to convey over written advice and tin can unintentionally come beyond as cold. To convey some warmth you could introduce phrases similar "I'd exist happy to assistance with that," or "Hope your day/week is going well."
  • Exist Responsive: Not just practise customers desire their problem solved, merely they prefer it's resolved quickly. If you can't solve their consequence easily when they commencement contact you, set expectations effectually when it volition be resolved (24hrs, ii business days?) and keep them in the loop. Don't ghost them.

Each customer has their ain unique needs, but there are a few that are universal.

1. Simple Solutions

While your product or service may run using a circuitous set up of algorithms and procedures, customers don't need to know that. They merely desire a solution that resolves their effect with as trivial fuss as possible. Keep your messaging simple and focus on how your brand will solve the client'southward problem.

ii. Personalization

Treat your customers like people and not numbers on a spreadsheet. Use their name in communications and tailor your messaging to the heir-apparent persona they most closely align with. Adding a personal impact 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 domicile in your messaging. Explain how and why they should choose your product or service over others on the market. How volition customers do good when they cull your make?

4. Transparency

One of the easiest ways to build trust with consumers is to exist transparent. No 1 wants to feel duped past disingenuous, bait-and-switch advertizement. Be honest about your production or service's capabilities and pricing whenever possible.

five. Accessibility

While it is always encouraged to empower customers to assistance themselves with features similar a knowledge base, getting extra help when they need it shouldn't be hard. Whether it'south phone, email, or chat support, it's important to be responsive to consumer needs. At the showtime of this commodity we identified accessibility as ane 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 Client Needs and Expectations

I of the best things you lot can practise is proceed learning based on the types of issues that come up upwardly so that y'all tin can proactively address consumer needs and go on improving on the experience.

While the procedure requires quite a bit of legwork, the results volition be instrumental in the success of your make. Once you understand client needs and expectations, you lot can work towards delighting them with your product.

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

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Originally published Jan 12, 2022 7:00:00 AM, updated February 28 2022