The evaluation of customer needs is one of the fundamental steps to building your offer of products or services and determining your position. To have a chance to grow your business, your request must meet needs. The more these needs are identified, the more likely your offer will interest your target audience and generate revenue.
Why do we need to assess customer needs?
A purchase decision is triggered following the needs expressed by a customer. A customer knows what he wants, and he will learn about your business through the internet before contacting you. It is essential to take this phase into account. If you haven’t correctly assessed the needs of the customers you are targeting and built a product or service offering accordingly, the potential customer will not contact your business.
The challenge of assessing customer needs is to enable you to develop a coherent product or service offering, which customers will request, which will generate turnover. Of course, to get to the conclusion of the sale, other mechanisms will also come into play. However, a product or a service that concretely meets the customers’ needs is an essential prerequisite for the development of your activity.
How to assess customer needs?
The assessment of customer needs is carried out as part of your market research. After globally analyzing your activity analysis sector, you must segment it to focus on the target clientele that best corresponds to your offer and positioning project.
Surveys and polls carried out with your target of your potential customers are relevant tools for gathering information about their needs. The more time you spend on it, the more accurate info you will be able to obtain. Even if your analysis starts based on global studies involving a large panel of people, you must then favour a qualitative approach.
For that, you only have one satisfactory solution: to interact directly with potential customers in your catchment area. Direct communication is the best source of information gathering, and you need to be personally involved in the process.
Finally, at the level of your organization, it is preferable to group the information resulting from the various exchanges within a file. This will allow you to carry out analyzes more efficiently by being able to group needs.
What should be done after assessing client needs?
Once you have analyzed customers’ needs, two logical steps follow: studying customer expectations and studying the competition.
Analyze customer expectations
In addition to studying the needs of your customers, you must also investigate their expectations. When a customer expresses a need to consume a product or service, what parameters does he decide to buy? At the customer level, we are therefore in the stage following the birth of the need:
- A need to purchase or consume a service is born with the customer,
- What are the criteria he will use to choose a product or a service?
Study the competition
Then, once you have thoroughly analyzed the needs and expectations of your future customers, you can focus on the competition. It is only after having carried out this segmentation that you can identify your real competitors. You will realize that it may not be the businesses you initially thought of.
This study will allow you to identify opportunities in areas that constitute weaknesses in your competitors. Then you have to look for a potential correlation between the disadvantage you can exploit and the customers’ needs. In this process, your objective is to find a competitive advantage to use.
To learn more about this subject, you can consult these files:
- How to analyze your competitors?
- Competitive advantages
Assessing customer needs is an ongoing job.
When your business has started, it will be essential to follow the evolution of customer needs, improve your offer, and make it evolve. It is not because your request is adapted today that it will know it tomorrow, on the contrary. Continuous monitoring of customer needs is essential to build a sustainable business.
To do this, you can count on the information that comes from customer service and what is being said about your business (on social networks, consumer opinion sites, in the press, etc.). You must also have the reflex to put yourself in the customer’s shoes to understand them better. Finally, it would help if you had regular monitoring of the evolution of your market and technological advances.
